The ugly truth about Joe Exotic and the 'Tiger King': How the world fell in love with a criminal
Joe Exotic is a name that has been going about quite a bit after release of Netflix documentary 'Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness'. But what exactly do we know about the guy? We know he's a zoo owner sporting a bleached mullet, dressed in completely unflattering leopard-print ensembles. We know that he's bred 187 big cats, is currently serving a 22-year sentence in prison and is one of the weirdest people one could ever come across.
Yet, there's still a lot more to know about him.
The man had multiple names and an alias to go with his magician persona. He was born Joseph Allen Schreibvogel. His last name posed quite a hardship for him growing up, so he changed it quite a handful of times before getting rid of it altogether. He's notorious for his long string of husbands and the last names that he borrowed from each of them i.e Maldonado, Passage. He went by Arron Alex or Cody Ryan when he did magic shows,and Tiger King in his reality shows.
But he is best known as multifaceted personality Joe Exotic - zookeeper, country singer, stunt politician, and an internet sensation.
But people who know him personally, or met him a couple of times, testify to him being a complete bag of cats.
He is crazier than the documentary lets on
Robert Moor, who wrote a New York Magazine investigative "American Animals" -- later turned into the Joe Exotic Wondery podcast, had a chat with Mark Carman of WGN Radio, and spoke of his bizarre encounter with Joe.
Moor explained that while Joe hadn't seemed like anything out of the ordinary, many of his employees told him otherwise.
“So the first time I went, I didn’t know enough to be afraid,” Moor said to Carman. “When you first meet him, Joe seems really charming. He seems like he’s rescuing animals. I was kind of like, you know, this guy’s not so bad."
"And then I started interviewing his former employees, and they started telling me these horror stories of how terribly he treated the employees how terribly he treated the animals," he revealed.
“One of them said to me, look when you go back there, you need to be really careful because Joe has a system set up down there for deaths. And what he means is that they would kill and butcher horses and cows to feed to the tiger. He said they could have you killed, butchered and fed out to those tigers in 15 minutes.”
The Daily Show host, Trevor Noah, apparently managed to gauge Joe's entire personality by binging on the documentary series. In his words, Joe "loves portraying himself as an expert in his field when the truth is, he has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s just winging it."
He abused his animals
In his conversation with Carnam, Moor said that Joe kept breeding more and more tigers as it brought in money from people who came to pet them. But he also had to take care of all the tigers he was breeding, and with time it skyrocketed completely out of his control to the point he started killing them. He has killed at least five tigers, Moor affirms as a fact, but there might have been more just to make more space within the cages.
In the series, we noticed that Joe's reptile closure had mysteriously caught fire and killed the alligators inside. Those alligators initially belonged to Michael Jackson and lived on his Neverland ranch. Moor has reasons to believe that Joe himself caused the fire, which he concluded from their conversation when they met in 2017.
Carole Baskin, CEO of Big Cat Rescue, outed Joe as an animal abuser. In 2019, he was convicted on 17 federal charges of animal abuse - eight violations of the Lacey Act, and nine of the Endangered Species Act.
He thirsted for Fame
Over time, his personality began to drastically change, fueled by fame. He even unsuccessfully ran for President of the United States in 2016.
After his first husband died of HIV complications, Joe turned sour and his personality turned darker. He became obsessed with fame and his own power. His zoo was his little kingdom and gave him complete power. With power comes the abuse of power. He got off on that power and ultimately bad things happened.
He owes Carole Baskin millions and plotted to kill her
He and Carole Baskin have been long-time rivals - ever since she called him out for his treatment of the animals in his zoo. The two would always engage in heated social media battles about the same. He owed Carole a million dollars after she sued him for copyright infringement for organising shows under Big Cat Sanctuary’s name and purposefully tarnishing her reputation, which ultimately backfired on him. She had been relentless in tracking him down to get her money from him. He got frustrated with her successful attempt to prevent him for breeding more animals and plotted her murder. Twice.
Moor told Carnam that when he'd spend time with Joe, talking to him about everything, he basically said he'd kill Carole. He claimed to have cancer, (which he really didn't) and if the doctor said he had two months left to live, he'd hunt Carole down in Florida and kill her. He also brandished an AR-15 that he had set aside for this very purpose. She drove him crazy because she outsmarted him at every point. He couldn't pay her back, even after thinking he could and it drove him nuts
He was arrested in 2018 when he tried to hire an undercover FBI agent as a hitman to murder Carole. He was later convicted for two counts of murder for hire and sentenced to 18 years in prison; he still continues to maintain his innocence.
He could worm his way out of anything but not his prison sentence
Joe was smart enough to manipulate people greatly. He was very skilled, Moor said. He could get out of anything because he was that good at manipulation. But at the same time, he was incredibly dumb, because if you look back at some of the things he's done, they seem stupid. But he had an ego the size of Texas.
"We said, Joe, you could have gotten out of this. It didn’t have to turn out like this man. You didn’t have to end up spending 22 years in prison because he couldn’t back down but he just - he couldn’t help himself. His ego was too big," Moor added.
He allowed it to grow and fester and that ultimately led to his downfall.