Before Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem & Madness would be ranked as the No. 1 Most Watched
Television show in the world with a 98% Fresh review on Rotten Tomatoes.
Before Joe Exotic would become immortalized as a meme, a costume, a face filter, and would
have his face printed on t-shirts.
Before Joe Exotic would be arrested and convicted of two counts of murder-for-hire, eight violations
of the Lacey Act and nine of the Endangered Species Act and would be sentenced to 22 years
in federal prison.
Joe Exotic has become such a big deal people are already placing bets for who should play
him in his own Hollywood movie.
Popular picks include Danny McBride, David Spade, Billy Bob Thornton and both Dax Shepard
and Edward Norton have already thrown their hats in the ring.
If you were to ask me, I think Michael Keaton would be perfect.
Since our last video on Joe Exotic the fandom, intrigue and meme's have only gotten more
and more outta control so we decided to dig a whole bunch deeper to found out more.
I got some juicy info about what he was like in high school, his ex girlfriend Kim and
and a ton of footage that was just too wild to be featured in the Netflix docu-series.
What's going on guys?
It's your boy Michael McCrudden back at it again with another Before They Were Famous
video.
Recent drops on this channel include a Before They Were Famous on Carole Baskin and a Where
Are They Now on John Finlay.
This show works off suggestions so I need you guys to request who to do next in the
comments down below.
We post vids daily so be sure to Subscribe.
Now let's get into this video.
Joe Exotic was born Joeseph Schreibvogel on Match 5th, 1963 in rural Kansas.
As the story goes, Joe was born into a wealthy farming family with four siblings, two brothers
and two sisters with him dab in the middle.
There were no hand outs.
His parents weren't affectionate and never told him they loved him.
When he was 5 years old, he says he was repeatedly raped by an older boy.
This happened in his own home.
He vividly recalls how a drawer in the bathroom could be opened to prop the door shut.
Joe chose to give his love to animals.
He became the president of his local 4 H chapter, where he raised show pigeons.
He took in ground squirrels and raccoons and kept them in cages until.
He brought home baby antelopes, porcupines, raccoons and snakes much to the dismay of
his parents.
He dreamt about one day becoming a veterinarian.
His mothers name is Shirley and his father Francie, a Korean War vet, and the family
moved from Kansas when Joe was fourteen to Wyoming.
Then they moved to Pilot Point, Texas, north of Dallas, where they lived in an eight-bedroom
house on a large ranch.
Joe wasn't close with three of his siblings but extremely close with one brother name
Garold.
Joe and Garold shared a deep love for animals and the two passed the time watching nature
shows on TV.
In high school Joe got bullied by the jocks because he preferred to hang around with the
girls.
In retaliation he sprinkled roofing nails all over the school parking lot and popped
the tires of a hundred cars and the jocks never fucked with him again.
Joe graduated from high school in 1982 but unfortunately his photo doesn't exist in the
yearbook.
Following school he talked his way into becoming the police chief of a tiny, crumbling Texas
town called Eastvale population 503 people.
He lived with a girlfriend named Kim but also explored Dallas’s gay nightlife.
He was outed by one of siblings to his father, who made Joe shake his hand and promise not
to attend his funeral.
Overcome with shame one night in 1985, which Joe would later refer to as “the bad year,”
he says he attempted suicide by crashing his police cruiser into a concrete bridge embankment
at high speed.
He says he ended up with a broken back, spent 57 days in traction in the hospital, and then
moved down to West Palm Beach, Florida, to participate in an experimental saltwater rehabilitation
program.
Joe’s neighbour down there, a man named Tim, happened to be the manager of a pet store,
and Tim’s friend worked at a drive-through zoo, one of those places where customers could
ride around in safari cars and look out the windows at lions and other animals roaming
free.
Tim’s friend would sometimes bring home baby lions and let Joe play with them.
Joe liked to say he was broken and those little critters helped put him back together.
After a couple of years, Joe returned to Texas, got a job as a security guard at a gay cowboy
bar called the Round-up Saloon.
There he met his first husband, Brian Rhyne who was 19 years old.
They moved into a trailer together in Arlington, where they shared a bed with a pack of poodles.
They enjoyed the night life snorting meth and going to bars, eventually the two wed
at the Round-up but due to the times, the late 80's it wasn't a legally binding union.
I decided to search up the bar on YouTube and it looks like its still a good time for
the fellas.
Down the street from the trailer park where Joe and Brian lived was a pet store called
Pet Safari.
Joe got a job there, and later he and his brother Garold Wayne decided to purchase it.
To attract a gay clientele, Joe hung rainbow banners outside and stocked the shelves with
rainbow dog T-shirts.
For the first few years they sold reptiles, birds, and small fish.
When they could afford to expand they would buy bigger cages for small exotic pets including
three-banded armadillos and four-eyed opossums.
All was going well, but then, in October 1997, disaster struck.
Garold was hit by a drunk driver outside Dallas and he died within a week.
His brother died in a car crash back in 1997.
Joe’s parents won a sizeable settlement from the trucking company responsible for
the death, $140K if I'm not mistaken.
Garold's had always been to visit Africa to see wild Lions roam in the wild so with the
money Joe purchased an old horse ranch in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, where he began building
a refuge for exotic rescued animals.
He named it after his brother: the Garold Wayne Exotic Animal Memorial Park.
Joe poured cement for sidewalks and built a row of nine cages.
There was already a little ranch house on the property that Joe and his husband moved
into.
Over the years, he had discovered that a shocking number of exotic animals were living in backyards
and basements all across the country, many of which had grown too large or too dangerous
for their owners.
People began dropping off exotic animals that they no longer wanted.
The first two pets at the zoo were Garold’s deer and buffalo.
Then came a mountain lion.
Then a bear.
In 2000 Joe got a call telling him that someone had abandoned two tigers in a backyard and
he named his first two tigers Tess and Tickles.
They bred, and Joe raised their cubs.
Within two years, Joe had already amassed more than a dozen tigers.
He persuaded the local Walmart to donate its expired meat, which he would feed to the cats.
He also secured donations from sponsors.
Despite the free food these big cats were an expensive bunch to feed and money was always
an issue.
He would borrow from his parents time and time again until he came up with a few new
ways to monetize his zoo including Cub Petting, a travelings magic show.
Unfortunately things didn't always go as planned.
He opened up a pizzeria and a safari themed bar.
When he said scratch what he means is scraps.
He sold merchandise with his face on it including condoms and T-Shirts.Visitors to the Zoo often
got sprayed with lion urine and “bombed” with ape feces.
Afterward, they proudly bought T-shirts in the gift shop that read I GOT PEED ON BY A
LION.
Later on came the TV studio so let's take a look at his very first YouTube video.
Looking over Joe's YouTube channel there were only one or two videos that went viral and
these were of the animals.
Despite him producing legitimate content seemingly daily he just never figured out how to grow
on YouTube.
That's all changed now, since his Netflix series has aired Joe has picked up 80K new
YouTube Subscribers and is getting over a million views a day.
Better late than never.
If you wanna know more about Joe's story and what happened to him now, check out our Where
Are They Now Video.
My name is Michael McCrudden and the rest of the story you can find over there...
I'll see you guys in another video.
BOOM!