Tiger King’s Joe Exotic reveals latest prison engagement to man 28 years younger 

‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic has announced his third engagement in three years.

The Netflix reality star has once again struck up a romance while serving his 21-year prison sentence.

Joe, real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage, 61, met Jorge Marquez, 33, while behind bars, and has now announced their relationship to the world with a post on X.

‘Meet Jorge Marquez he is 33. He is so amazing and is from Mexico,’ he began.

‘Now, the quest of getting married in prison and getting him asylum or we be leaving America when we both get out. Either way, I wish I would have met him long ago.’

In the posts, Exotic also asked for the pair to be pardoned from prison. ‘Yep. Took me 61 years to find him now I got to convince [Donald] Trump to let me keep him in America,’ he wrote.

Exotic confirmed the engagement to Entertainment Weekly in a phone call from prison, saying: ‘We filed our official papers for the marriage license from the prison yesterday, so we’re just waiting for approval. He has picked out December 12 as the date we’re hoping to get this approved by.’

He added that the application must be approved by the warden, psychiatry officer and the chaplain before their license can be approved.

His latest love interest Marquez is serving time for immigration-related issues, CBS News reports.

Exotic began a relationship with another inmate John Graham in 2022, and they also became engaged. But the fairytale didn’t last.

In a letter to his attorney Autumn Beck Blackledge obtained by TMZ at the time, Exotic shared that he met his ‘extremely romantic and caring’ partner when they were both housed in the same prison unit.

‘If you ever watched Twilight, it’s as close as that,’ Exotic wrote in the letter, also describing their relationship as a ‘fast attraction’. However, their romance fell flat when Graham was released from prison.

He moved on with Seth Posey in the same year, with the pair promising to marry. They met after Exotic held an online ‘Bachelor King’ contest, welcoming applications to be his new boyfriend. Posey won, but things ended shortly after they got engaged.

Exotic has been married five times, most recently to Dillon Passage, who he met on a dating app. He was featured in Netflix’s Tiger King but requested a divorce in 2021.

His first husband was Brian Rhyne, who he married in the late 1980s. He died of HIV complications in 2001.

He then met his next partner, JC Hartpence, who helped him to create a travelling animal show.

John Finlay and Travis Maldonado were Exotic’s third and fourth husbands. They got married in 2014 in a three-way ceremony however, less than a year later, Finlay wanted out. In 2017, Maldonado died tragically from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Witnesses said the incident was accidental as Maldonado thought the gun wouldn’t fire.

Exotic was sentenced to 21 years in 2019 for 19 counts of wildlife crimes and two counts of hiring hitmen to kill animal activist Carole Baskin.

Prosecutors said Exotic offered $10,000 (£7,500) to an undercover FBI agent to kill Baskin during a recorded December 2017 meeting. In the recording, he told the agent: ‘Just like follow her into a mall parking lot and just cap her and drive off.’ Exotic maintained his innocence and claimed he was not being serious.

In 2020, Exotic was the feature of a Netflix documentary, Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem And Madness, which catapulted him to global fame. It focused on an Oklahoma zoo, its eccentric owner Exotic, and his feud with Baskin.

‘A zoo owner spirals out of control amid a cast of eccentric characters in this true murder-for-hire story from the underworld of big cat breeding,’ the synopsis teased. The episodes became a major talking point due to the controversial zoo which housed wild animals in questionable conditions, and the obvious hatred between Exotic and Baskin.