'Tiger King' Stars Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin Used to Demonstrate Social Distancing by Minneapolis Amid Coronavirus Pandemic

While everyone seems to be hyped up about Netflix's Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness right [...]

By Victoria Moghaddami

While everyone seems to be hyped up about Netflix's Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness right now, the city of Minneapolis is taking advantage of that to encourage social distancing. The city took to their Twitter page to show the "appropriate" social distancing length by using the docuseries' stars, who aren't on good terms, Joe "Exotic" Maldonado-Passage and Carole Baskin. "Practice appropriate physical distancing like Joe and Carole. Keep six or more feet apart from others," their caption read as they used an image of Maldonado-Passage with a guitar in his hand and Baskin on her bike with a tiger in between them.

"This was a good opportunity to use something that's culturally relevant, trending and could easily resonate with a large audience, to increase awareness of physical distancing," Jordan Gilgenbach, the city's digital communications coordinator told Yahoo Entertainment of the post. "Sometimes, local governments need to stand out in order to convey an important message." Gilgenbach added that their city officials reached a lot more people with that post than they had before with other ways of delivering the message. They've already earned 1,200 likes and 445 retweets.

Since the release of the show two weeks ago, the popular docuseries quickly took the No. 1 spot on the streaming platform's Top 10 to watch. Maldonado-Passage is currently sitting in prison and has been charged with 17 counts of animal abuse and two counts of murder-for-hire after allegedly plotting to kill Baskin on her Big Cat Rescue property. According to a Facebook post of Maldonado-Passage's, he's now pleading for his freedom requesting that President Donald Trump excuse his charges. He's also suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, his former business partner Jeff Lowe and James Garretson, who was a confidential informant for the prosecution for $94 million dollars.

While Maldonado-Passage is thrilled to be famous now thanks to the documentary, Baskin on the other hand has been rather critical of its release. Baskin revealed on her blog that when she was approached by producers, she was under the impression the series would be something similar to Blackfish, "a documentary that exposed abuse at SeaWorld," however, she wasn't satisfied with how it turned out. As a response, co-producers Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode denied using hyperbole or creating "sensational" stories like she claimed.

"I would just say they were completely forthright with the characters," Chaiklin told the Los Angeles Times. "With any project that goes on for five years, things evolve and change, and we followed it as any good storyteller does. We could have never known when we started this project that it was going to land where it did."

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