Tiger King: Joe Exotic's former zoo handed to rival Carole Baskin

A zoo formerly owned by the star of Netflix documentary Tiger King is to be handed over to the woman he was convicted of trying to have killed.

A federal judge has given Carole Baskin control of Joe Exotic's old zoo in Oklahoma as part of a ruling in a $1m (£800,000) trademark dispute.

Joe Exotic is currently serving a 22-year sentence for his involvement in a murder-for-hire plot and animal abuse.

Full disclosure: As a person, who has dedicated 25+ years of my life to captive animal care and conservation research (as a zookeeper in my teens and twenties, and then going to University and entering the world of research afterward), I have NO use for Joe Exotic, or anything that he stands for. However, there are a lot of us, who have had to sit by and watch for over two decades as Carole Baskins has been able to continually (allegedly) get away with murder. The left-wing media and the Animal Rights groups adore her to the point, where it's sickening...

Joe Exotic was a kid that used these specialty animals to meet other like-minded men for trysts.

He is truly useless.

Why Carole gained control, verses another debtor or a third party, is unanswered in the article.

Carole got control because a few years ago, she sued Joe, and won. For the Cliff’s Notes version of the story: Carole ditched her first husband for a millionaire property investor named Don Lewis around 1986, and married him in 1990. Don Lewis had a fascination with big cats, so he and Carole started a facility in Tampa called Wildlife on Easy Street, where they bred non-domestic cats. Don Lewis mysteriously disappeared in 1997, and Carole apparently had a ‘hallelujah!’ moment, where she re-branded herself as an animal rights activist, and re-christened the facility as Big Cat Rescue, and set about trying to smear and destroy anyone and everyone else, whether good or bad. {TL;DR} - one of the folks whose life she made utterly miserable, who actually (tried) to fight back was Joe Exotic, but Carole, of course, out-manoeuvered him at every turn. Eventually she sued him for copyright infringements against Big Cat Rescue’s trademarks, and she got a $1M+ judgment, although many legal experts have opined (both then and ever since), that she shouldn’t have won. Anyway, and again {TL;DR}, her and her lawyer third-husband Howard Baskin went after Joe (and his parents) relentlessly to get him shut down and get ALL of his family’s assets, and they have succeeded in doing so.

Also, for a musical Cliff’s Notes version, and even though I’m not a fan of rap, Young Merkules lays it out quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeJckYOsQ2g

“Carole killed her husband...
And you ain’t gonna change my mind.
Carole killed her husband...
They can prove it, it’ll just take time.”

(allegedly)

Much as I despise Jeff Lowe (snitch & rat), he got quite a good zinger off against Carole in the TMZ article this morning: https://www.tmz.com/2020/06/01/carole-baskin-taking-control-oklahoma-zoo-joe-exotic-lawsuit-jeff-lowe/ Lowe says in the article: "Jeff and Lauren continued, "Considering [Carole] spent approximately 2.5M chasing her 1M judgment, we congratulate her on her new acquisition of 16 acres in rural Oklahoma." They took one parting shot, saying, "The possibility of human remains being buried on this land should make her feel right at home." Yeah, we think Joe would second that emotion."

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