‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic exposes Trump and hints at child molestation in new memoir

Wis about to hit the two-year mark since the world was first introduced to the eccentric, flashy, and rowdy criminal that is Weird Joe through that feeling is Netflix’s Tiger King.

Premiering at the onset of the pandemic in 2020, viewers are instantly sucked into the world of the former Oklahoma zookeeper, which is filled with abused, swindled, and coped big cats, gathering relationships, bad guys working at a drug-stained zoo, shady characters of the strange animal world, and perhaps most intriguing: an animal-against Carole Baskin.

Despite her knack for shooting myths bursting with quirky claims and erratic yet charismatic personality, the reality star (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage) isn’t a character at all holiness in the imagination.

Joe Exotic has been sitting in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, until this week when he was taken to a medical facility in North Carolina for cancer treatment diagnosis, according to his attorney. After his arrest in 2018, he was convicted of 19 wildlife counts, including killing five “healthy” tigers and two counts for attempting to hire assassins to kill his arch-enemies. Baskin himself, causing him to receive a 22-year prison sentence in January 2020.

In addition to the crimes for which he is currently serving his sentence, his employees and ex-lovers describe him as a nightmare, accused him of mistreating, controlling and cruelly mistreating animals in his care.

But Joe Exotic remains adamant that he is innocent, as he continues to campaign for his release, claiming the tigers he killed were ailing and that he knew nothing of the murder plot. hired against Baskin, pinning a brutal plot to his ex. business partner Jeff Lowe, who later took control of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park.

The 58-year-old finds all the stops to try and win public sympathy in his new bio Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir, released on November 23, claiming that he wished he wasn’t involved that feeling at all, as he paints everyone in his life as villains, including estranged husband Dillon Passage, former zoo employees and business partners, government, and even targeting Donald Trump — while also spraying more venom at Baskin.

It’s like the shtick that Exotic used in tiger king, where everyone in his life seems to be out to get him, before the viewer realizes that he might not be telling them the whole truth.

In his retelling, Exotic is still very upset even to Baskin, and in the first sentence of his book, he spits out, “Dear American public, can you believe that bitch Carole Baskin out there as free as a bird while I’m sitting here rotting in prison?”

Strange sorta admits his own mistakes as he traces the events in his life that led to him being behind bars. But he seems to believe that his transgressions are nothing compared to what he thinks he did wrong, going out to quarrel with friends, ex-lovers and former colleagues, including who are no longer here to defend themselves.

But there are moments when the former zookeeper allowed himself to be vulnerable, recounting the worst moments of his life, including being ostracized by his family in the 1980s when his brother his abandonment and the 2001 death of her first husband Brian Rhyne, who died of complications from HIV. He admitted the suicide of his third husband, 23-year-old Travis Maldonado, in 2017, caused him to contemplate suicide due to grief.

Exotic also stated for the first time that he was physically and sexually assaulted by his father as a child Francis Schreibvogel, passed away in 2021. “What I am about to tell you, I have never told anyone in my life, I can only say it now because my dad is no longer here to deal with the shame and all of his siblings. She’s gone too,” he wrote.

“My father abused me; Children can be abused in any way. I remember sitting in his pickup truck in the field, with no one around to help me, and he made me touch his penis. This has happened many times… I feel completely helpless, with nowhere to run and no one to help me. The sexual abuse my dad put me through ended around the year I was eight, but he continued to beat me up.”

Exotic claims his brother Yarri Schreibvogel also sexually harassed him, alleging that “right after my father started assaulting me, my brother Yarri also began to sexually abuse me.”

“Yarri used to take me to the bathroom, pull out a bottom drawer to block the door, and force me to have sex with him. Yarri continued to abuse me, for several years, until we left Kansas,” he alleged. (Schreibvogel previously denied that he sexually abused him Strange, but recently agreed that his father was physically abusive towards his children.)

It is clear that Exotic thinks he is the worst burned in his personal story, suspects that he is behind bars despite the pile of evidence against him, believes that while he he suffers unjustly, everyone else in his life is growing.

But he ignores the fact that since the international success of Tiger King, tragedy and scandal have followed its cast, and few have found themselves in a better position because of their notoriety.

That is not to say that these men and women are entirely without fault. Part of the reason Tiger King So compelling is that there are so few redeemable characters — everyone seems to be telling half-truths or having ulterior motives.

Baskin, who runs Florida’s Big Cat Rescue, has become a breakout star of the series, but not in the way she imagined. The 60-year-old claimed that the documentary presented to her was “Black fish for the big cats,” she said Today in the first day of this month. “We think that’s what we’re working on.”

Instead, Baskin feels she’s been turned into a “villain”, like Baskin is accused of strangely killing her wealthy husband, Don Lewis, and feeding his carcass to her tiger, “hit” him so she can inherit his multi-million dollar fortune. This allegation sparked a flurry of amateur racers digging into Baskin and the case, as Lewis’ body was never found after he went missing in 1997, eventually being declared dead. legally died in 2002.

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Except a period of disaster on Dancing with the stars and her own archive on Discovery+, Carole Baskin’s Cage Fight, Baskin tried to distance himself from Tiger King, go as far as looking for a command against Tiger King 2, asking it not to use past footage of her and current husband Howard Baskin. (Baskin ultimately lost the legal battle, and the next documentary premiered earlier this month.)

Exotic’s former business partner who took over the zoo, Jeff Lowe and his wife Lauren was sued by the Ministry of Justice last year for the inhumane treatment and improper handling of animals covered by the Endangered Species Act.

Officials were appalled by the conditions, detailing how one lion cub was so severely malnourished that it resulted in chronic bone fractures and lameness. This May after many warnings, the government seized “68 protected lions, tigers, a cross between a lion and a tiger and a jaguar” from the zoo, citing widespread violations of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Earlier this week it was reported Jeff Johnson, a former reptile dealer and old friend of Exotic who made a brief appearance in Tiger King, committed suicide in September after an argument with his wife.

Zookeeper Erik Cowie, who cried in the archives while talking about animal abuse at the zoo, was found dead in a New York City apartment in SeptemberHis cause of death was later reported as acute and chronic alcohol use, according to the NYC Chief Medical Officer. (Strange allegations in his book that Cowie set him on fire and left him to rot in zoo grounds, calling him a “drunk hypocrite” which Netflix wrongly described as “” a big animal lover”.)

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Allen Glover, that Tiger King allegedly an assassin, was arrested for a DUI and continued to change his story about the circumstances of the events surrounding the plot to kill Baskin, suddenly claimed he and Lowe were actually planning the murder Strange because Lowe is a beneficiary of 50% of Exotic’s life insurance policies.

“We devised a plan to decapitate Joe, kill him, kick him out of the property so Jeff could take over it, the animals and everything,” Glover stated in Tiger King 2.

Exotic’s book is another iteration of his transcendent showmanship skills, diverting attention from his misdeeds by attempting to garner sympathy through acknowledging half the wrongdoings, petty complaints, and a healthy dose of hypocrisy.

He shamelessly accused his enemies of things he had done, such as beating Lowe and his wife for having a “sex cave” on the zoo premises, flying to women young people from all over the country to visit them, but did not mention that he regularly solicited sex from men on Craigslist for him and ex-husband John Finlay to join.

Exotic is also against the zoo staff and his ex-husband for alleged drug and alcohol addiction, while he is accused of keeping them hooked on drugs to keep them under his control.

He even brooded over former president Donald Trump, who he hopes will pardon him before he leaves office in 2020 but make him look like “a fool”.

“Got it, I should have written a big check and I would get that pardon too,” he wrote.

Exotic has always had a thirst for fame, evident in his failures in trying to produce his own reality show, a waning singing career, a magic touring performance, and even running for office. Governor of Oklahoma in 2018.

But Exotic’s inability to take legal responsibility for the serious allegations against him, such as the way he treated his employees and lovers, as well as allegations of animal cruelty, makes he showed little sympathy as he continued to try to clear his name.