Zookeepers Gone Wild!

Joe Exotic bred lions, tigers, and ligers by the dozens at his roadside zoo. He was a 21st-century Barnum who found an equally extraordinary nemesis.

- Robert Moor

Joe was born with an unusual last name, rough on the tongue: Schreibvogel.

People were always getting it wrong or using it against him, so he changed it, and changed it again, until he finally slipped free of it altogether. Over the years, as he amassed a string of husbands, he borrowed their last names, calling himself first Joe Maldonado, then Joe Passage; when he did his magic shows, he sometimes went by Aarron Alex or Cody Ryan; when he was filming his reality show, he called himself “the Tiger King”; but the name he was best known by, as a zookeeper, country-music singer, stunt politician, and amorphous internet celebrity, was Joe Exotic.

Joe grew up on a farm in Kansas among creatures of the barnyard variety—horses, cows, chickens, dogs, cats—as well as the varmints he and his siblings sometimes brought home: baby antelopes, porcupines, raccoons. Joe was born into the middle of the pack with two brothers and two sisters, and he often felt that his cold Germanic parents viewed him as a source of farm labor rather than a child. He recalls that no one in his family ever said “I love you” to each other.

Humans, Joe learned early, can be the cruelest of all God’s creations. When he was 5 years old, he says he was repeatedly raped by an older boy. This happened in his own home. He vividly recalls how a drawer in the bathroom could be opened to prop the door shut.