Since the release of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, fans arewanting more — and those featured in the docuseries are experiencing overnight fame. While Joe “Exotic” Maldonado-Passage is reportedly loving his newfound fame from inside prison, others like Doc Antle are seeing the downside of being in the public eye. The zoo owner says he’s now sleeping with an AK-47 after death threats started rolling in.
Antle told The Mirror that he’s receiving up to 50 threats a day and fears that activists will kill him. “My life is threatened every day, one to 50 times. People say they want to kill me, they are going to kill me, they’re going to get me.” Much like Maldonado-Passage, Antle isn’t a fan of Carole Baskin, owner of Big Cat Rescue. In the docuseries, she revealed how she has received a number of death threats herself, but Antle blames her for his situation currently. “The salacious insanity she’s written, all of the stuff she said that I’m this evil dude. People think that there’s something there.”
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In the Netflix series, Baskin admitted that she too slept with guns by her side at night out of fear of Maldonado-Passage and those who supported him. But Antle has a history with guns, as this isn’t his first rodeo strapping up. “I don’t know where the next crazy person is going to go,” he said. “I’m a professional cowboy. I grew up with a six-gun on my hip when I was ten years old. That’s the Wild West I grew up in so I’ve always had some automatic weapons and variety of another 50 guns in my life. I have a pistol in my pocket, another in my glove box. I travel like that all the time.”
Maldonado-Passage was sentenced in January to 22 years of prison on 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of murder-for-hire. However, that hasn’t stopped him from asking President Donald Trump for a pardon. While requesting such a favor from Trump, he also filed a $94 million dollar lawsuit against the US Fish and Wildlife Service, his former business partner Jeff Lowe and James Garretson who was a confidential informant. After news broke, Antle shared his thoughts of the pardon saying, “It’s kind of crazy land. I can’t imagine that will happen. I think Joe could potentially get a new trial if he could get an appeal. That’s probably a good thing that he would have an appeal come up, so that the facts can be presented more clearly.” He then suggested “if Joe had OJ Simpson’s legal team, he would be walking around today, singing ‘Eye of the Tiger’.” He then concluded with predicting Maldonado-Passage has at least a 50/50 chance of getting out in his opinion.
