Welcome back to the Deep Dive. It is Saturday,
January 24th, 2026. Today, we are opening a file
that... I think for a huge chunk of the population
is mentally filed away under a COVID fever dream.
That's the perfect way to put it. It feels linked
to that very specific time, you know, sourdough
starters, wiping down your groceries. Exactly.
And this story was this cultural moment in early
2020 where the whole world just stopped. We were
all inside and we all collectively watched this,
this mullet wearing zookeeper completely unraveled
on Netflix. It was a genuine phenomenon. It almost
feels like something we all. hallucinated together.
It does. We are, of course, talking about Joseph
Alan Maldonado, who was born Joseph Schreibvogel.
But, you know, the entire planet knows him as
Joe Exotic. And I think the temptation here,
what, six years on, is to just remember the memes,
you know, the Girl Baskin song, the tiger print,
everything, the jokes. Right, to treat it as
a caricature. But the sources we have laid out
here today, they tell a much, much darker and
honestly more complicated story. And that's really
the mission of this deep dive, isn't it? To go
past that caricature. When you look at the actual
factual biography from like the 1980s all the
way to right now, where he's sitting in a federal
medical center, it's not a comedy. No, not at
all. It's really a study in escalation. It's
a story about how a fascination with animals,
which might have even started out genuinely,
got corrupted by this desperate, all consuming
need for fame. And how that spiraled into, you
know, a murder for hire plot and a 21 year prison
sentence. And we're going to cover the parts
that the documentary either glossed over or that
just hadn't even happened yet. I mean, we're
talking about his time as a police chief. Which
is a real thing that actually happened. A real
thing. His political campaigns that ran all the
way into 2024 from a prison. cell and his life
right now, because the story did not end when
those credits rolled. No. In fact, you could
argue the post -conviction era these last five
or six years are just as bizarre and just as
revealing as the tiger years. It's the aftermath.
It's the crash. So let's rewind way, way back
before the bleach, before the mullet, before
any of it. We're in Garden City, Kansas, 1963.
That's where Joseph Schrembogel's life begins.
But I want to jump ahead to the detail in his
background that just stopped me in my tracks.
The early 1980s, Joe Exotic was a cop. It sounds
like fiction, doesn't it? But it's there. It's
in the public record. After his family moved
down to Texas and he finished high school, Joe
joined the police force in a town called East
Vail, Texas. Okay, so... What kind of town are
we talking about here? Oh, tiny. You have to
understand, this was essentially a hamlet. It
wasn't the Dallas PD or anything. But he was,
in 1982, the chief of police. He wore a badge.
He was the law. It's just such a stark contrast
to the whole outlaw, anti -establishment persona
he built later on. Completely. But this period
of his life, it ends with an incident that I
think is sort of the Rosetta Stone for his entire
psychology. The bridge crash in 1985. This is
the turning point. This is the pivot. In 85,
he crashes his police cruiser into a concrete
bridge embankment. It was a really serious wreck.
But the why of it, well, that depends entirely
on which version of Joe's story you're hearing
at that moment. And that's the pattern, right?
Joe rewriting his own history to fit whatever
narrative suits him best. Constantly. So you
have the later version, the one he told Texas
Monthly in 2019. In that one, he frames it as
this tragic, almost romanticized suicide attempt.
Right. This is the story where his brother, Yari,
outs him as gay to their parents. Exactly. And
he claims his father gave him this cold handshake
and said, you know, don't come to my funeral.
And so Joe, in his despair. drives his car straight
into the bridge and end the pain. Which is a
very sympathetic story. It casts him as the victim,
you know, a man pushed to the brink by a cruel,
homophobic family. It creates a reason for the
chip on his shoulder. It explains everything.
But if you go back and look at the actual news
reports from 1985 or what Joe himself was telling
reporters in 1997, it's a completely different
tale. So what was the 97 version? The 97 version
was that it was a drug investigation gone bad.
Ah, the action hero version. The action hero
version. He said an unidentified car ran him
off the road while he was deep undercover on
a narcotics case. He was the hero cop taken out
by the bad guys. So you have the tragic victim
and the action hero. What do the facts say? Well,
investigators from New York Magazine and other
outlets, they dug into this. There were no witnesses
to another car. There was no official record
of any deep cover drug bust in this tiny little
town. So the evidence points to. What? A simple
accident? It points to a single car accident.
Maybe he fell asleep. Maybe he just lost control.
But for Joe, it can't just be a mistake. He has
to build a mythology around the trauma. He has
to be the main character. Accuracy is not the
priority. The story is the priority. Precisely.
Okay, so he survives this crash, leaves law enforcement,
and he moves. West Palm Beach, Florida. And this
is where the animals finally enter the picture.
And it's interesting. It wasn't tigers at first?
He's managing a pet store, and he has a neighbor.
Just a neighbor. A neighbor who worked at a local
drive -thru safari park. And this neighbor would
bring home baby lions. You know, you have to
remember, this is the mid-'80s. The regulations
around exotic animals were looser. Much looser.
So Joe holds a lion cub for the first time, and
he describes it like a switch being flipped,
this feeling of power or connection with this
tiny apex predator. He says that exact moment
set the course for the rest of his life. So he
takes that feeling, that spark, and he brings
it back to Texas. He and his brother, Gerald
Wayne GW, they open a pet shop together in Arlington.
They do, in 1986. And we see another side of
Joe here that becomes really crucial later, the
combative activist. He was never quiet, was he?
Never. I mean, he's hanging rainbow -striped
gay pride flags in his shop window in Arlington,
Texas in the mid -1980s. That was a very loud,
very brave thing to do then and there. And when
the city came after him for it? He didn't just
quietly pay the fine for the sign violations.
He went to the press. He called them out. He
accused the city inspectors of being homophobic.
So that me against the establishment energy that
was there from the very beginning, he thrives
on conflict. He absolutely does. But then...
The real catalyst happens, 1997. His brother,
Gerald, is killed in a car accident. This is
the moment. This is where the Joe Exotic we all
know really starts to take shape. It was devastating
for him. And in his grief, he makes this huge
life change. Sells the pet shop, takes the insurance
money, and he buys 16 acres of land out in Oklahoma.
He decides he's going to build a monument. The
Gerald Wayne Exotic Animal Memorial Park. The
GW Zoo. And, you know, to be fair, in the very
beginning, it really seems like it was a sanctuary.
The intentions were good, maybe? The first animals
there were actually Gerald's own pets that he
left behind. It was genuinely born out of loss,
a desire to honor his brother. But... And this
is the fatal flaw that drives the entire story.
Sanctuaries are money pits. And zoos are businesses.
And Joe is terrible with money. And that's where
we get to what you could call the tiger math.
Because I think people see the hundreds of tigers
and they just think, wow, he loves tigers. They
don't see the economic engine behind it. Right.
So he gets his first two tigers in 2000. And
then by 2002, he has this realization. He was
working with a traveling magician for a while.
And what he noticed was that, you know, people
would clap for the magic tricks. But after the
show, they would line up and empty their wallets
for a chance to pet a tiger cub. And that's it.
That's the discovery that seals his fate. It's
the whole engine of the story. The business is
cub petting. But there's a biological problem
with that business model, isn't there? A huge
one. It's like a Ponzi scheme, but with biology.
You can only really use a tiger cub for public
interaction for a very short window. What are
we talking, a few weeks? Between about eight
weeks and 12 weeks old. Before eight weeks, their
immune systems are too fragile. After 12 weeks,
they're too big, they're too strong. They'll
bite a kid's finger off. So you've got a four
-week window. A one -month revenue window per
animal. Per tiger. So if your entire business
is charging people 50, 100 bucks to hold a baby,
you need a constant, never -ending assembly line
of new babies. Which means you have to be breeding
constantly, nonstop. Speed breeding. You pull
the cubs from the mothers the second they're
born, so the mothers go back into heat faster.
But then, the goal comes due. Because the babies
grow up. The babies grow up. And tigers live...
for 20 years in captivity. So suddenly you're
sitting on 200 adult tigers, each one costing,
say, $10 ,000 a year just to feed. And they're
generating zero revenue. You can't pet them.
So this is why the population at the zoo exploded.
He wasn't hoarding them because he loved them
so much. He was hoarding them because they were
the industrial waste product of his actual business.
They were spent inventory. Exactly. And that
crushing financial pressure. I mean, the sheer
cost of feeding 200 giant predators, that's what
leads to the horrific conditions that we read
about in the federal investigation. Let's talk
about those conditions. The Walmart diet. This
detail really illustrates the scale of the problem.
To feed that many cats, you need, I mean, literal
truckloads of meat every single week. He couldn't
afford good meat. So he made a deal with a local
Walmart to take all their expired meat. And we're
not talking like a day past the sell -by date.
No. We're talking about meat that was turning
green, styrofoam packaging, plastic wrap, all
of it just shoveled into a truck and dumped at
the zoo. And it wasn't just the tigers eating
this stuff. No. This is where it gets truly dystopian.
The staff, who were often these vulnerable people
he'd recruit, you know, drifters, people fresh
out of prison, he'd pay them maybe $150 a week.
So they can't afford their own groceries. They
can't. So they were eating the expired Walmart
meat, too. And the allegation that it was even
used in the pizza sold to visitors. That is the
allegation, that the pepperoni on the pizza you
bought at the GW Zoo concession stand might have
been salvaged from that dumpster truck. That
is just, it's horrifying. You've got this cult
-like compound where the people are living in
squalor, eating rotten food, all to serve the
ego of this one guy. And when the Walmart meat
wasn't enough, he moved on to what they call
the horse solution. This is where any claim to
being an animal lover just evaporates. It really
does. He would put out ads, solicit donated horses.
He'd tell people, oh, bring us your old horse.
We'll give it a beautiful pasture to live out
its final days. And the reality was? The reality
was he would shoot the horse in the head the
moment it got off the trailer and feed it whole
to the tigers. It was just brutal pragmatism.
He didn't see an animal. He saw a free thousand
-pound package of meat. So you have this grim
reality churning away in the background. But
in the foreground, Joe is just desperate to be
a star. He builds his own TV studio at the zoo.
Joe Exotic TV. He was basically live streaming
before that was even really a thing. He'd host
this nightly show where he would just rant, mostly.
Rant about the government, rant about animal
rights people. And he wanted to be a country
music star. The music videos. I saw a tiger.
You're a kitty kitty. We have to ask. Did he
actually sing those songs? No. They sounded too
polished for that. They were very polished. Because
this is another classic Joe Exotic move. He purchased
a reality he couldn't earn. He hired professional
musicians, the Clinton Johnson Band, to write
and record the songs for him. So he would give
them the idea, maybe? Yeah, he might hum a melody
or give them a lyrical theme like Carole Baskin
killed her husband. But the actual performance,
the voice you hear on those tracks, it is not
Joe Exotic. He's just lip syncing in the video.
Just lip syncing. He wanted the fame of being
a singer without having any of the talent. It's
the same pattern as the bridge crash story. It's
all a performance. It's a facade. And then he
tries to attach himself to the biggest name in
the animal world at the time, Steve Irwin. He
claimed he knew Steve Irwin, that they talked
on the phone. There's no proof of any real friendship.
After Irwin died in 2006, Joe built a Steve Irwin
Memorial alligator complex. Which then mysteriously
burned to the ground in 2015. In a fire that
was incredibly suspicious. It destroyed his TV
studio, destroyed the alligator pit, and basically
boiled the alligators alive in their enclosure.
Horrific. Joe immediately blamed animal rights
activists. But the sheriff, the investigators,
they suspected it might have been an inside job.
For insurance money. Either for the insurance
money. or more likely to destroy incriminating
video footage and records that were stored in
that studio. The case is still officially unsolved.
OK, so the zoo is this chaotic, financially disastrous,
morally bankrupt operation. But that's not a
big enough stage for Joe. He decides he needs
to run the country. The political arc is something
people forget the details of. They think it was
all a joke. It was a joke to the rest of us,
maybe. Not to him. Not to him at all. In 2016,
he launches a campaign for president of the United
States as an independent. And did he actually
get any votes? He did. He managed to get his
name on the ballot in Colorado. And nationwide,
he received 962 votes. 962. I mean, it's a tiny
number, but it's not zero. Almost 1 ,000 people
voted for him. And it gave him mainstream attention.
John Oliver featured him on Last Week Tonight.
That's where Make America Exotic Again came from,
right? Yeah, that was Oliver's joke, which Joe
then immediately adopted as his own serious slogan.
But he doesn't stop there. 2018, he runs for
governor of Oklahoma. This time as a libertarian.
Yeah. And he actually does surprisingly well
in the primary. He finished last, sure, but he
got 664 votes. That was 18 .7 % of the total
vote. Almost one in five Libertarians in that
primary voted for the Tiger King. It is shockingly
high. And the actual Libertarian Party was horrified.
They officially censured him during the campaign
and then kicked him out of the party completely
after his arrest. They realized he wasn't just
some quirky activist. He was a genuine liability.
But not even prison could stop the political
ambitions. He ran again in 2024 from his cell.
This time he filed to run for the Democratic
nomination. It was, you know, clearly a publicity
stunt to try and get attention for a pardon.
But the details are just wild. Like his choice
for vice president. In 2022, he floated the idea
of Andrew Tate as his running mate. Andrew Tate,
the controversial social media influencer. Yeah,
the very same. And it just shows you how Joe's
mind works. It makes zero political sense. Joe
is an openly gay man. Tate has been accused of
rampant misogyny. But it makes perfect viral
sense. Joe operates in the economy of attention.
Policy is irrelevant. And to top it all off,
in 2025, he endorsed the prime minister of Australia.
Anthony Albanese. Yes, from his cell in Fort
Worth, Texas. It's like he just needs to feel
like he's part of the global conversation. It's
a way to mentally break out of the prison walls.
Which brings us to the conflict that actually
put him behind those walls, the central drama,
Joe versus Carole Baskin. The nemesis. Now, the
show framed this as this big personality clash,
the Hatfields and McCoys of the big cat world.
But when you look at the sources, it was really
a clash of business model. Oh, absolutely. That
is the entire root of the feud. Carole Baskin's
organization, Big Cat Rescue, their whole mission
was to ends the private ownership of big cats.
And her main target was cub petting. Specifically,
the mall tours. The mall tours? She organized
these massive email campaigns to mall managers
all over the country saying, do not let Joe Exotic
bring his tiger cubs here. This is animal abuse.
She was going right for his wallet, cutting off
his main source of cash flow. Precisely. If he
can't tour the malls, he can't make money. If
he can't make money, he can't feed the 200 tigers
back at the zoo. He saw her as an existential
threat. And being Joe, he didn't respond with,
you know, a reasoned debate. No. He responded
with a campaign of relentless, vicious harassment.
Reading her stolen diary on his web show, flying
a helicopter over her property, and most famously,
weaponizing the disappearance of her husband,
Don Lewis. Turning a missing person's case into
a marketing tool. He made music videos accusing
her of feeding him to her tigers. Yeah. Offered
a reward for information. It was obsessive. But
his fatal mistake, the thing that actually brought
him down legally, wasn't the harassment. It was
the trademark infringement. The Big Cat Rescue
entertainment debacle. This was his biggest error.
In 2011, he rebranded his whole traveling show
to use her name, Big Cat Rescue, and a Florida
phone number. He was trying to trick people into
booking him. Which is just a slam dunk lawsuit.
She sued and she won a million dollar judgment.
And Joe did not have a million dollars. So that
triggers the bankruptcy and then the fraud where
he transfers the zoo's assets into his mother's
name to hide them from Carol. He was completely
cornered financially. And a cornered Joe exotic
is a very dangerous Joe exotic. And that desperation
leads directly to the murder for hire plot. By
2017, he's at the end of his rope. He's been
talking about wanting her dead for years. But
now. Now he puts money on the table. He offers
cash to an employee named Alan Glover and then
unbelievably discusses the whole plan with a
man who turns out to be an undercover FBI agent.
The sloppiness is just astounding. But I want
to focus on the other charges for a second. The
ones that get overshadowed by the whole hitman
plot, the animal crimes. The Lacey Act and Endangered
Species Act violations. Yes. These are really
important because they cut through the animal
lover persona. He was convicted specifically
for killing five tigers. He shot them. Shot them
in the head with a pistol to make more cage space.
And in the court documents, he referred to them
as generic tigers. What does that even mean?
It's a term they use in the captive breeding
world. A generic tiger is basically a mutt. It's
a crossbreed between different subspecies like
a Siberian tiger crossed with a Bengal tiger.
So they have no conservation value? Zero. You
can't release them into the wild. You can't use
them in a legitimate species survival plan at
a real AZA accredited zoo. To science, they're
worthless. And to Joe, they were just inventory.
They were adult inventory that couldn't be used
for petting anymore. They were just big, expensive
mouths to feed. So you dispose of them like you'd
get rid of a broken piece of equipment. That's
chilling. So the trial happens in 2019. The jury
hears about the hitman plot. They hear about
the dead tigers. And they convict him on everything.
Two counts of murder for hire, eight counts of
Lacey Act violations, nine counts of Endangered
Species Act violations. A clean sweep. He gets
sentenced to 22 years, but then there was a resentencing
in 2022. I remember his supporters were acting
like he was about to be released. It was very
minor technicality. The appeals court ruled that
the two murder for hire counts should have been
grouped together as a single plot for sentencing
purposes, not treated as two separate crimes.
So the judge recalculated and the sentence was
reduced by... One year. Just one year. From 22
years to 21. Which means his current release
date is scheduled for 2036. He was born in 63,
so he'll be 73 years old when it gets out. If
he serves the full term. And if he survives that
long. And woven through this whole criminal saga
is this incredible personal tragedy, The Husbands.
The documentary focused on the throupled Joe,
John Finley, and Travis Maldonado. And we have
to be clear about the pattern here. It's a pattern
of predation. Joe targeted very young, often
straight, often vulnerable men who worked for
him, men with drug problems. And he used his
power, the money, the trucks, the guns, the access
to drugs to control them. It was a massive power
imbalance. Huge. And Travis Maldonado. I mean,
his story is the most heartbreaking part of this
entire saga. He's just a kid, 23. And by all
accounts, not gay. He seemed completely trapped
in this bizarre world Joe had built around him.
And in 2017, he's in the zoo office, he's messing
with a pistol. And he makes a fatal mistake.
He thought the gun was safe because he'd taken
the magazine out. He didn't understand that there
could still be a round in the chamber. And he
put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger,
sort of as a joke, and died instantly. Right
in front of the campaign manager, Joshua Dial.
Who's profoundly traumatized by it. And Joe's
reaction to this tragedy was just... So telling.
It was all performance. He held a press conference.
He started a charity in Travis's name, but then
at the actual funeral, he made these bizarre,
crude jokes about Travis's anatomy. It showed
this complete emotional disconnect from the reality
of what had happened. He was playing the part
of the grieving widower. And then, just two months
later, he marries Dylan Passage. Dylan was the
husband who was there through the trial and the
Netflix fame. They stayed together for a while,
but eventually divorced in 2021. But here's the
update, the part most people don't know because
the cameras have moved on. He got married again
in prison. This is the most recent twist. While
incarcerated at FMC Fort Worth, he met another
inmate, a man named Jorge Marquez. They got engaged
in October of 2024, and they got married in April
of 2025. So he's married right now. He is. But
there's a catch. Jorge Marquez was released from
prison in May of 2025. just one month after their
prison wedding. And he was immediately deported
to Mexico. Wow. So Joe is married, but his husband
is in a different country, and he's still locked
up in Fort Worth. It's another example of him
creating these bonds, but ending up completely
isolated anyway. And how is he physically? I
know there have been a lot of health scares.
It sounds like it's been pretty rough. He was
diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2021. He had
to be transferred to a special medical facility
in North Carolina for treatment for a while.
And he's back in Fort Worth now. Back in Fort
Worth. But he's reported other issues, immune
disorders. And in late 2024, he was writing letters
complaining about a massive scabies outbreak
in his prison unit. Scabies. A parasitic skin
infestation. Incredibly itchy, contagious. It
just paints this picture of a life that is so
far removed from the guy on the throne with the
tigers. He's aging, he's sick, and he's dealing
with scabies in a medical prison. And yet he's
still trying to protect the brand. He threatened
to sue a college football player. Jordan Travis,
the quarterback for Florida State. He was using
the nickname Tiger King on some merchandise.
And Joe, from his cell, sent a cease and desist
threatening legal action. He claimed he owns
the trademark to Tiger King. It's the only asset
he has left. The name itself. The fame is all
he has. So where are we now in 2026? The zoo
is gone. Carole Baskin ended up with the land.
Is that right? That is the ultimate perfect irony
of the entire feud. The court awarded her the
land as part of the settlement for that million
-dollar judgment he refused to pay. She took
ownership of the GW Zoo. So the cages are all
gone. She sold the property, but she put a deed
restriction on it. It can never be used as a
zoo or to house exotic animals ever again. The
kingdom has literally been erased from the map.
It's just a plot of land at Oklahoma now. There
was that moment, though, in early 2021 when he
was absolutely convinced he was getting out.
The pardon attempt. Oh, the Team Tiger limo.
That image just says it all. They were so sure
that Donald Trump was going to pardon him on
his last day in office. They had a stretch monster
truck limo parked and waiting outside the prison.
They had a whole team ready, hair and makeup.
Ready to get him camera ready for the press tour.
And they just waited. And waited. They waited
all day. The sun went down. The inauguration
happened. Joe Biden became president. And the
pardon never came. Joe stayed in his cell and
that empty limo just sat there. It's a perfect
symbol for the whole story. Delusion crashing
right up against reality. Exactly that. Before
we wrap this up, there is one last piece of his
psychology that I think is fascinating. He's
made statements recently that suggest, well,
a change of heart. He has. He wrote in a letter,
no animal belongs in a cage. He claims that now
that he knows what it's like to be locked in
a cage, you know, the boredom, the lack of freedom,
being told what to do all day, he finally understands
what he did to those animals. And he says he
regrets it. That he'd never own a zoo again.
That's what he says. And that's the ultimate
question with Joe Exotic, isn't it? Is this a
genuine epiphany born out of his own suffering?
Is he finally connecting his own pain to the
pain of the tigers? It's just another performance.
Or is he just a master manipulator saying exactly
what he thinks a parole board or the public wants
to hear? He knows redemption is a powerful narrative.
He knows remorse is a good legal strategy. With
him, you just can't ever seem to find the line
between the man and the performance. And I think
that fundamental ambiguity is why, even now,
we're still talking about him. He's a villain,
he's a victim, he's a caricature, and he's a
tragedy all at the same time. The king in a cage.
Well, that brings us to the end of this deep
dive. We have unpacked the police years, the
bizarre economics of the cub petting trade, the
political campaigns, and the pretty grim reality
of his life today. It's a much heavier story
when you pull back the curtain on the memes.
It's a story about the real cost of fame and
attention. It really is. If you want to see the
timelines, the actual court documents from the
Lasiak charges or even photos from his time as
a police chief, we'll have links in the show
notes. But be warned, it is a very, very deep
rabbit hole. It is indeed. You are now well informed.
Thanks for listening.