The feline lover and star of the Netflix series Tiger King has just been sentenced on appeal for trying to murder his enemy Carole Baskin.
The king of tigers will stay behind bars for a while. If he dreamed of a presidential pardon, Joe Exotic has just been sentenced on appeal to 21 years in prison for “murder-for-hire”. Incarcerated in 2020, the star of the Netflix documentary Tiger King was on trial for hiring two henchmen to assassinate her rival Carole Baskin. This new and final conviction therefore marks the end of an eventful legal battle for Joe Maldonado-Passage, who still receives a year less than at first instance.
A season 3 all found
Airing in 2020 during the very first lockdown, the first season of Tiger King had been a huge success, both in the United States and internationally. Under the eye of Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, this explosive mini-documentary returned to the enmity between Joe Exotic, an eccentric feline lover who owns an animal park, and Carole Baskin, head of the controversial Big Cats refuge. Rescue. With threats and legal proceedings, the two main protagonists had declared war on each other, under the dumbfounded eye of a PETA (humane society), which did not seem to see favorably neither the zoo of Exotic, nor the “sanctuary” by Baskin.
Incarcerated at the end of season 1, Joe Exotic had nevertheless remained one of the main figures of the second season of Tiger King. Unlike Carole Baskin, who no longer wanted to appear in the series, the king of the tigers did not fail to make the show from his prison, proclaiming loud and clear that his assassination attempt on his rival was only a plot orchestrated by his former associates.
This time though, game over. It was in tears that the 50-year-old arrested the federal judge, imploring him to “don’t die in prison”. Suffering from prostate cancer, Joe Exotic had appealed his first conviction to request a reduction of sentence related to his state of health. A favor finally rejected on Friday, in front of an audience nevertheless committed to the cause of the king of the tigers.
For its part, the defense has not said its last word. Exotic’s lawyers have already announced their willingness to seek a new trial, with the aim of exonerating — or at least reduce — their client’s pain.
