Tiger King star Joe Exotic, who is serving a 21-year prison sentence at Federal Medical Center Fort Worth, has announced he tied the knot with fellow inmate Jorge Flores Marquez.
The former tiger trader (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage) shared the news on X on Monday.
“Never been more proud of someone. Meet my husband Jorge Flores Maldonado,” Exotic, 62, wrote alongside a picture of them wearing matching suits and white baseball caps.
Exotic’s marriage to Marquez comes months after he announced they were engaged last October.
“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,” Exotic wrote on X at the time. “Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago.”
Exotic rose to fame through the Netflix 2020 true-crime documentary, Tiger King, which focused on Exotic’s rivalry with wildlife activist Carole Baskin.
In 2019, the TV personality was found guilty on two counts of hiring a hitman to murder Baskin. Prosecutors said Exotic offered $10,000 to an undercover FBI agent to kill Baskin during a recorded December 2017 meeting. In the recording, he told the agent, “Just like follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off.”
Exotic’s attorneys said their client, who once operated a zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, about 65 miles south of Oklahoma City, wasn’t being serious.
Exotic, who maintains his innocence, was also convicted of killing five tigers, selling tiger cubs, and falsifying wildlife records.
He was originally sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2020, but in 2022, his sentence was reduced to 21 years during a re-sentencing trial.
This marks Exotic’s third marriage. The two are said to have met behind bars as Marquez is serving time for immigration-related issues, according to CBS News.
Exotic was first married to Travis Maldonado, who died from a self-inflicted, accidental gunshot wound in 2017.
He was then married to Dillon Passage, who filed for divorce in 2021 after their hopes of securing a presidential pardon from Donald Trump were “dashed.”
“The presidential pardon we were all waiting for never came and our hopes were dashed. I remain in support of Joe and want to be there for him,” Passage said in a since-deleted Instagram post announcing their divorce. “This wasn’t an easy decision to make but Joe and I both understand that this situation isn’t fair to either of us.”
The former zoo owner has been vying for a presidential pardon for years. After he failed to gain clemency from Donald Trump during his first election, he later sought clemency from former President Joe Biden, but his efforts remained unsuccessful. In January, Exotic slammed Donald Trump for again failing to pardon him and said he would have been better off if he had stormed the US Capitol on January 6.
