Tiger King‘s Joe Exotic has high hopes he’ll be a free man by next year. The 61-year-old star of the 2020 Netflix docuseries is currently serving a 21-year sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, but he told Us Weekly he’s setting his sights on freedom amid his battle with cancer.
The former zookeeper, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, was convicted for his role in an alleged murder-for-hire plot targeting rival big-cat sanctuary owner Carole Baskin as well as for violating federal wildlife laws. Maldonado-Passage hopes that the court will overturn his conviction in the near future.
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“My biggest goal is not only to get out of here and move on and live a life,” he said of his plans to move forward if he is released. “I want to testify in front of Congress about the prison and justice system [and] what really goes on in here.”
Maldonado-Passage also opened up about the alleged conditions at the medical facility in which he is housed. “Part of the roof is missing, and we have plastic bags above our beds taped to the ceiling to guide water out the window. In the last week, I caught 15 rats on sticky boards under my bed. Now 140 of us have scabies,” the Oklahoma native claimed. “I run a soup kitchen in here. That’s something Carole and nobody [else] can take away from me, that I gave back to society.”
While Maldonado-Passage’s prostate cancer is in remission, he told the outlet that the medical team believes he has cancer in his left lung. “I have to take it as it comes,” he said. “I still have faith that I’m going to walk out of here — I just need to live for the next five or six months and hope for the best.”
Despite Tiger King‘s success more than four years ago, Maldonado-Passage said he recently watched the docuseries for the first time. After lawyers were allowed to show him the series amid their work on a lawsuit, the big cat enthusiast said he was “disgusted” with the way director Eric Goode portrayed things. “Carole and I never had a deadly fight going on — it was blown out of proportion,” he claimed. “I never saw Carole’s face until my trial.”
If Maldonado-Passage is released next year, he said he’s looking forward to putting any kind of drama with Baskin behind him. “I don’t want that to define [me] anymore,” he said.
