The outspoken star of a hit Netflix series is “begging” President Trump to consider pardoning him after he was found guilty of conspiring to kill a big-cat rights activist in Florida.
In a handwritten note addressed to Trump, Tiger King star Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic, said he was asking for the president to see the “truth” and set him free, according to the letter obtained by CBS News.
“I am begging you to listen to the (millions) who see the truth. I’m asking you to listen to your own son Donald Jr. and make this right and grant me a miracle ‘a pardon’ and let me put this behind me and go save my dad he is 86 and go live my life with my husband ‘Dillon,” Maldonado-Passage wrote to Trump.
Maldonado-Passage was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison after he was found guilty in a murder-for-hire plot to kill Florida animal rights activist Carole Baskin. The Tiger King series centers around the eccentric behavior of Maldonado-Passage, who owned a big-cat petting zoo in Oklahoma, ran for president as a libertarian in 2016, and became a cult star as the episodic documentary spiraled to nationwide success during the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
“If I have ever looked up to anyone it would be you, not because I need you to save my live but because you stand for what you believe no matter what anyone thinks,” Maldonado-Passage wrote to Trump.
