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8 Of The Weirdest & Most Disturbing Revelations In ‘Tiger King’ Season 2

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Leave your morals and good taste at the door because Tiger King is back, with Netflix dropping Season 2 over the weekend.

It’s hard to imagine our lives before Tiger King tilted our whole existence when the first season dropped in March last year. The name Joe Exotic was not yet part of our common vernacular, Carole Baskin was just some lady who wore a lot of leopard print, and big cats only belonged in either the wild or legitimate wildlife parks.

But alas Tiger King introduced us to the rivalry to end all rivalries: Joe is serving a 22-year prison sentence after being implicated in a murder-for-hire plot to kill Carole, his longtime enemy with an equal passion for big cats and exotic wildlife. Joe ran the ethically dubious GW Zoo — a roadside zoo in Oklahoma — while Carole is the founder of the comparatively kind Big Cat Rescue in Florida.

Another layer to this story is that Joe, among others, has accused Carole of killing her ex-husband Don Lewis and feeding him to her big cats. Don has been missing since 1997, with some believing that he’s living in Costa Rica but the case is still open. Baskin has never been arrested or charged.

There are many other players in the mix, like bitter ex-employees from GW Zoo and Jeff Lowe, who bought the zoo off Exotic before the property was later seized by Baskin, as part of a settlement from an earlier trademark dispute.

The latest episodes pick up where last year’s season left off. The new season has been heavily criticised for lacking the spark of Season 1, and for not featuring protagonist Joe Exotic enough, who is demoted to a background character in Season 2 — only appearing in brief scenes via phone calls from prison. Carole also doesn’t feature much in the new season, which makes sense as she is currently suing Netflix for using any footage of her.

While the criticism is fair in some instances, the additional episodes do contain some new and interesting tidbits of information — from the weird and wacky to the downright dark and disturbing.

Here are 8 of the weirdest and most disturbing revelations from Season 2 of Tiger King:

1. Joe’s ex-husband now sells a range of anal bleach.

Possibly the only person to get a happy ending from the entire Tiger King saga was Joe’s fifth husband (yes, Joe’s had five husbands) Dillon Passage. While Joe is still stuck in prison, Dillon has well and truly moved on, and he’s now dating a new partner named John.

Joe and Dillon no longer speak. “I don’t want to be forever known as just ‘Joe Exotic’s husband.’ I want to be Dillon Passage,” he says in the docuseries. But just because he’s removed himself from his relationship with Joe doesn’t mean he’s not profiting off his ex’s name. Dillon has hired a manager who has helped create a merchandise range, which includes a product called ‘Tiger Taint Tail Brightener’, which is a type of anal bleach.

I mean, good for him!

2. Joe Exotic made a music video about one of the zoo’s chimpanzees dying.

In one of the weirdest moments in the season, a flashback video clip is played of Joe singing a cover of A Great Big World’s ‘Say Something’ as he lays to rest a recently deceased chimpanzee at GW Zoo. Joe had dressed the chimp in a ‘Tiger King’ t-shirt before they lowered the animal into the ground in a truly shameless act of self-promotion.

3. Don Lewis was allegedly a predator.

While the first season of Tiger King was mostly concerned with Don’s possible death, the new episodes took a look at who Don was in his life — and it was rather grim. According to Don’s associates in Costa Rica, he was known as ‘El Gringo’ down there, as he owned a brothel known to some as ‘The Cursed House’, which was some type of sex trafficking ring for underage girls.

Don, himself, allegedly dated a 15-year-old-girl while living in Costa Rica.

4. Don Lewis might not be dead.

Don was implicated in a lot of dodgy dealings in the docuseries which could give credence to the theory that Don didn’t get murdered — he disappeared on purpose. While Don was declared legally dead in 2002, Don’s attorney Joseph Fritz revealed that he received a call from a detective claiming that Don was alive in Costa Rica. “When we were talking about Don, the detective got mad at me and slipped up and told me there were federal reports of him alive and well in Costa Rica that he had to overcome,” Fritz said.

According to a document attributed to Homeland Security, it stated that Lewis could stay in Costa Rica “indefinitely,” because he had “loaned money to various individuals in Costa Rica and could live quite well on the interest earned.” The series included interviews that suggested Don had good reason to want to disappear: he was hiding millions of dollars in different companies and had angered local families for allegedly becoming intimate with their teenage daughters.

5. But a psychic reckons Don was definitely murdered.

In another truly baffling turn of events, Don’s family reach out to a psychic to find answers about what happened to him. They decided to get a man named Troy Griffin to investigate Don’s whereabouts, who describes himself as a “Christian clairvoyant, empathic, psychic medium and psychic detective.”

After visiting Don’s last known location, Troy said that there was “bad juju” there and he felt physically ill. He then told the Lewis family that Don was murdered at that exact location and “from behind.”

For some reason, Troy started freaking out when he realised he had been “talking about chicken all day” and pointed to an empty chicken wrapper on the site as proof of his psychic gifts. Don’s daughter nodded along confused. It was really something!

6. Jeff and Lauren Lowe used the zoo to find customers to have sex with.

In another deeply cooked moment, Jeff and his wife Lauren proudly told the filmmakers that after taking over Joe’s GW Zoo, they would use the term ‘Code 69’ to alert when an attractive woman had entered the grounds — who they would then assumedly approach. “I am the one that picks out the cute girls,” Lauren said.

Former employee Taryn Walker told the filmmakers that “It took me a while, but I would always notice on the radio repeatedly ‘Code 69’,” she said. “They would show up from the back of their house. A beautiful woman would be walking in and walk past with Jeff and Lauren looking in, and they would be gone.”

Joe Exotic also alleged that the couple got up to some predatory behaviour before Carole seized the property. “This got so out of hand between sleeping with the female staff and using our customers as sex toys,” Joe said from prison. 

“It wasn’t about tigers, it wasn’t about running a zoo. They’re just predators.”

7. Tim Stark is just as bad as the rest of them.

While the first season focused on big cat players Joe Exotic, Jeff Lowe, and Doc Antle, two of the new episodes zoned in on another roadside zoo owner in the mix: Wildlife in Need operator Tim Stark. Stark previously went into business with Lowe when he was left with Joe’s zoo, but he eventually got into hot water with PETA after the animal advocacy group sued him for the cruel practice of declawing the big cats at his zoo — leaving the animals permanently crippled.

Eventually, all of the animals at Tim’s roadside zoo were confiscated by PETA. In April this year, Stark was permanently forbidden from ever owning or exhibiting exotic or native animals after it was discovered that he had fraudulently used funds from Wildlife in Need for his own personal use.

Amid the mounting lawsuit, Tim has become increasingly threatening and unhinged. In one scene in the docuseries, as the media surrounded his car, he yelled out body-shaming insults at a nearby journalist. In another conversation with Tiger King’s director Eric Goode, Stark told him “If one negative thing comes out about me from here on out, whether it be in Tiger King 2 or any of this kind of shit, I’ll slice your fucking throat, bitch.”

So yep! Tim Stark is a bad dude.

8. The murder plot might have been targeting Joe Exotic — not Carole Baskin.

The season saved its most shocking revelation for its final minutes. According to a sworn affidavit from hitman, Allen Glover, who Joe allegedly hired to kill Carole, he is now claiming that Jeff Lowe was going to pay him to kill Joe. “I was going to have Joe’s head cut the fuck off,” Glover actually told the cameras in the show’s last episode.

In a grisly detail I would have been happier not knowing, Allen recounted that the plan was to string barbed wire up between two trees at GW Zoo, so that when Exotic drove through it on his four-wheeler, he would get decapitated. Allen even showed the producers where the plan was supposed to unfold, and displayed the barbed wire — although they were suss on the fact that there was already barbed wire left all over the zoo, so it was hardly concrete proof of Jeff and his possible murder plot.

Who the hell knows whether this is something that can be believed or not, but Tiger King 2 has left us with many more questions than answers.

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Watch both seasons of Tiger King on Netflix.