‘Tiger King’ star Joe Exotic says he married fellow prisoner in jail: ‘Never been more proud’ – Entertainment Weekly
2025-04-22T14:29:59Z
‘Tiger King’ star Joe Exotic shared a photo of what he said was his new husband following a reported prison marriage: ‘Never been more proud.’
The Tiger King star said he married a fellow inmate in Texas.
Exotic shared an image on social media and told his followers the pair were married in prison.
“We love each other very much, spend every minute of the day together,” Exotic told EW last year.
Tiger King star Joe Exotic — who’s currently serving a 21-year sentence after a murder-for-hire plot against animal activist Carole Baskin — said he married a fellow prisoner in Texas.
“Never been more proud of someone. Meet my husband, Jorge Flores Maldonado,” Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, wrote Monday in an X post while serving his sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
The announcement also included an image of the TV star with another man as they stood under a trellis of flowers. Entertainment Weekly could not verify the authenticity of the image.
A representative for the Federal Bureau of Prisons Office of Public Affairs tells EW that “we do not comment on the conditions of confinement for any individual in our custody,” and could not verify that Exotic and Flores married in prison.
EW has reached out to representatives for Exotic for comment.
Exotic previously told EW in October 2024 that he and Flores, who’s from Mexico, were engaged to be married.
“We filed our official papers for the marriage license from the prison yesterday, so we’re just waiting for an approval,” he said at the time, later adding that their application process had “to be approved by the warden and psychiatry and the chaplain” before they could wed.
Joe Exotic with a tiger on ‘Tiger King’. Netflix
“We love each other very much, spend every minute of the day together,” Exotic said. “I’ve been through some s— in my days,” he continued. “I buried two husbands, the third one ran off with 2.6 million bucks from Netflix and left my ass here, but Jorge is a very amazing young man.”
Exotic was previously married to Dillon Passage from December 2017 through 2020, with their union following the accidental death of Exotic’s prior husband, Travis Maldonado, who died after accidentally shooting himself.
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Netflix’s Tiger King docuseries ignited intense public interest in Exotic’s story, as a former zookeeper who was arrested on suspicion of hiring two men to murder Carole Baskin, a founder of Florida’s Big Cat Rescue animal park.
Exotic was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2020 on 19 federal charges, though he has filed multiple petitions requesting a new trial and a lesser sentence. In 2021, an appeals court found that the pair of convictions over his murder-for-hire attempts against Baskin were wrongfully handled separately, and he was resentenced to 21 years as a result.
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