Joe Exotic

Joe Exotic's mugshot.

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Joseph Allen Maldonado (né Schreibvogel) (1963–), more commonly known as Joe Exotic, is a former zookeeper, convicted felon, and perennial candidate currently being interred in the Santa Rosa County Jail in Florida. Originating from Kansas and later moving to Texas, he is best known for his ownership of the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma, which was chronicled in the 2020 Netflix series Tiger King. He ran for president in 2016 as an independent and in 2024 as a Democrat as a write-in cadidate, while running for the governor of Oklahoma as a Libertarian in 2018.

Tiger King

Exotic founded the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in 1999 after buying some land in Oklahoma using money received in a lawsuit related to his brother's death. One year later, he would start breeding tigers at the zoo. His tigers were reportedly underfed and kept in small enclosures, and he reportedly killed five tigers and illegally sold tiger cubs in violation of federal laws. He also paid his staff a meager $150 a week, forced them to live in dilapidated trailers, and frequently withheld food rations from them. While a lot of this was covered in Tiger King, they left a few things out, like Exotic's use of racial slurs.

Feud with Baskin

Exotic had blamed a lot of his problems on Carole Baskin, another zookeeper who runs Big Cat Rescue. Joe Exotic infamously accused her of murdering her husband who disappeared in 1997 in his memetic song "Here Kitty Kitty". This has led Exotic to promote several unfounded theories on the disappearance. For example, he said that Baskin either hid her husband's body in a septic tank or shoved it through the meat grinder despite the fact that neither the meat grinder nor the septic tank were on the property at the time of the disappearence. The feud ultimately led him to hire a hitman to murder Baskin, which alongside 8 counts of violating the Lacey Act on rare animal and endangered species trading, and 9 counts of violating the Endangered Species Act got him sentenced to 22 years in prison. In the end, due to a scheme where Exotic fraudulently put his zoo in his mother's name to avoid making payments to creditors as a result of an earlier $1 million trademark infringement lawsuit brought forth by Baskin, a judge gave Exotic's zoo to Baskin.

Political campaigns

In 2016, he ran as an independent candidate for president and was shouted out by John Oliver. He only achieved ballot access in Colorado and got 968 votes nationwide.

In 2018, he ran in the Libertarian primary for governor of Oklahoma, though he was accused by his opponents of not being a real libertarian and was largely seen as an embarrassment to the party, and even his campaign manager said he didn't think that Exotic even knew what a libertarian was. He ultimately came in last in the primary out of three candidates, and his party membership was revoked following his arrest.

After trying and failing to get a pardon from Donald Trump, he ran in 2024 as a write-in candidate in the Democrat Party primary. While he's running from prison, he probably won't do as well as Eugene V. Debs.