'Tiger King' Joe Exotic's sordid love life: Five husbands, bigamy, addiction, suicide, and he's still married
Spoilers for 'Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness'
As the entire planet continues to participate in social distancing and self-isolation amidst the COVID-19 lockdown, many found respite in the form of Netflix's recently premiered documentary 'Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness.'
The documentary told the story of the eponymous king Joe Exotic's (real name Joe Schreibvogel-Maldonado-Passage), the controversial zoo owner and big cat aficionado whose life was infested with alleged exploitation and abuse of both animals and humans. This spurred a rivalry between Joe and 'The Big Cast Rescue' co-founder Carole Baskin and that ended with Joe getting incarcerated for 22 years.
While his animal abuse charges continue to be a subject of debate, what's no secret is Joe Exotic's sordid love life that is highlighted across the documentary.
Involving impressionable men way younger than his age, Joe Exotic landed himself five husbands and his marriages withstood bigamy, addiction, suicides, as he still continues to be married to his fifth husband.
Here's a look at Joe's love life which seems crafted for the tabloids, including his first two husbands who weren't addressed in the Netflix sensation.
Brian Rhyne
Joe and Rhyne reportedly met in the late 1980s; at the time, Joe was working as a security guard at a gay cowboy bar in Texas, reveals a profile from the New York Magazine.
Joe was in his late 20s, while Rhyne was just 19. Soon he moved in with Joe, in his trailer, and the couple shared a number of poodles. The magazine's profile reveals the couple "grew to resemble each other, with mullets and horseshoe mustaches and dressed in jeans and boots. On Saturdays, they would snort pink-tinged meth and go out to the bars." Together with Rhyne, Joe opened the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma. Sadly, Brian passed away due to complications from HIV in 2001.
JC Hartpence
It hadn't even been a year after Rhyne's death when Joe met 24-year-old events producer, Jeffrey Charles "JC" Hartpence. Hartpence's experience in the events industry reportedly helped develop Joe's tiger and magic shows which would later see him do setups at malls and other public venues, allowing people to pet tiger and other big cat cubs, in an around Texas, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin.
Within just a few years, things turned very, very dark between the two. According to Texas Monthly, it started with a clash of interest regarding the zoo: Hartpence wasn't the focus to shift to a rehabilitation center for big cats, while Joe wanted to continue with the alleged breeding that would later be his bane. In 2003, Joe sent disturbing threats Hartpence's way, by showing him a photo of their tiger Goliath with a piece of meat labeled "JC's remains". It also accompanied a note that read: "If you don’t get your shit together, this is gonna be your reality." This resulted in Hartpence holding two guns at Joe's head while he was sleeping, and once he had calmed down, Joe called the police to get him arrested. Hartpence, a convicted pedophile according to Digital Spy, is currently serving life in prison for a murder unrelated to Joe, reports The Wichita Eagle.
John Finlay
The same year that Hartpence was arrested, Joe hired another 19-year-old called John Finlay to help run his businesses—both the zoo and the roadshows. Soon, the two started dating, as was the case with most of Joe's "helps", and Finlay ended up getting a tattoo on his lower abs right below the belt that read "PRIVATELY OWNED BY JOE EXOTIC." Joe paid for that tattoo which has now been covered up by a giant buffalo head, following Finlay's split from the troubled zoo owner. Finlay starred in several of Joe's music videos (yes, he had several country albums on his love for big cats), but their relationship was sprinkled with meth addiction resulting in Finlay's rapid loss of teeth, and later, bigamy.
By early 2014, Joe married Finlay and his latest recruit-slash-squeeze Travis Maldonado in a three-way ceremony that baffled many and has left viewers of the documentary pretty shocked. And just within a year, Finlay wanted out owing to Joe's increasingly "domineering, controlling, and obsessive" nature reports Texas Monthly. The relationship ended with Finlay attacking Joe at a parking lot and being charged with battery, following which he left with the woman who was the zoo's front desk secretary, and together they had a child as well.
Travis Michael Maldonado
The third party in Joe and Finlay's relationship, Travis Maldonado, was all of 19 (There's clearly a pattern here) when he began working at the zoo in 2013, after being recommended by a friend of Joe's. Their three-way wedding ceremony happened in a dance hall across the street from the zoo, but Joe's employees and closest allies claim his and Joe's relationship survived on Maldonado's dependency on Joe to get him meth.
Things took a tragic turn in 2017 when Maldonado accidentally shot himself at the zoo's gift shop. Maldonado was trying to show how his Ruger pistol wouldn't fire without a magazine by firing at himself, and despite pulling the magazine out, a spare bullet in the chamber killed him. Photos sashayed in the Netflix documentary show Maldonado and Joe as a happy couple, but those that lived with them claimed Maldonado was constantly high and doing bizarre, eccentric gestures under the effect of meth. Following his death, Joe conducted an elaborate funeral, which Maldonado's mother Cheryl claims looked more like a staged act while Joe was running for the position of governor in the state, and even though people claim in the documentary that Joe was a changed man after Maldonado's death, in just short two months, he found himself a replacement.
Dillon Passage
Following Maldonado's death, Joe's allies claim his entire focus shifted from the zoo and running for governor to finding himself a new partner. He directed his associates to look for prospects on dating apps like Grindr and Tinder and that's how he found Dillon Passage. Within two months, they got married when Passage was just 22, in a ceremony attended by the minister, Joe, Passage, and Cheryl Maldonado, of all people. While Cheryl alleges Joe made her do that only to show the world that if she was okay with it, it was okay for Joe to move on, his and Passage's marriage saw them move to Gulf Breeze, Florida, right away, where Joe washed dishes at a pirate-themed seafood restaurant.
Paranoid about being followed by the cops, who were investigating charges of him plotting Baskin's murder, Joe would caption Instagram photos from their time in Florida with locations set to California, Belize, and even Mexico. Soon he would be caught by the police and convicted on all 19 counts of charges against him, including plotting Baskin's murder, and several allegations of animal abuse.
Right now, the 57-year-old former zoo owner is serving time in federal prison. He and Passage are still reportedly married, reveals the Daily Beast, with Passage claiming in his own Instagram account that Joe would be okay with him finding newer partners. Things seem alright between the couple, with Passage sharing at the end of the Netflix documentary that if he ever saw Joe again, he would just offer him a high because that's what he feels Joe would need.