John Finlay is living a “better life” after leaving ex-husband Joe Exotic and meeting his new fiancée Stormey. Speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the premiere of the Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness aftershow, which debuted on Sunday and was hosted by Joel McHale, Finlay opened up about his new lease on life without Exotic (real name Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage).
“My fiancée has been working on it,” Finlay told the outlet of his fiancée’s efforts to become more of a people person. “I’ve had a better outlook on life with her. And she’s given me definitely a better life since we’ve been together. I used to have a lot of pent-up negative thoughts and [a] bad aura about myself. I just quit thinking about the past and the negative stuff that’s happened to me, and now I’m engaged and we’re having a really good life.”
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Finlay had married Exotic and Travis Maldonado in an untraditional three-way wedding in 2014 after he met the “Tiger King” while working at Exotic’s exotic animal zoo in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Their relationship eventually crumbled, however, and Finlay walked out on Exotic and the park after he sparked a relationship with one of the zoo’s receptionists. Finlay recently revealed that he hasn’t spoken to his ex-husband since 2018, and he told PEOPLE that he” been with Stormey since 2019 after they met online.
The couple’s relationship is so serious that they are already planning to walk down the aisle. They had originally had a wedding date set for this summer, but were forced to postpone it due to the coronavirus pandemic. Finlay explained that they “put things on hold because nobody would be able to travel or anything” and that the new date for their wedding “has yet to be set in stone.”
Meanwhile, Finlay has plenty of other things to celebrate. Now six years sober, he is looking ahead to his future. He told the outlet that he envisions having kids and hopes “to work with youth” to fight addiction.
“It’s time to really think about the kids and my future and stuff and use this thing for something good not just to be, ‘Hey, I have a personal gain now. It’s all about me,’” he said. “It’s not all about me. It’s about other people too.”
All episodes of Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness are available for streaming on Netflix. A Joe Exotic biopic, executive produced by and starring SNL‘s Kate McKinnon, is currently in the works.
