Tiger King star Joe Exotic has tied the knot — again — and this time, it happened behind bars.
The flamboyant former zookeeper and convicted felon, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, revealed Monday that he married fellow inmate Jorge Flores Maldonado while serving a 21-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
“Never been more proud of someone. Meet my husband, Jorge Flores Maldonado,” Exotic wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), accompanied by a photo of the couple standing beneath a flower-draped trellis. The image has not been independently verified.
Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33. He is so amazing and is from Mexico.
Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we be leaving America when we both get out.
Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago. pic.twitter.com/MYRVPcy97Y
— Joe Exotic (@joe_exotic) October 29, 2024
A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to confirm the marriage, telling Entertainment Weekly that the agency does not comment on “the conditions of confinement for any individual in our custody.”
A Wedding Years in the Making
Exotic, 61, first revealed his relationship with Flores in October 2024, saying the pair had gotten engaged and were awaiting approval to marry.
“We filed our official papers for the marriage license from the prison yesterday, so we’re just waiting for an approval,” he said at the time. He noted that the process required sign-off from the prison’s warden, chaplain and psychiatric staff.
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“We love each other very much, spend every minute of the day together,” Exotic added. “I’ve been through some stuff in my days. I buried two husbands, the third one ran off with $2.6 million from Netflix and left my ass here, but Jorge is a very amazing young man.”
Exotic’s Rocky Romantic History
Exotic’s most recent previous marriage was to Dillon Passage, whom he wed in 2017. That relationship ended in 2020. Prior to Passage, Exotic was married to Travis Maldonado, whose tragic and accidental death by self-inflicted gunshot was documented in Tiger King.
His love life has often played out as dramatically as his legal troubles. In 2020, Exotic was convicted on 19 federal charges, including two counts of murder-for-hire against animal rights activist Carole Baskin, and violations of wildlife laws. He was originally sentenced to 22 years, but the sentence was reduced to 21 years in 2022 after a federal appeals court found issues with how the murder-for-hire charges were handled.
Despite his imprisonment, Exotic has maintained a public presence via social media and continues to push for a retrial, claiming innocence in the murder-for-hire plot that made him a pop culture phenomenon during the height of the pandemic.
No word yet on a honeymoon — but knowing Joe Exotic, it’s probably already being planned.
