'Tiger King' Joe Exotic announces engagement from prison: 'Meet Jorge Marquez'
Joseph "Joe Exotic" Maldonado booking photos, 2018 and 2024. (Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office)
"Tiger King" star Joe Exotic announced from prison that he is now engaged.
"Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33," he posted on social media. "He is so amazing and is from Mexico."
"Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we be leaving America when we both get out," he continued. "Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago."
Joe Exotic — whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage — was convicted in a case involving animal welfare activist Carole Baskin. Both were featured in Netflix’s "Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness."
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He's currently serving a 21-year sentence in prison, after his punishment was reduced to a year by a judge in 2022.
The former zookeeper was convicted of trying to hire two different men to kill Baskin. A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with Maldonado-Passage that the court should have treated them as one conviction at sentencing because they both involved the same goal of killing Baskin, who runs a rescue sanctuary for big cats in Florida and had criticized Maldonado-Passage’s treatment of animals.
Prosecutors said Maldonado-Passage offered $10,000 to an undercover FBI agent to kill Baskin during a recorded December 2017 meeting. In the recording, he told the agent, "Just like follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off." Maldonado-Passage’s attorneys have said their client — who once operated a zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, about 65 miles (105 kilometers) south of Oklahoma City — wasn’t being serious.
Maldonado-Passage, who maintains his innocence, also was convicted of killing five tigers, selling tiger cubs and falsifying wildlife records.
In 2021, Maldonado-Passage said he was battling prostate cancer.
"It is with a sad face that I have to tell you ... that my prostate biopsy’s came back with an aggressive cancer," he wrote on social media.