Tiger King: How Joe Exotic Faked Having Cancer (& Why)

Joe Exotic (real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage), who’s the main focus of Netflix’s Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, allegedly once faked cancer. Joe Exotic is an unconventional, gun-loving, mullet-sporting, gay man who carried on a polygamous relationship while running a private, for-profit zoo in Oklahoma. Things at his Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park were not exactly done by the books.

Tiger King‘s Joe Exotic is now serving twenty-two years in prison. He was convicted of falsifying wildlife records, violating the Endangered Species Act, and hiring a man to kill Carole Baskin, who was a rival that operated her own big cat animal park. The murder for hire was never completed, but Joe Exotic is still paying for setting it up. Now there’s also the accusation that Joe Exotic faked cancer for a period of time.

Long before the Netflix show, Robert Moor hosted a podcast called Joe Exotic: Tiger King, covering many of the same things that the new docuseries does. As revealed via Twitter, Joe Exotic once told people he was battling prostate and bone marrow cancer. This was accompanied by a photo of Joe Exotic with a badly scabbed face and oxygen tube in a hospital bed, which he said came from Joe Exotic himself. According to Moor, the motive behind this was to make money, even going so far as to raise funds from fans on Facebook. In reality, Exotic never had cancer, but had actually been suffering from a prostate infection, dehydration, and a herpes outbreak.

Joe Exotic does have a fairly lengthy list of supposed health issues. In a video posted to his own YouTube channel in 2015, Exotic refuted claims that he had Tuberculosis, revealing he had tested positive, but further tests and scans revealed he was in the clear. In that same video, he discusses having CVID, a treatable immune deficiency, and that he had surgery for the aforementioned prostate cancer, but became septic afterwards. The cancer claim remains unproven either way, but discussing health issues isn’t uncommon for Joe.

That said, Moor’s allegations about faking cancer for financial gain would line up with how many of Joe Exotic’s money-making sources had dried up. Joe bred and sold big cat cubs, which he claimed brought in $2000 per cub in Tiger King, but that practice is now illegal. He also ran traveling cub-petting experiences, but that income was impeded when Carole Baskin was able to take possession of his tractor-trailer after settling a lawsuit against him for $1 million. The revenue from zoo tickets and the souvenir shop, which sold everything from underpants to CDs purportedly recorded by Joe Exotic, doesn’t seem to have been enough.

Sadly, Tiger King often shows Joe Exotic cutting corners financially. He said he could feed a single tiger for $3,000 a year, a number that was significantly lower than his competitors’ figures. He kept that number down by regularly accepting shipments of expired food products (some of which his poorly paid staff kept for themselves) and collecting roadkill to feed his animals. Rick Kirkman, who was hired to produce video content about the zoo, claims that he witnessed Joe Exotic accept a horse to keep as a rescue, only to shoot it on the spot and feed it to the tigers, per TMZ. But even with all the cost-cutting, there were always bills to pay.

Faking cancer and then starting an online campaign to raise money to help pay for treatments seems like a money-making venture that Joe Exotic may have dreamed up to keep his zoo afloat. While this is only an allegation, and Joe Exotic cannot defend himself against it here, he has been convicted of skirting the law before. Tiger King certainly makes the case that he was a creative thinker who would do almost anything to make a buck. Just remember, as outlandish as it all seems, this was all in real life and there have been real consequences.