Carole Baskin Sells Tiger King Joe Exotic’s Zoo
It feels like it was about four lifetimes ago, but it was only 18 months when Tiger King and Joe Exotic first came into all of our lives. The show became an instant sensation on Netflix, thanks in part to the fact that it had the good fortune to be released just as the world went into Covid lockdown and people had endless amounts of time on their hands. (The fact that it was full of wild, compelling characters certainly didn’t hurt either.)
In a twist so surreal it belongs in fiction rather than a documentary series, Joe Exotic — the primary subject of Tiger King — eventually lost his beloved zoo full of extremely wild animals to Carole Baskin, his perpetual adversary in all matters related to big cats (and allegedly the woman he conspired to have murdered, as chronicled in Tiger King). And now there’s another turn in the saga: Baskin has sold the former Tiger King zoo — on the promise that the new owners would not use it for anything that has to do with the Tiger King story or film.
Baskin told Yahoo, “When we sold the property in June, we required that it never be used as a zoo, or for anything related to Tiger King or anything like that.” Her husband Howard added “If it became an RV park or storage unit ... We don’t want it named the Tiger King RV Park. We would like the 20 years of mistreatment of animals there to be forgotten and be history.” So Tiger King tourists will not be able to get their kicks there anymore.
They also won’t get to see Nicolas Cage as Joe Exotic, as Amazon recently shelved that project, which was begun in the wake of all the Tiger King mania last year. If you do want more of the story, the Baskins participated in another documentary titled Shooting Joe Exotic that was released earlier this year by the BBC. And Peacock still has its own fictional version of the story in development.