Joseph Maldonado-Passage, nicknamed Joe Exotic, is an American media personality, former presidential candidate, convicted felon, and former zookeeper of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park. He rose to fame at the start of the 2020 pandemic due to his leading role in the Netflix critically acclaimed docuseries "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness."
In 1998, Maldonado-Passage founded GW Zoo in honor of his deceased brother Garold after purchasing a ranch in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, with his parents. For 20 years, Joe Exotic's zoo became well-known for displaying a thousand different exotic animals, including more than 170 big cats, earning him the moniker tiger king. In 2001, Maldonado-Passage became financially reliant on customer interaction cubs, charging $25 to hold the cub or take a picture.
Exotic began to expand his business model by breeding big cats to maintain his supply of cubs, gaining the attention of Carole Baskin, a big cat advocate. In 2006, she wrote an op-ed in an Oklahoma newspaper criticizing Joe Exotic's zoo, claiming it was not a responsible big cat sanctuary. Maldonado-Passage retaliated with a smear campaign against Baskin and her group Big Cat Rescue, leading to a decade-long feud.
After losing a $1 million infringement lawsuit against Baskins and several failed business ventures, Maldonado-Passage left GW Zoo in June 2018. He was arrested three months later for allegedly hiring two men to murder his longtime rival. In 2019, Exotic was convicted on two counts of attempted murder for the plot to have Baskins killed along with an additional 17 counts of animal abuse and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
However, in July 2021, a federal appeals court ruled that Maldonado-Passage should receive a lighter sentence, stating the judge in his trial court determined his prison term by treating the two murder-for-hire convictions separately. In January 2022, the court reduced his sentence to 21 years. After announcing he had aggressive prostate cancer in November 2021, Exotic was transferred to a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, where he currently resides.
