Just when you thought Tiger King couldn’t get anymore bizarre, now there’s a Michael Jackson twist to the story
Michael Jackson owned the alligators in Tiger King star Joe Exotic’s roadside petting zoo. (Kevork Djansezian-Pool via Getty Images/Netflix)
Of course, Tiger King star Joe Exotic’s alligators belonged to Michael Jackson. Of course.
Bravo, 2020, yet another brilliantly written plot twist.
If you, the reader, thought that how Tiger King star Doc Antle being the tiger handler during Britney Spears’ iconic 2001 VMAs performance couldn’t be topped, well, 2020 just said: “Hold my beer.”
Michael Jackson owned some of the animals in Joe Exotic’s zoo.
In 2015, a plume of flames at Exotic’s animal park Garold Wayne Interactive Zoological Park in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, killed seven alligators and a crocodile as well as destroying a video production studio, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
The fire devastated Exotic and his staffers and, in a YouTube video, he said the animals were “boiling alive in a towering inferno” in the fire that occurred around the early morning of March 26.
And in a plot twist that, as much as we can say we didn’t see coming, we happily accept it nevertheless, some of those animals were moved from Jackson’s Neverland Ranch to Exotic’s park after the closure of Neverland.
“The building can be replaced, the equipment can be replaced, but Michael Jackson’s alligators cannot be replaced,” Exotic said at the time of the fire, reported KXII.
Robert Moor, who conducted a podcast investigation into Exotic, explained in New York Magazine last year that the alligator transferred to Exotic’s zoo did, in fact, survive the fire, but their offspring did not.
Tiger King: Joe Exotic’s former flame recounts arson attack.
Exotic’s former partner, John Finlay, recounted the story in an interview with David Spade on Lights Out earlier this week.
“One of the previous managers had got us Michael Jackson’s alligators from Neverland Ranch, we’ve got some other ones from friends and stuff,” he said, flashing his new pearly whites.
“That’s the ones I really took care of most of the time.
“You’ve got to be very cautious, you have a lot more to worry about that say with a tiger or a bear.”
While an embattled Exotic furiously declared the suspected arson attack – which reduced the studio used to film Joe Exotic TV to ashes – as someone trying to “make a statement against him”, officials never ruled him out as a suspect.
