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The niece of the star of Netflix‘s Tiger King has spoken out against her uncle, claiming that he’s far worse in real life than how he’s portrayed on screen.
Chealsi Putman, who is the daughter of Joe Exotic’s younger sister, said viewers get an idea of “his evil persona” but not the whole story. She claimed that he would freeze the bodies of dead tiger cubs to sell on to taxidermists.
“You can see glimpses of his evil persona but in the real-life Joe is 100 times worse. I want people to know who the Real Joe Exotic is,” Putman told the Mail Online.
Exotic’s niece claimed that she worked at his zoo periodically from 1999-2017, coming to learn that he allegedly sold dead cubs to taxidermists. “Over the years there must have been at least 10 tiger cubs that he froze,” she said. “I have no idea what happened to them, they would just disappear.” There is no evidence to support these allegations.
Putman also claimed she “personally witnessed” Exotic “spray a tiger with a fire extinguisher not out of a safety or for a life saving reason but because the tiger didn’t react the way Joe had wanted it to.”
His niece added that the series glossed over the fact that Exotic has a son with his ex-girlfriend Kim, named Brandon Chappell, who appears in a few scenes in the show.
The Netflix show, which explores the underground culture of tiger breeding in the US, has been a mammoth hit since it was released last month. It’s now officially earned the crown of being the most-watched title on the platform for the longest period of time.
Exotic was jailed for 22 years in 2019 for conspiring to kill his business rival Carole Baskin, as well as 17 other animal welfare violations. In Tiger King, Exotic accuses Baskin of having murdered her husband Don Lewis when he disappeared 21 years ago.
Documentarian Louis Theroux, who met Exotic in 2011 for his own BBC film America’s Most Dangerous Pets, says the odds that Carole killed Lewis are “very unlikely”.
There’s already a potential sequel in the works, courtesy of leading crime and justice network Investigation Discovery (ID). Investigating The Strange World Of Joe Exotic, the new series, will investigate the disappearance of Carole Baskin’s husband.
Baskin has denied that she was responsible for the disappearance of her husband. On April 7, she wrote on her website that she “certainly had nothing to do with his disappearance. When he disappeared, I did everything I could to assist the police. I encouraged them to check out the rumours from Costa Rica, and separately I hired a private investigator.”
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