What Happened to Tiger King?

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 9 min read

Joe Exotic, 63, the star of Netflix's Tiger King, is serving a 21-year federal prison sentence.Image via Wikimedia Commons

The 2020 Phenomenon

In March 2020, as the world locked down for the pandemic, Netflix released Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, a seven-part docuseries about Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, known as Joe Exotic, born March 5, 1963. The flamboyant, mulleted operator of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma (1999-2018), his feud with animal activist Carole Baskin, his polygamous marriages, his 2016 presidential campaign, and his country music videos made him an instant lockdown icon.

The series was watched by tens of millions in its first weeks, spawning memes, a thousand takes on Baskin, and an unlikely folk-hero status for Exotic. But the man at its center was already in federal prison.

The series' viewership, tens of millions of households in its first month, made it Netflix's biggest early-pandemic hit, and its characters, Baskin, Doc Antle, Jeff Lowe, Rick Kirkham, became instant archetypes. The show's true-crime-meets-reality-TV formula spawned a thousand imitators.

The 2020 Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary Series, validated the show's craft beneath the chaos. Directors Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin spent five years on the project, a commitment that showed in every bizarre, brilliant frame.

The Conviction

In January 2020, before the series aired, Exotic was convicted of two counts of murder-for-hire (plotting to kill Carole Baskin) and multiple animal cruelty charges, including killing five tigers and selling and buying endangered animals. He was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison, later reduced to 21 years on resentencing after an appeal found a sentencing error.

Prosecutors presented recordings of Exotic offering money for Baskin's murder and testimony from his former associates. Exotic maintained he was set up, but the jury disagreed on every major count.

The murder-for-hire evidence included recordings of Exotic offering an undercover FBI agent money to kill Baskin, plus testimony from his former right-hand man. The animal charges, killing five tigers to make room, selling tiger cubs, were documented through his own park's records.

Life Behind Bars

Exotic is serving his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, transferred there amid serious health problems, including prostate cancer, for which he has received treatment in custody. He has reported difficult conditions and has been vocal, through social media run by supporters and interviews, about his declining health and his belief that he will die in prison.

He married fellow inmate Dillon Passage in 2017 (they later divorced) and more recently announced an engagement to another inmate. His love life, like everything else about him, continues to generate headlines from behind bars.

His health decline in custody, prostate cancer treatment, weight loss, has generated genuine sympathy even among those who revile his crimes. His supporters' social media accounts post updates in his voice, keeping the Tiger King persona alive from a prison medical center.

The Pardon Bids

Exotic's great hope was a presidential pardon. His team lobbied hard in the final days of the Trump administration in 2021, even preparing a limousine, but the pardon never came. Subsequent appeals for clemency from later administrations have also failed. His legal team continues to file appeals challenging the conviction, so far without success.

The pardon saga became its own media circus, with Exotic's supporters arguing selective prosecution and Baskin's camp insisting justice was served.

The 2021 pardon lobbying included a $10,000-a-night Washington hotel war room and a stretch limousine idling outside the prison, ready to whisk him to freedom. When the pardon list was announced without his name, the limousine drove away empty, an image as absurd and sad as anything in the series.

Carole Baskin and the Aftermath

The series made Carole Baskin a household name and a meme (Did she feed her husband to tigers?), and she later won control of Exotic's former zoo property in a trademark lawsuit, selling it with conditions barring exotic animal ownership. The zoo itself closed. Exotic's former associates scattered: some to new animal ventures, some to obscurity, one, Rick Kirkham, to tell-all interviews.

A second season of Tiger King (2021) and various spinoffs kept the saga alive, but nothing recaptured the lockdown lightning of the original.

Baskin's Dancing with the Stars stint (2020) capitalized on her meme fame, introducing her to audiences who never watched the docuseries. Her Big Cat Rescue sanctuary, meanwhile, continued its legitimate conservation work, the serious mission beneath the meme.

Where Is the Tiger King Now?

At 63, Joe Exotic remains in federal prison with a projected release in the 2030s, health fragile, pardon hopes dimming. The man who once presided over a roadside zoo empire, ran for president, and released country albums now measures his world in prison visits and legal filings.

What happened to the Tiger King is the comedown after the most surreal fame spike of the streaming era: a folk hero who was already a convicted felon when the world fell in love with him, now likely to spend his final years exactly where the series found him, behind bars.

His projected release in the 2030s, when he will be in his seventies, assumes no successful appeal or clemency. Each passing year dims the pardon hopes further, and the Tiger King saga seems destined to end where it began: with Joe Exotic behind bars, the cameras long gone.

The Zoo Empire

The Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, which Exotic operated from 1999 to 2018 in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, was at its peak one of America's largest private tiger collections, with hundreds of big cats and a steady stream of visitors paying for cub-petting encounters. Exotic built the park with his late brother Garold's memory as its stated mission, and it became a roadside attraction of genuine scale.

But USDA inspections documented repeated violations: inadequate veterinary care, unsafe enclosures, and the deaths of animals. The cub-petting business model, breeding tigers constantly to supply photo-friendly cubs, drew condemnation from legitimate conservationists. What the series presented as colorful eccentricity, regulators had long documented as systemic mistreatment.

Season 2 and the Spinoffs

Tiger King 2 (2021) attempted to recapture the magic with new revelations about Don Lewis's disappearance and Exotic's case, but without the lockdown captive audience, it landed with a fraction of the impact. Spinoffs proliferated: The Doc Antle Story, various true-crime retellings, and Exotic's own jailhouse interviews, each diluting the original's shock.

The franchise's fade mirrored its subject's: the world moved on, the memes aged, and the remaining story, a sick man in prison filing appeals, lacked the first season's grotesque vitality. The Tiger King moment, like the lockdown itself, now feels like a dispatch from another era.

The 2016 Campaign

Before Netflix, Exotic ran for President in 2016 as an independent, then for Governor of Oklahoma in 2018 as a Libertarian, campaigns the series mined for comedy but which were, in their way, sincere: his platform mixed libertarian talking points with tiger advocacy, and he drew small but real crowds.

The campaigns established the Exotic persona, the mullet, the sequins, the straight-talking zookeeper, that Netflix would amplify to the world. They also documented, on the public record, the grievances against Carole Baskin that would curdle into the murder-for-hire plot.

The Memes That Ate the World

Tiger King's meme legacy is among the richest in streaming history: I am never gonna financially recover from this, Here Kitty Kitty, That bitch Carole Baskin, each line a cultural artifact of lockdown 2020. The show's characters became Halloween costumes, the phrases entered everyday speech, and the discourse, podcasts, explainers, parodies, was endless.

The memes' afterlife outlasted the show's relevance: years later, the references still land, a shared language for the strangest spring in modern memory. For Exotic, the memes were a double-edged sword: beloved folk hero online, convicted felon in court, with the internet's affection doing nothing for his sentence.

Carole Baskin's Big Cat Rescue

Big Cat Rescue, Baskin's Tampa sanctuary, was the series' moral counterweight to Exotic's zoo: an accredited facility that stopped breeding and cub-petting, housing rescued big cats in spacious enclosures. The show's portrayal of Baskin as eccentric villain obscured the sanctuary's legitimate conservation work, a distortion Baskin has spent years correcting.

The sanctuary's 2023 move, relocating its cats to a larger Arkansas facility, marked the end of an era, and Baskin's continued advocacy for the Big Cat Public Safety Act, signed into law in 2022, was a genuine legislative victory. Whatever the memes say, her impact on big-cat welfare is real.

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