Joe Exotic may have technically run against Donald Trump in 2016, but when he got in legal trouble he knew to ask him for help. During the former president’s last weeks in office, the star of Tiger King, the Netflix documentary series that took the nation by storm early in the pandemic, asked if he could make him one of his 11th hour pardons. Trump did not, and Exotic was pissed. And in his new memoir, he’s still pissed, though it seems more at himself.
The book is called Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir, and it’s released as its author is still languishing in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, serving a 22-year sentence on 17 charges of murder-for-hire and animal abuse. As per The Daily Beast, it’s a predictably flamboyant read. The first sentence goes like this: “Dear American Public, can you believe that b*tch Carole Baskin is out there free as a bird while I’m sitting here rotting away in prison?”
But Exotic reserves some ire for others. Among them is Trump, who seems to have considered intervening but did not, pardoning the likes of the recently indicted Steve Bannon instead. Exotic says that Trump snubbing him left him looking like a “dumbass,” though he doesn’t let himself off the hook. “Word has it I should have written a big check and I would have gotten that pardon, too,” he writes.
It’s a game-recognizes-game moment, one convicted criminal knowing that the way to the heart of another legally troubled figure is through cold hard cash.
Meanwhile, the Tiger King sequel was recently dropped on Netflix, and though Baskin attempted to get her and her cats removed over contractual hiccups, she, alas, failed.
(Via The Daily Beast)
