A Missouri woman who starred in the HBO documentary series Chimp Crazy has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison after she lied that a movie star primate that she was accused of mistreating had died. Tonia Haddix, 56, was also ordered Thursday to serve three years of supervised release after her 46-month prison sentence ends, reports the AP. Haddix, who ran a primate facility in the St. Louis suburb of Festus, pleaded guilty in March to two counts of perjury and one of obstructing justice.
It all started nearly a decade ago, when PETA sued, claiming Haddix was keeping several chimps in "confined [and] cramped, virtually barren enclosures" at the now-defunct Missouri Primate Foundation facility. Among the chimps was Tonka, who appeared in the 1997 movies Buddy and George of the Jungle. Actor Alan Cumming, the British-born actor who starred in the movie Buddy alongside Tonka, also begged for the primate to be moved. Haddix signed a consent decree in 2020 agreeing to send four of the chimps to a Florida sanctuary. The order allowed her to keep three others, including Tonka, at a facility she was to build.
But after a judge found that wasn't complying with the agreement, authorities arrived in 2021 and removed the remaining chimps, except for Tonka. Haddix claimed Tonka had died and that she'd cremated the remains, according to court records. "I wanted to keep trying to save Tonka if l could," she said, according to court records. "But then he just died on his own, so there was no saving him." Except Tonka was alive—in 2022, PETA removed him from a cage in the basement of her home in Sunrise Beach, Missouri. Haddix told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2022 that she lied to protect Tonka from "the evil clutches of PETA."
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She also admitted what happened in the third episode of Chimp Crazy, which premiered last year, saying, "Tonka was literally on the run with me." Just last month, investigators found another chimp locked up in the basement of her home in Sunrise Beach in violation of court orders, documents in the case said. She was arrested and her bond was revoked. Her lawyer, Justin Gelfand, asked for mercy in court filings, saying she suffered abuse as a child and then endured several rocky marriages as an adult. "In the face of these harsh realities threaded throughout her life, Haddix came to form secure attachments with animals," Gelfand wrote. PETA, meanwhile, praised the sentence in a news release, saying that Haddix now "can't hurt another chimpanzee."
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