Baskin: Joe Exotic will have to work to end tiger handling to get her support for reduced sentence

She wants the convicted criminal to "work with law enforcement" to put "co-conspirators" behind bars.

Published: April 23, 2021 3:59pm

Updated: April 24, 2021 5:48pm

Carole Baskin, one of the stars of the surreal Netflix reality series "Tiger King" that made waves last year, is stipulating that her longtime adversary Joe Exotic will have to throw unconditional support behind a new wildlife protection bill if he wants her to support a reduction in his prison sentence.

Exotic, a former tiger breeder, was sent to prison in 2019 after being convicted of multiple accounts of animal abuse as well as a plot to have Baskin assassinated. Baskin, an animal rights activist, had been a longtime critic of Exotic's animal handling practices and the two had regularly feuded prior to Exotic's conviction and imprisonment.

Baskin recently revealed that she would be willing to support a reduction in Exotic's two-year prison sentence if he promised to support anti-animal abuse legislation. But this week she told David Brody, the host of Just the News's Water Cooler, that Exotic is attempting to garner a reduced sentence without actually supporting the bill.

"What I had said was I would be all in favor of a reduced prison sentence if Joe Exotic would actually support the Big Cat Public Safety Act, which bans cub petting and phases out private possession, and if he would work with law enforcement to put the rest of the people that I believe are co-conspirators in jail," Baskin told Brody.

"So he came out and said, 'Yeah, I'll take her offer but I don't like the bill and ... I'm not [in prison] for the right reasons and I want her to say that I'm not.' And it's like, no, they, they put him in jail for all the right reasons," Baskin continued.

"It's just, I think there's a lot of other people that he should have in there with him that he could bring in there with him if he did that," she added. "So he hasn't really accepted my offer."

"Tiger King" was a major hit for Netflix last year, due in part to its release at the outset of widespread COVID-19 lockdowns when many viewers were confined to their homes indefinitely.