Joseph Maldonado, known professionally as Joe Exotic, says a new documentary about the Tiger King story is coming to Prime Video. And that might be news to Prime Video.
A post shared on Maldonado’s Instagram account on Saturday, July 19, teases a documentary titled Tiger King: Truth Exposed. (Or Tiger King: Truth Exposed: Joe Exotic’s Story. Or Joe Exotic’s Story: Tiger King: Truth Exposed: Fraud, Rape & Sex Trafficking. The formatting of the text makes it hard to tell title from subtitle from tagline.)
“Coming September 2025, only [on] Amazon Prime. The real story about the people in Tiger King. Never-before-seen footage, interviews from the people that [weren’t] paid to lie on Netflix. You don’t want to miss this,” the caption on the post reads, with fellow Tiger King star John Reinke tagged and pictured alongside Maldonado.
If the key art — showing a snarling tiger rising above a barbed-wire fence, as seen below — smacks of artificiality, refer to the “AI” watermark atop the Prime logo in the lower-right corner.
Plus, a search for “Tiger King,” “Truth Exposed,” and “Prime Video” yields no announcement from Amazon as of the time of this writing.
Joseph Maldonado/Instagram
Unsurprisingly, Instagram commenters aren’t convinced this is a real documentary project.
“Is this real?” one commenter asked.
“No,” another replied.
The announcement on Maldonado’s Instagram account did get some users excited, however. “Can’t wait for this,” one commenter wrote.
“I’ll definitely watch that! Can’t wait for the truth to finally get out there,” someone else said.
In 2019, Maldonado was found guilty of hiring two men to kill rival Carole Baskin — another Tiger King subject — and crimes related to the animals in his Oklahoma zoo operation. He’s now serving a 21-year prison sentence at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and lost an appeal for a new case after the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled against him on July 9, according to The Oklahoman.