In the waning days of the Trump Administration, Joe Exotic and his legal team appeared increasingly confident the Tiger King star was going to receive a presidential pardon. They were so sure of it, the team rented a limo to pick Exotic — real name Joseph Maldonado-Passage — up from Forth Worth’s Federal Medical Center. Alas, Trump never handed down a pardon to the Tiger King star, who currently remains in prison on a 22-year federal sentence.
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Fellow Tiger King star Carole Baskin tells us she was also watching the news closely, worried that Exotic would be pardoned. According to her, she thought Trump would try upsetting the news cycle one last time in office and she feels pardoning the Tiger King star would have done just that.
“I really was worried that he could get a pardon, and the reason that I thought that he might is that it would have been a way for Trump to deflect attention away from all of the things that he was dealing with,” Baskin says. “And the media would have been more than happy to do that because all they freaking wanted to talk about all year long was Tiger King.”
In fact, Baskin goes on to call the non-pardon a “missed opportunity” from Trump, as it would have redirected the spotlight from the ongoing election news and onto Exotic for a time being.
“Even if he wasn’t going to do it, just even talking about it, I think would have helped deflect the attention away from some of the other more pertinent issues,” she adds. “But it did concern me that that would happen, so I was really relieved when the change in office took place and the pardon had not gone through.”
Exotic’s 22-year prison sentence was handed down after being found guilty of 17 charges — two counts of hiring someone to kill Baskin, eight counts of falsifying wildlife records, and nine counts of violating the federal Endangered Species Act.
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness is now streaming on Netflix.
Cover photo by Eric McCandless/ABC via Getty Images
