He’s back! Joe Exotic is still in prison for hiring someone to kill Carole Baskin, but that hasn’t stopped him from participating in Tiger King 2.
The notorious zookeeper will return to Netflix for a sequel to the 2020 docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness, which debuted right as many viewers were settling in for weeks or months of coronavirus lockdowns. The show was an instant hit, spawning an additional documentary and multiple scripted series about Exotic (real name Joe Schreibvogel) and his cohorts.
The first series followed the Kansas native in his domain at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma, where he bred tigers and displayed other big cats including lions and pumas. It also documented his vendetta against Baskin, a Florida-based activist who had been trying to have Exotic’s park shut down.
Exotic didn’t take the situation lying down, but his solution to the problem was what landed him in custody: he hired someone to murder her and got caught. In January 2020, he was sentenced to 22 years in prison for two counts of murder-for-hire as well as eight counts of falsifying wildlife records and nine counts of violating the Endangered Species Act.
The Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park, meanwhile, no longer exists. Jeff Lowe bought the attraction from Exotic in 2016, but in May 2020, a federal judge transferred ownership to Baskin as part of a judgment she’d already won against him. One year later, the Big Cat Rescue CEO sold the property, on the condition that the new owners never referenced or repeated Exotic’s actions.
“When we sold the property in June [2021], we required that it never be used as a zoo, or for anything related to Tiger King or anything like that,” Baskin told Yahoo Entertainment in August. Her husband, Howard Baskin, added, “If it became an RV park or storage unit, we don’t want it named the Tiger King RV Park. We would like the 20 years of mistreatment of animals there to be forgotten and be history.”
Despite the fact that Exotic is incarcerated and the zoo is permanently closed, Netflix has promised that Tiger King 2 will feature the “madness and mayhem” that audiences loved the first time around. “Thought you knew the whole story?” the streaming platform teased in a press release. “Just you wait.”
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