Infamous tiger attack during Las Vegas Strip show was 20 years ago Tuesday
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) - Twenty years ago today, an infamous tiger attack during a show at the Mirage changed the landscape of entertainment on the Las Vegas Strip forever.
On October 3rd, 2003, the duo Siegfried and Roy were performing their iconic illusionist act at the resort when a 380-pound white tiger named Montecore attacked Roy Horn onstage in front of thousands of people. Horn was taken to the hospital and barely survived.
The fallout from the tiger attack was significant, including the cancellation of the show. Columnist Steve Friess covered the event two decades ago and remembers how it altered the way entertainment was done on The Strip.
“It short-circuited the way that those shows acted,” said Friess. “And in addition to that, I think another thing that a lot of these Strip hotels realized at that point was, when you invest that much capital into a specific headliner, people and act, you are very, very vulnerable.”
Friess says what happened next was a cover-up from high-ranking people like Senator Harry Reid and executives at MGM Resorts to suppress the violent nature of the official video that captured the mauling. He says if social media had been around, that would have been very hard to do.
Horn died in 2020 from complications of COVID-19.
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