Joe Exotic had a message for Carole Baskin as he gave his first jailhouse interview since being resentenced to 21 years in prison for his murder-for-hire conviction during Thursday’s Nightline. The Tiger King star, who was accused of targeting Baskin in his plot, urged Baskin to leave him alone when asked what he would say to her, declaring, “enough is enough.”
“What would I say? I am in prison and she can’t leave me alone,” he told Nightline‘s Juju Chang. “So what would I like to say? Carole, go find another reason to live other than Joe Exotic. Because enough is enough.” Exotic also claimed he does not belong behind bars during the interview, saying of the conditions, “You have no windows. It’s just a concrete room with no enrichment. No TV, no radio, no nothing. You cannot, in America, put a monkey in a cage, according to the Animal Welfare Act, and treat them like this.”
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The former zoo owner then claimed his health was failing him while in prison. “I’m losing weight real bad and the sores in my mouth are unbearable to live with all the time. But you know, in the three-and-a-half years that I’ve been in custody, I’ve been taken to the hospital 43 times,” Exotic said. “I have little to no immune system and then they have to give me blood infusions every four weeks. Juju, I don’t see me walking out of here alive.”
When it comes to the Tiger King docuseries on Netflix, Exotic said he had not seen any of the episodes, but that the series becoming a cultural phenomenon could be attributed to him. “I have received and answered back over 11,000 letters. I get letters from 8-year-old kids to 95-year-old grandmas, and every letter says it’s because I was unapologetic, I stood up for what I believed in and because I’m not ashamed of who I am,” he said. “And that is why Tiger King 1 was such a hit and Tiger King 2 turned out to be a flop.” That doesn’t mean he’s been profiting off of his newfound fame. “Get on the Internet and Google ‘Joe Exotic’ and hit the shop button and look. Everybody in the world is making money off of me but me,” he added.
