Former Vegas performer recalls vicious attack by a Siegfried and Roy leopard, 25 years before Roy's attack

Famous Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried & Roy were the topic of Tuesday’s Dark Side of the 2000s, which took a hard look at just how unsafe their wild animal acts were throughout the decades, including a gruesome firsthand account from one performer who was attacked.

The ViceTV docuseries, which focuses on different aspects of pop culture from the 2000s, talked to various people associated with the duo during their rise from cruise ship magicians to the biggest performers in Las Vegas. Their act largely revolved around the use of tigers, lions and other big cats, which was ultimately the downfall for the pair and the main focus of the episode.

Despite repeated claims through the years from Siegfried & Roy that they never had any incidents with the animals, Tuesday’s special points out at least three that happened before the infamous attack on Roy in 2003 that effectively ended their Vegas run.

One of those attacks happened in 1976 at the original MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas. A family of acrobats known as The Seven Alexanders was booked to perform with Siegfried & Roy, whose act at the time included a tiger, a lion and two leopards, which were kept in cages backstage near the rest of the cast.

About 20 minutes before showtime, Sean Stanek, a 10-year-old acrobat in the Alexanders act, remembers looking at the cages and noticing they were open, and then he heard a crash.

“I saw a man on his back, and I saw a leopard staring at me, growling,” Stanek said. “And I ran to the left down the hallway to my dressing room for safety. And the next thing I felt was he jumped on my back and he just started biting me.”

Stanek said it felt like the leopard was “tearing” at his neck, and at one point his mother had grabbed his arm and was dragging him while punching the cat in the face. Another person from the crew helped Stanek's mother drag her son into a dressing room where they fell into a rack of clothes. Finally a trainer pulled off the leopard, which had a face “full of blood.”

When it was finally over, the leopard had bit Stanek 14 times, leaving puncture wounds throughout his head and neck in an ordeal that Stanek’s mother, Zuzi Rajnai, described as “horrifying.”

“Thank God my son survived,” she said.

Stanek said that Siegfried & Roy didn’t “step up to the plate at all” after the attack.

“Roy was completely cold. Never apologized. Never engaged,” Stanek said.

The family ended up suing the production and the MGM Grand, and at one point during the depositions, Stanek said that Siegfried & Roy’s lawyers tried to put the blame on Stanek’s parents for putting their son in a dangerous show.

The family finally received a $74,000 payment in the fall of 1983, seven years after the incident, which went largely unreported.

“But after lawyers, fees and all that, it was nothing,” Stanek said. “And all the work we lost as a result of this, it hurt us really bad.”

And beyond the pain of the initial attack, said Stanek, was the “gut punch” that was seeing Siegfried & Roy’s rise to fame, while also claiming that their animals were safe.

“When you see them and they’re being interviewed by Larry King and they go, ‘No, nothing’s ever happened.’ You just put your head down and go, ‘wow, really? Really? You’re gonna do that? You’re gonna lie like that?’” Stanek said.

And given everything that Stanek had been through, his reaction when Roy was attacked in 2003 was a little bit different than most.

“I walked out, and I started kind of crying. And I remember saying, ‘now he knows what it feels like.’”

Stanek went on to say that given the lack of protection for the audience during their show, things could have been much worse for Siegfried & Roy if the attacking cat went beyond the stage.

“Think about the chaos and the terror and the horror that could have taken place,” Stanek said. "They got lucky."

Dark Side of the 2000s airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on ViceTV.