Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) said that Joe Exotic, the eccentric gay zookeeper who rose to fame in Netflix’s Tiger King, has tried to enlist her help in getting him a pardon after he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
“Joe Exotic has reached out to me, or at least his team has in the past,” Boebert said, grinning widely, on Alex Stein’s web broadcast, while discussing Exotic’s attempts to get a pardon.
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The columnist also called her an embarrassment to “herself, her family, her constituents and her state.”
“He was a fantastic unifier,” she said of Exotic, “and, Alex, I don’t know if you’ve been offered any tigers to make this proposition…”
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Then Boebert stopped smiling and started speaking affectionately about Exotic, who is serving over two decades in prison for, among other things, hiring a hitman to kill wildlife activist Carole Baskin.
“No, I, I think truly… I enjoy the heart and sentiment of Joe, and since he’s been in prison, his outreach,” she continued. She then brought up his past presidential campaigns and said that Exotic is “certainly a part of the American grit and spirit, but, uh, we’ll see what the pardon team says.”
Lauren Boebert says ‘Tiger King’ Joe Exotic has reached out to her while he has been in prison, he is a “fantastic unifier,” and Trump should consider pardoning him.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-06-25T00:20:44.862Z
Exotic announced his engagement to Jorge Marquez Flores earlier this year, who he met in prison. Exotic has been a vocal supporter of the current president, even though Marquez Flores was deported earlier this year.
The president pardoned over a thousand people at the start of his second term, including many January 6 rioters. Exotic complained that he was forgotten in that round of pardons, but, several months later, it appears that a pardon isn’t coming for him.
“Hell the guy who killed 2 FBI Agents even [g]ot a pardon today. I can’t even get a new trial based on admitted perjury testimony,” Exotic wrote in an Instagram post in January.
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