‘Tiger King’ Star Joe Exotic Was Brutally Beaten and Sexually Assaulted in Prison – By a Guard!

Tiger King was one of the surprise hits of quarantine that gave everyone a good week of talking about how crazy and flamboyant its stars were. Carole Baskin is even going to be on Dancing with the Stars, because the word “stars” in that title has always been used very loosely. Still a better name than Strictly Come Dancing, though.

Joe Exotic, former big cat zoo owner, is currently serving a 22-year prison sentence for hiring a hitman to whack Carole Baskin, who basically everyone thinks fed her first husband to a tiger.

Now, what Joe Exotic was not sentenced to was to be beaten and raped and tortured by guards in prison, but OK Magazine reports he says that’s exactly what happened to him.

“I was sexually assaulted by a guard in Grady County (Oklahoma), beat the f*ck up and stripped naked,” Joe said.

“I was tied in a chair (for) so long the skin came off my arms … and then locked in a room naked for eight days sleeping on a cold metal shelf on the floor with dried feces and sperm on it from so many others before me. There is no mental help there—it’s just abuse.”

Who the hell is this guard, Harvey Weinstein?

And I’m sure someone is about to say that prison isn’t meant to be nice, but it’s absolutely not meant to be fucking torture. That “no torture” thing is right in the Constitution.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Part of the issue with prisons and prison reform is that we as a society don’t actually agree on or define anywhere in law what the purpose of prison is. The main reasons for prison are punitive, reformative and protective; meaning we either put people in prison to punish them, to reform them so they don’t commit crimes or to take them out of the general population because we believe they’re a risk to others.

We should be asking ourselves and our elected officials what we want prisons to do. I believe that the goal of the criminal justice system should be to reduce the risk of harm to innocent people as much as possible, and we are failing that horribly with a system seemingly designed to make people who have been through the prison more likely to commit a crime in the future and to make them better at doing it.

I don’t have all the answers, though I’d be happy to weigh in on the debate if I were asked. What I can tell you, what should be self-evident to anyone reading this, is that what Joe Exotic describes happening to him does not fit any reasonable definition of justice.