“These are all just personal attacks to try to slander me and my character,” Hargrove is quoted as saying. SeaWorld sent reporters the video, the paper said, and a spokesman said the company received the video during the weekend “from an internal whistle-blower.” Screen shot from Orlando Sentinel video showing John Hargrove using the N-word during phone chat almost 5 years ago.
On Tuesday, the Orlando Sentinel posted a nearly 5-year-old video depicting Hargrove as drunk and using the N-word in a chat with an unidentified woman. Hargrove, who worked at SeaWorld San Diego from 1995 to 2001, accuses the parent company of trying to silence him via legal threats starting in November and as recently as a couple of months ago - “that if we didn’t stop, they would file an injunction to stop the book, which they never did.”Ī SeaWorld spokesman said flatly: “We never threatened Hargrove with a lawsuit.” Warwick’s pulled the plug only a day before the scheduled event “after the store started receiving phone inquiries about the video and a subsequent email from SeaWorld that included a link to the conversation.” The U-T report followed the Orlando Sentinel, which posted the same video earlier Tuesday. U-T San Diego quoted Julie Slavinsky, the bookstore’s director of events and community relations, as saying: “The cancellation is a statement of our feelings about what is in the video.”
In Beneath the Surface, Hargrove paints a compelling portrait of these highly intelligent and social creatures, including his favorite whales Takara and her mother Kasatka, two of the most dominant orcas in SeaWorld. The outcry over the treatment of SeaWorld’s orca has now expanded beyond the outlines sketched by the award-winning documentary, with Hargrove contributing his expertise to an advocacy movement that is convincing both federal and state governments to act. When two fellow trainers were killed by orcas in marine parks, Hargrove decided that SeaWorld’s wildly popular programs were both detrimental to the whales and ultimately unsafe for trainers.Īfter leaving SeaWorld, Hargrove became one of the stars of the controversial documentary Blackfish. However, as his experience with the whales deepened, Hargrove came to doubt that their needs could ever be met in captivity. For Hargrove, becoming an orca trainer fulfilled a childhood dream. Over the course of two decades, John Hargrove worked with 20 different whales on two continents and at two of SeaWorld’s U.S.
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