"Tiger King" star Joe Exotic this week announced he is engaged to marry a fellow inmate, whom he met while serving a 21-year sentence for his role in a murder-for-hire plot against rival and co-star Carole Baskin.
"Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33," Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, wrote alongside a photo on X, formerly Twitter. "He is so amazing and is from Mexico. Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we [will] be leaving America when we both get out. Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago."
Maldonado-Passage was convicted in 2019 of, among other things, paying Allen Glover a $3,000 down payment to kill Baskin, a big cat conservationist at odds with the Oklahoma zookeeper known as the Tiger King. Among the multiple people he tried to hire to carry out the murder was an undercover FBI agent.
The murder plot came about after Baskin, the owner of a big cat sanctuary in Florida, sued Maldonado-Passage's G.W. Exotic Animal Memorial Park in Oklahoma and won a multimillion-dollar judgement.
According to authorities, Maldonado-Passage also killed several tigers in 2017, and illegally sold and offered to sell tiger cubs.
Maldonado-Passage was previously married to Travis Maldonado, who died after accidentally shooting himself. Just months later, Maldonado-Passage married Dillon Passage, who appeared alongside him in "Tiger King" on Netflix. They divorced in 2021 after three years of marriage.
--With reporting by TMX
