In March 2020, Netflix debuted what might be its most shocking and bingeworthy true
crime series to date. Tiger King tells the story of the rise and fall of Joseph Schreibvogel,
a.k.a. Joe Exotic, the charismatic proprietor of an exotic animal park in Oklahoma.
But Exotic was more than just a zookeeper and a manager: He had a knack for self-promotion,
positioning himself as just as much of an attraction as the close encounters with lions
and tigers offered by his park.
Tiger King describes, in increasingly bizarre detail, the complicated personal and professional
life of Joe Exotic, which culminates in an elaborate assassination plot against Carole
Baskin, a Florida-based operator of a wild cat preserve determined to get Joe's business,
and others like it, shut down. It's also a story that involves other cat aficionados,
polygamy, cult-like arrangements, exploitation, shady business practices, and accidental death.
"I am never going to financially recover from this."
Despite seven, 45 minute or so-long episodes, filmmakers couldn't fit the entire story into
Tiger King. Here are some pertinent details that didn't make it into the series.
Joe Exotic is a serial monogamist, if not polygamist, boasting of his not-exactly legal
simultaneous marriages to John Finlay and Travis Maldonado. After splitting with Finlay,
and Maldonado's death, Exotic recoupled with Dillon Passage, but that's not the entire
history of Exotic's many husbands.
According to Intelligencer, in the late '80s Exotic worked as a security guard at a Dallas
gay bar, where he met a 19-year-old cowboy named Brian Rhyne. They lived together for
well over a decade, and were married at the bar where they met.
Rhyne was also around for many of the events depicted in Tiger King. He was there when
Exotic's older brother Garold died in 1997, and when Exotic opened the G.W. Exotic Animal
Memorial Park in his memory.
Rhyne died in 2001, and according to zoo employees, his passing helped trigger Exotic's escalation
toward colorful and erratic behavior. He also started spending a lot of time at a gay bar
called the Copa, where he met his next husband, J.C. Hartpence who later ended up sentenced
to life in prison for murder.
After that, Exotic met Finlay, and while with him met a young Insane Clown Posse fan known
only as Paul, and they all slept together in one big bed. Only after Paul departed did
Exotic hook up with Travis Maldonado.
Joe Exotic engaged in more animal-related shenanigans and cheesy stabs at showmanship
than a seven-part documentary could show. One of his endeavors was a magic act involving
exotic animals, which he performed under the stage names Aarron Alex and Cody Ryan. His
assistant, Aaron Stone, was a guest on the podcast Joe Exotic: Tiger King, and detailed
some finer points and deeply unflattering moments from Exotic's magician stint.
A big trick involved making a tiger magically appear on stage in a previously empty cage.
A noisy explosion and some pyrotechnics provided the necessary misdirect, but those things
also frightened the big cat, who would show up in the cage near the back, cringing in
fear.
Since seeing a tiger in distress could make an audience feel uneasy, and make Exotic look
bad, the magician decided to get rid of the tiger and bring in a sheep... which he spray-painted
black and orange to resemble a tiger.
Not only did audiences immediately recognize the painted sheep for what it was, but it
was just as scared of the pyrotechnical effects.
“So there I am, hiding in a secret compartment, hugging a painted sheep."
Joe Exotic tried to be a lot of things he was a zoo-running businessman, an animal handler,
and perhaps most inexplicably, a country music singer who wrote and performed songs very
much about his own life as a tiger lover and a few of his own personal grudges, of course.
Those songs, loaded onto CDs sold in his park's gift shop, all seemed so very personal, and
yet Exotic had little to do with the enterprise, apart from the marketing. According to Tiger
King co-star and Exotic's arch-nemesis Carole Baskin, those aren't the tiger king's golden
pipes.
Baskin said on the Big Cat Rescue blog,
"Joe Exotic only lip-synced to songs written and recorded by Vince Johnson and Danny Clinton."
She also added that she has emails from Johnson and Clinton, the alleged real musicians behind
those tunes, to prove it.
While viewers get a large overview of most every person involved in Tiger King, they
don't learn all that much about Rick Kirkham. It's shown that he's a former gonzo
reporter for the tabloid TV show Inside Edition who went to work as the producer of Joe Exotic's
daily internet talk show.
Viewers are left with the impression that Kirkham largely stayed out of the personally
and legally devastating events everyone else in Tiger King engaged in, not counting how
an unknown actor — heavily implied to be Exotic himself — burned Kirkham's studio,
destroying hundreds of hours of possibly incriminating footage in the process.
"Boiling alive in a towering inferno of nothing but flames and fire."
What's not shown in Tiger King is that Kirkham was the victim of a second mysterious arson
not long after he left the Joe Exotic compound. Kirkham moved a couple of hours away to Dallas
and settled into an apartment, which caught fire when he was still in it. Kirkham was
safely removed by firefighters, but his dog died in the blaze. Police never made an arrest
for either fire.
The third episode of Tiger King dives deep into the backstory of Carole Baskin, leader
of the Big Cat Rescue animal preserve and subject of a murder-for-hire plot by Oklahoma
cat zoo operator Joe Exotic.
Viewers learn that Baskin's previous husband, Don Lewis, disappeared in 1997, and Joe Exotic
and his associates believe that Baskin killed him and fed his remains to her beloved big
cats.
"So the whole world's wondering, did you actually grind your husband up and feed him to the
tigers so there's no evidence?"
Some of the details of his disappearance presented in Tiger King may raise eyebrows such as a
claim that Lewis tried to file an injunction against his wife after she threatened physical
harm but Baskin's side of the story reportedly wasn't completely represented, nor was Tiger
King the documentary she initially believed she was helping to make.
Speaking about the filmmakers in an interview with Vanity Fair, Baskin claimed,
"Their pitch was that what they were trying to do was create the Blackfish of the cat
industry."
That's a reference to a previous animal rights-related documentary, an exposé on SeaWorld that made
waves in 2013.
Baskin participated in filming for Tiger King for five years, even through the exploration
of her former husband's death, which she says awakened a lot of painful memories. She claims
to have fully participated with authorities in trying to track down Lewis, to no avail.
She also shared her own theory on what happened to him with the Tiger King filmmakers, floating
the notion that Lewis' secretary killed him.
That's an interesting angle, but one Tiger King doesn't delve into probably because it
didn't have anything to do with cat people. Maybe one day another documentary will come
along to dig into this aspect of the story a little more.
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