Nearly a year after he rose to fame with the debut of the Netflix docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, Joe Exotic is embarking on a new endeavor. Amid his failed requests for a presidential pardon, the former owner of The Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park is ready to tell his side of the story with is tell-all memoir, Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir.
Set to hit shelves on Nov. 9, 2021 from Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, the “no-holds-barred memoir” finds Exotic, “a proud polygamist and self-proclaimed ‘gun-toting, gay redneck with a mullet’” whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, getting candid about “his outlandish journey from Midwestern farmer to infamous Tiger King, and finally, to federal inmate.” According to the memoir’s official synopsis, the book “pulls back the curtain” on the man the who “managed to unite us all: Joe Exotic, the Tiger King” and offers a look behind the headlines, detailing Exotic’s tragic childhood “riddled with abuse to his dangerous feuds with big cat rivals and beyond, nothing is off the table.”
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Speaking with E! News, which was first to share news of the memoir, Exotic teased that the book is “going to be a truth-tell book,” adding that he’s “not holding back anything.” He said that “everybody’s that’s ever done anything good, it’s going to be in there and anybody that’s got bones in your closet, you better look out.” Exotic, who has not seen the Netflix docuseries, said Tiger King “has not come close to telling my life or even the truth about why I’m in here” and he feels that the “big part” that the series has “gotten wrong” is that “they think I lost my way.”
“[Viewers think] it was all about fame and it was all about money and that’s the furthest from the truth. The only reason I even got into doing the television show at the park, and into doing all the crazy s– did, was to try to keep my staff and my animals safe,” he said. “So I had to act like a crazy bastard to keep people out of the zoo. I’m going to explain all of that.”
Exotic is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence after he was convicted with eight counts of falsifying records after he violated the Lacey Act, nine counts of violating the Endangered Species Act, and two counts of murder-for-hire for his plot targeting Carole Baskin. He revealed to E! that he wrote the memoir throughout his first year in prison at the Federal Medical Center, a 1,500-inmate facility in Forth Worth, Texas, where he is allowed to get on the computer every 30 minutes for 30 minutes at a time. He said he “can type for 30 minutes. I spend approximately three hours a day altogether, typing this book over email and sending it through.” Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir will be available in November of this year.
