More than 34 million people have watched “Tiger King” on Netflix, but I knew of only one who worked with the big cat king, so I drove across town to meet him.
David Stanton is a videographer with a home and a production studio in Polish Hill. Late in 2011, he took a three-day train ride to southern Oklahoma to go to work with Joe Exotic, aka Tiger King.
For those who haven’t seen the Netflix miniseries, the multi-aliased Exotic is a drug-addled, gun-toting, death-threatening, mullet-wearing, narcissistic, polygamous con man. But when Mr. Stanton shipped all his studio equipment to his ranch and moved out there, he pegged Joe as just a colorful conservationist.
Mr. Stanton, 53, walked up to me Wednesday afternoon in the Friendship Park wearing a T-shirt that said, “The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.” He still lives with a miniature dachshund he rescued from Joe Exotic.
The two had met, virtually, about nine years ago, after Mr. Stanton launched Gay Life Television and OutTVPittsburgh. Exotic liked an animal segment Mr. Stanton hosted on “Talk it Out,” and pretty soon Exotic was on the show via Skype with his monkeys and such. By Nov. 1, 2011, Exotic was in the studio in Pittsburgh with Mr. Stanton on a show called “OUT and Wild With Joe Exotic.”
Neither fame nor infamy arrived that day; the segment had only 71 views on YouTube through Thursday afternoon. But Exotic was by then spinning such a story of his concern for animals — “he put me under his spell” — that Mr. Stanton would drop everything in Pittsburgh to move west and build a TV studio at Joe’s exotic animal park in Wynnewood, Okla.
It all seemed wrong from the moment he arrived. One of Joe’s husbands picked Mr. Stanton up at the train station and never said a word on the ride to the ranch. Mr. Stanton had been promised accommodations and a $900 weekly salary, but he was housed in a dirty, critter-crawling trailer that he shared with three others. When he walked into his bedroom, it had only a mattress, a package of cheap sheets and a bathroom with no tub behind the shower curtain, just a big hole to the outside. He’d soon be begging for any pay at all.
The ranch hands were partyers, drifters and undocumented workers. No confidences were shared for fear it would get back to Joe, who told Mr. Stanton, “If you ever see me, there should be a camera in your hand.” He filmed everything, as if he were walking the set of a low-budget horror movie.
“I got good at filming death without looking through the video finder. And I used to edit with sound. When I would hear the gunshot, I would look away. I’m the only producer who could edit by sound alone.”
Every day, he said, he filmed horses being shot. Some who donated these horses to the ranch thought they’d be put out to pasture; instead they were filleted by a squad of workers inside of 10 minutes, the meat given to the lions, tigers and ligers that approached the size of vans.
Fundraisers were outright frauds. Joe named one injured horse “Miracle,” brought in a phony veterinarian and raised $10,000 to “save” it. Mr. Stanton filmed it all only to learn later from a worker that Miracle was shot that night. Exotic then took the money to go off on a bender, Mr. Stanton said.
Newborn tiger cubs were stolen from their mothers with the aid of long poles poked through the cages. A crew would go out on a long road trip to malls with 10 cubs for petting events and “come back with maybe one or two.” One starving coatimundi ate his brother, and “when Joe found out about it, he laughed.”
Exotic eventually pulled the pistol off his hip and pointed it at Mr. Stanton. Fearing for his life, he waited for Exotic’s next fundraiser-fueled bender and left the ranch in August 2012. Mr. Stanton carried with him his production equipment and a cage filled with 53 starving house cats and strays that were supposed to be fed to the ranch reptiles. By then he had an apartment in nearby Pauls Valley, and though he had to run through his savings, he said he eventually got all the cats adopted with the aid of a nearby vet.
Joe sicced the police on Mr. Stanton, accusing him of stealing equipment, but he had all the receipts and they let him go. The crew that cut up horses came by and repossessed his escape van. And Carole Baskin, owner of Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, Fla. (and Exotic’s nemesis), paid his expenses to Florida where he presented testimony to the U.S. Department of Agriculture about Exotic’s operation.
Spoiler alert: Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, 57, aka Joe Exotic, is serving a 22-year federal prison sentence for animal abuse and a failed plot to kill Ms. Baskin. The Netflix documentary makes every story Mr. Stanton tells easy to believe, but the irony is he hasn’t watched an episode.
Viewing wouldn’t be good for what he sees as post-traumatic stress disorder. “After I left that place, I deleted everything I had.”
But he did keep Penny, the only survivor of a litter of dachshunds. He found her his very first night at the ranch, lying on the floor like an old sock, with partyers stepping over her. Now nearing 9 years old, Penny lives with four pit bulls and “she’s the boss.”
You grow up tough when you’re born among lions.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: April 12, 2020, 12:00 p.m.