The convicted private zoo owner at the centre of Netflix’s breakout series ‘Tiger King’, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known by stage name Joe Exotic, sent a handwritten pardon-request letter to US President Donald Trump, to be delivered to the White House on Thursday, CBS News reported.
In the letter, Maldonado-Passage, who has been sentenced to 22 years in prison, reportedly praised Trump as “his hero”, and asked to be pardoned for his crimes. The convicted felon also asserted that he had voted for Trump in the 2016 election, following his own unsuccessful presidential bid in the same race.
Maldonado-Passage referred to the president’s criticism of federal investigators, saying, “I have seen what they do to you”. The 57-year-old former tiger breeder wrote to Trump claiming that he did not get a fair trial, declaring that he was “just some gay, gun-toting redneck in Oklahoma” before he became famous following the release of the true crime documentary ‘Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness’, which attracted over 34 million visitors in the first ten days after its release on Netflix.
“My parents and my life and everything we ever worked for was stolen by criminals who got everything,” Maldonado-Passage said in his letter to Trump, cited by CBS. “Allow me to make you proud, to make America proud, to make the world proud. Be my hero please”.
Maldonado-Passage asked Trump to waive the typical five-year wait for a presidential pardon as well, asking the president to “listen to the millions who see the truth”, including the latter's son, Donald Trump Jr., who remarked that the sentence appeared to him to be “sort of aggressive” and joked that the disgraced media celebrity be pardoned “just for the meme.”
“Now, I don’t even know exactly what he was charged with,” the president’s elder son is quoted as saying. “I watched the show, but it’s like, I don’t know exactly what he was guilty of or wasn’t. It doesn’t seem like he was totally innocent of anything, but when they’re saying, ‘We’re putting this guy away for 30 years,’ I’m saying that seems sort of aggressive”.
In April, in response to a reporter's question about the possibility of issuing a pardon to Maldonado-Passage after the president's son appeared to support the idea, Trump said that he “will take a look” into a request for pardon.
Maldonado-Passage was sentenced to 22 years in prison, 18 for orchestrating a plot to have an animal rights activist killed who had threatened to have his zoo shut down, and another four years for killing five tigers, selling tiger cubs on the black market and falsifying wildlife records.
