One of its stars desperately wanted to be in it but is in prison, the other is so determined to stay out of it that she’s gone to court. As for the supporting cast of characters, well, many of them have returned and they’re as outlandish as ever. It’s Tiger King back, and this surprising viral monster of the pandemic is sure to make it even more insane.
Tiger King, alias Joe Exotic, suited those crazy times to a tee — a mullet-haired, assault rifle-brandishing, drug-abusing, gay polygamist, hillbilly showman. His anarchic Oklahoma roadside animal zoo was full of lions.
His accusation was that he had illegally bred the animals to support his cub-petting venture. She accused him of killing her husband, and giving him food to her large cats.
The show rapidly became one of streaming giant Netflix’s biggest ever hits, watched by 64 million households in its first month, March 2020.
The eight-part series, titled Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, managed to get odder and odder until what had seemed like a black comedy turned into something far darker when Exotic — real name Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage — was arrested for hiring two men to kill Ms Baskin.
Joe Exotic, from Netflix’s popular series Tiger King. The show rapidly became one of streaming giant Netflix’s biggest ever hits, watched by 64 million households in its first month, March 2020
His supporters claimed he was set up but he was later convicted of that offence as well as falsifying wildlife records and animal abuse — including shooting and killing five tigers — and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Exotic revealed this week that the appeal court reduced his sentence. However, Exotic suggested that it may have been academic.
On social media, he revealed that he has prostate cancer and asked for compassionate reasons to be freed from Texas’ federal prison. He added: ‘Carole will have her own party over this!’
Tiger King 2 is set to be released on November 17th. It will focus again upon a troubling, yet undeniably charismatic personality who was so well-known that Trump even considered pardoning him after his Free Joe campaign had received enough votes.
Exotic, who was covered with tattoos and body piercings had undergone so many face-lifts that his sideburns are now visible behind his ears. A heavy user of the drug crystal methamphetamine, he liked to sleep three to a bed with his much younger ‘husbands’ on either side of him and famously once walked into a local gay bar with a tiger on a leash.
As he headed for prison, Mrs Baskin, meanwhile, was given ownership of Exotic’s zoo by a federal judge shortly after the TV series came out as the settlement of a seven-year-old trademark dispute in which he was also ordered to pay her $1 million.
However, before that settlement could be enforced, Exotic managed to pass on the zoo’s big cats to a business partner, Jeff Lowe. After a complaint that Exotic was being cruelly treated, federal agents raided their site to seize the remaining 68 large cats.
The picture shows the star of Netflix’s hit series, with what appears to be injuries on his left arm. Oklahoma Grady County jail is where the attacker was reported to have been.
Mrs Baskin, who runs a well-regarded big cats sanctuary in Florida, complained bitterly about the programme makers’ ‘false portrayal’ of her, unfairly suggesting she had murdered her second husband and making her look as trashy as pistol-packing Exotic with his garish leopard-print shirts and grim history of cruelty towards the animals he insisted he loved.
She accused the TV series of tarnishing her reputation as a serious animal conservationist but then didn’t help her case by appearing on Dancing With The Stars, America’s version of Strictly Come Dancing, where she danced to Eye Of The Tiger wearing her signature headpiece, a flower crown.
She also appeared this April in Louis Theroux’s documentary, Shooting Joe Exotic, for BBC2, a considered programme which was more sympathetic to her and more honest about Exotic’s dangerous personality. Netflix lawyers attempted to discredit Theroux by claiming that many characters were subject to exclusivity contracts.
While the TV award-winning first Tiger King series won TV Emmys, animal welfare groups and conservationists lambasted Exotic’s cynical glamorization of Exotic as well as downplaying illegal breeding practices and cub trafficking by private zoo owners were rewarded with TV honors.
Netflix, which has a passion for lurid true-life stories, is keeping tight-lipped about the contents of the new series but has made clear in a wham-bam trailer that those looking for more jaw-dropping lunacy won’t be disappointed.
Mrs Baskin told the Mail this week that she doesn’t know what is in it about her but fears the worst. Baskin, an activist who declared she was bisexual last year, believes the series will once again glorify Exotic while glossing over animal cruelty in the pursuit of gripping drama. ‘They found something that worked and they made money off it so I would be inclined to believe they’ll have stuck with the same format,’ she said.
Mrs Baskin’s feud with Exotic started after she campaigned for shopping malls to ban his touring cub petting zoo. According to her, she said that the Tiger King’s makers convinced her they would conduct a thorough investigation on the exploit of large cat cubs. They also confirmed her interest in appearing in the sequel. ‘They wanted to clear the air and I told them to lose my number. We didn’t have a discussion.’
She said that since Netflix put out the trailer for the new series, people had been posting one-star reviews of her big cat sanctuary near Tampa, Big Cat Rescue, and making ‘hateful comments’.
Carole Baskin told the Mail this week that she doesn’t know what is in it about her but fears the worst. According to the activist, she revealed her bisexuality last year and suspects that the new series will glorify Exotic animals while ignoring cruelty.
She adds: ‘It was all the same stuff that happened last time. Just about everybody who calls is either screaming that I’m a murderer or saying that I’m no different to Joe, that I have tigers in cages … At least this time we won’t be blindsided.’
Asked if she believed it was the film-makers’ intention all along to demonise her, she said: ‘I don’t know what their intention was but they could have had a perfectly good series with crazy characters without villainising one person who was trying to end the abuse.’
But after discovering from the Tiger King 2 trailer that the directors were using footage of them left over from the first series, she and husband Howard Baskin sued Netflix and the producers for what they said was its ‘unauthorised’ use under their original deal.
Even though a judge dismissed their request for an order of restraining on the new series’, they are not done with their legal proceedings. This has undoubtedly only added drama to their story.
The Baskins, however, aren’t the only people feeling oppressed. Joe Exotic said that he doesn’t regret his appearance in the series. However, he still protests his innocence. The new trailer includes a selection of whining phone calls he made to Tiger King’s directors from prison.
He wails: ‘There’s an innocent man in prison.’ ‘If you give a damn, it’s time to speak up.’
This eight-part series, entitled Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, was a comedy that got more and more odd.
Mrs Baskin’s feud with Exotic started after she campaigned for shopping malls to ban his touring cub petting zoo. According to her, she accepted to be part of the first Tiger King series because the makers promised her that there would be serious investigations into the exploiting big cat cubs. They also confirmed her interest in appearing in the second series.
In another he moans: ‘Everybody from the zoo is making money and I’m paying the price for every one of them.’ However he also warns his rival big cat collectors: ‘We’ve gotta put our differences aside or we’re all going to die in here.’
It’s clear from the teaser for Tiger King 2 that at least four of his cronies have agreed to collaborate with the new series.
The trailer looks a lot like Miami Vice’s opening, and James Garretson is seen riding on a jetski and sitting on a dock while four women, all underdressed, look on. ‘Tiger King changed our lives overnight,’ he tells the film.
‘We have more money than God,’ boasts Jeff Lowe, a Las Vegas playboy and another big cat collector to whom Exotic passed his zoo after he was convicted to stop Ms Baskin getting it.
He is now back to his old ways. Mr Lowe used to bring tiger cubs with him in a Louis Vuitton suitcase into Las Vegas casinos. This was to make it easier to chat up ladies. In the trailer, he ogles dancers in a strip club and shows off a giant jewel encrusted neck chain with a tiger’s head and the words ‘Tiger King’.
In one scene he’s filmed shooting a rifle with a sketch of Joe as target, and in another Mr Lowe is getting on to a bed containing his wife Lauren and another woman, while Exotic complains: ‘Jeff and Lauren are like two rabid dogs in a goldfish bowl.’
Also returning is Allen Glover — Tiger King’s handy man until Exotic offered him $3,000 to cut off Mrs Baskin’s head only for him to tell the FBI — and Lowe’s former business partner Tim Stark.
Described by someone in the trailer as ‘bat**** crazy’ (though that hardly narrows it down), Mr Stark’s armed to the teeth and apparently so determined to stop officials taking his big cats from his Kentucky private zoo — misleadingly named Wildlife In Need — that he’s installed booby traps. ‘Nobody’s going to take my animals, it’s that simple,’ he snarls. ‘Come get me, mother******s.’
Tiger King, alias Joe Exotic, suited those crazy times to a tee — a mullet-haired, assault rifle-brandishing, drug-abusing, gay polygamist, hillbilly showman
The trailer doesn’t spare Mrs Baskin either. ‘What happened to Don Lewis?’ says a voiceover, referring to her missing ex-husband. ‘Carole knows something. He was dealing with some shady characters down in Costa Rica.’ Another man opines: ‘Don liked to play with dangerous stuff. They’ll kill you for that.’
Carole wouldn’t be drawn by the Mail on what the trailer might be referring to but she has previously claimed Mr Lewis, another big cat collector, was obsessed with sex and frequently flew to Costa Rica for affairs.
In July 1997, he filed unsuccessfully for a restraining order against her, claiming she’d threatened to kill him, although they continued to live together. He vanished two months later.
Mr Lewis’s daughter claimed that her stepmother, knowing he was about to divorce her, killed him and used the sanctuary’s meat mincer to mush up his body before giving it to the cats. Her involvement has been denied. ‘I couldn’t have run his hand through the grinder, much less his body,’ she said in the first Tiger King series.
However, the new trailer doesn’t tell the whole story. Exotic may soon have many of its stars from the original series. According to animal rights group Peta, almost every big cat ‘abuser’ in the original series is now in custody, out of business or facing lawsuits or criminal charges.
Stark, who was arrested April 18, has been charged with animal cruelty including beating a leopard to death using a baseball bat.
In May, federal officials removed the remaining nearly 70 big cats from Tiger King Park, Jeff and Lauren Lowe’s successor to Exotic’s zoo. The authorities say the Lowes — who deny mistreating animals — had committed various animal welfare breaches.
Exotic ran an anarchic roadside zoo in Oklahoma full of lions and tigers, and was fighting a vicious battle with his nemesis, Florida big cats rights activist Carole Baskin (pictured, appearing on Dancing with the Stars
Although he criticised his portrayal in the first series and isn’t in the new trailer, it’s been reported that Kevin ‘Doc’ Antle, a big cat owner and supplier of animals to Hollywood films, will also be in Tiger King 2.
One of the first series’ stand-out oddities, he renamed himself Bhagavan, meaning ‘mystical lord’, and kept a harem of young interns who he gave new names and cosmetic surgery.
He too has fallen foul of law. He was arrested in October 2020 for wildlife trafficking, as well as other charges. He insists he’s never been cruel to animals.
There’s clearly plenty of meat for the makers of Tiger King 2 to get their teeth into in their search for more grotesque people and preposterous plotlines. The Tiger King is not the Tiger King.
- Tiger King 2, Netflix, 17 November.