Joe Exotic says he’s more deserving of Trump pardon than Jan. 6 rioters

Joe Exotic has a message for President Donald Trump.

“I plead to President Trump. I’m not begging, but I’m asking that he take five minutes and look at the evidence,” the star of the Netflix true-crime series Tiger King, whose real name is Joseph Allen Maldonado, tells Entertainment Weekly.

Maldonado is currently incarcerated at Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Tex. He called upon Trump in the past to pardon him of the 21 criminal counts he was convicted on in 2020, but has revived and intensified the call in the past few weeks, posting numerous graphics to Instagram pleading his case.

“Being in prison with the evidence that I have is wrong, especially when they’re releasing people that have murdered people,” he says. “I don’t hold anything against the Jan. 6 people, but some of them people really hurt some police officers and they’re free because they were hostages. Hell, I’m a hostage, I’m a political prisoner in America, and I’m asking President Donald J. Trump to put an end to this and let me go home.”

Maldonado was arrested in 2018 on suspicion of hiring two men to murder Carole Baskin, the founder of Florida’s Big Cat Rescue and his longtime rival. The events leading up to the alleged attempted hit and subsequent legal proceedings form the events of the viral streaming series.

He was eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2020 on 17 counts of wildlife crimes and two counts of attempted murder-for-hire.

Maldonado has maintained his innocence since his incarceration, saying he “has all the evidence to prove that I’m innocent on my website.” He argued his case in 2022 before a federal judge and was resentenced to 21 years despite pleas for leniency as he underwent treatment for cancer.

Maldonado says “it’s not just Trump. It goes back to Biden too. They trip all over themselves, releasing people like Viktor Bout, $6 billion doing all these foreign trades, and nothing against Brittney Griner, but she got on an airplane with illegal drugs and knowingly not only flew across state lines, but she flew across international lines. Then she pled guilty and got sentenced in Russia and America bends over backwards and calls it wrongfully detained.”

The incarcerated media personality says it’s hypocritical that “we have so many people — especially me, but I’m no better than anybody else that’s in prison — innocent, that haven’t got a fair shake.”

Former President Joe Biden pardoned a laundry list of individuals during his final days in office, including a preemptive pardon for Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health; members of the committee that investigated the attempted Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection; and his own son, Hunter Biden. Trump issued hundreds of pardons on his first day in office, including nearly every individual charged with crimes related to the insurrection attempt.

“Good for the January Sixers, good for the protesters for pro-life, everybody that got the pardons and everything else,” Maldonado clarifies. “But seven years of my life for nothing. My parents have died. I lost my business, which is supposed to be the American dream, to work and own your own business. I think I’m due.”

Maldonado says, “I could take just time served if somebody thinks I’ve done something wrong and I can move on with my life being a felon, because he’s the President as a felon. And if you can become the president of the United States as a felon, Hey, I can finish off my life… I can finish that happily as a felon. Just give me time served. I don’t need a damn pardon. Just commute my sentence to time served, not because of who I am, but because it’s the right thing to do.”