‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic is marrying prison mate 28 years his junior

1 November, 2024

Joe Exotic

Tiger King star Joe Exotic has announced his engagement to a prison mate 28 years his junior.

Exotic, real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage, 61, recently took to social media to share that he had struck up a relationship with 33-year-old Jorge Marquez in prison. The former zoo owner is currently serving a 21-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.

“Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33. He is so amazing and is from Mexico,” he began the post, which includes a picture of the couple.

“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.”

In another post, Exotic also asked for the pair to be pardoned from prison. “Yep. Took me 61 years to find him now I got to convince [Donald] Trump to let me keep him in America,” he wrote.

Marquez is currently serving time for immigration-related issues, CBS News reports.

Exotic confirmed the engagement to Entertainment Weekly in a phone call from prison, saying: “We filed our official papers for the marriage license from the prison yesterday, so we’re just waiting for approval. He has picked out December 12 as the date we’re hoping to get this approved by.

He added that the application must be approved by the warden, psychiatry officer and the chaplain before their license can be approved.

This is Exotic’s third prison engagement in three years. In 2022, he began a relationship with another inmate named John Graham, but things soon ended after Graham was released from prison. In the same year, Exotic started a relationship with Seth Posey, but they also split shortly after becoming engaged.

Exotic has been married five times, most recently to Dillon Passage, who featured in Netflix’s Tiger King. Passage requested a divorce in 2021.

Exotic was sentenced to 21 years in prison in 2019 for 19 counts of wildlife crimes and two counts of hiring hitmen to kill animal rights activist Carol Baskin.

Back in February, Exotic publicly expressed his attraction to Machine Gun Kelly and suggested he would woo his crush with “a tiger and a bit of meth”.

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