Looking for love is never easy, especially when you’re one of the most famous convicts in the U.S. prison system. Consider the romantic potholes being tripped over by Joe Exotic.
What Happened: Exotic — whose birth name is Joseph Allen Schreibvogel and later changed his identity to become Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage — was a private zoo operator who became a fixture on the pop culture radar with the Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) series “Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness.”
Exotic received was convicted in January 2019 of 17 federal charges of animal abuse and two counts of attempted murder for hire of Carole Baskin, the CEO of the nonprofit Big Cat Rescue. He is incarcerated at Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
In March, Exotic filed for divorce from Dillon Passage after four years of marriage, and TMZ reported that Exotic had become romantically attached while in prison with a fellow inmate named John Graham.
Exotic met Graham in March 2021 at a serendipitous moment, when he was just released from solitary confinement, and the men were housed in the same unit. Exotic stated they became engaged last August.
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What Happened Next: Alas for Exotic, Graham has been released from prison, at which point he released himself from his engagement.
Nonetheless, TMZ reported that Exotic “will continue to have a close relationship with John's son and some members of his family.” And it seems that Exotic is getting over this setback, hinting that a "very special man" recently came back into his life.
As for Passage, he is still married to Exotic and is seeing a slow progress in his divorce proceedings.
Photo: Joe Exotic and friend in his pre-prison days, courtesy of Netflix
