Joe Exotic Announces Engagement to Fellow Prison Inmate

Joe Exotic is getting married.

The Tiger King star, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, got engaged while incarcerated. He announced the news on his social media, introducing the man he is set to marry with a photo.

“Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33,” Maldonado-Passage wrote. “He is so amazing and is from Mexico.”

“Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we [will] be leaving America when we both get out,” his statement continued. “Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago.”

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This isn’t the Oklahoma zookeeper’s first marriage. Just two months before marrying ex-husband Dillon Passage, who was also on the Netflix hit, Maldonado-Passage was married to Travis Maldonado, who accidentally shot himself and died. 

Maldonado-Passage and Passage later split in 2021 after 3 years of marriage.

“To answer the main question the public wants to know, yes, Joe and I are seeking a divorce,” Passage wrote on his Instagram at the time. “This wasn’t an easy decision to make but Joe and I both understand that this situation isn’t fair to either of us. It’s something that neither of us were expecting but we are going to take it day by day.”

“We are on good terms still and I hope it can stay that way,” he continued. “I will continue to have Joe in my life and do my best to support him while he undergoes further legal battles to better his situation.”

Maldonado-Passage is currently serving a 21-year prison sentence after his 2019 conviction for a murder-to-hire plot against his animal rights activist rival Carole Baskin. He allegedly was charged with paying Allen Glover $3,000 to kill Baskin, a big cat conservationist, along with other charges.

According to prosecutors, starting in July 2016, Maldonado-Passage repeatedly tried to hire people — one of whom was an undercover FBI agent — to murder Baskin, who owns a tiger refuge in Florida and won a multimillion-dollar judgment against Maldonado-Passage’s G.W. Exotic Animal Memorial Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma.

Eventually, Maldonado-Passage paid Glover to travel from Oklahoma to South Carolina and on to Florida to kill Baskin, “with a promise to pay thousands more after the deed,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Authorities also said that he killed five tigers in October 2017 to free up cage space for other animals, then proceeded to sell and offer to sell tiger cubs in interstate commerce and falsify forms involving the sale of wildlife in interstate commerce.