Did False Testimony Cage the Tiger King?
A key witness in the allegations that led to Joe Exotic being arrested and placed behind bars has now retracted his statement, admitting that he gave false testimony. So why isn't Joe being released?
By the time the witness decided to speak again, the story had already hardened into a cultural artifact. Joe Exotic was no longer just a man in a federal prison. He was a costume, a punchline, a documentary villain flattened into episodes and catchphrases. The jury had delivered its verdict years earlier. The appeals courts had spoken. The public had moved on. And then, from inside the same shadow world that once fed the prosecution, came a sworn statement that threatened to loosen one of the central beams of the case.
The man who had once helped send Joe Exotic to prison now said he had lied.
Joe Exotic, born Joseph Schreibvogel and later known as Joseph Maldonado-Passage, built his life as a performance long before the law dismantled it. In rural Oklahoma he constructed a kingdom of cages, cubs and cameras, a roadside empire fueled by spectacle and raw nerve. He bred tigers for public handling, cycled cubs through tourist pens, and fed a growing online audience with nightly rants and music videos filmed among the cages. He wore guns like ornaments and anger like brand identity. His enemies were named and ritualized. None more relentlessly than Carole Baskin.
Years before his arrest, the feud between Joe and Carole had already grown theatrical. She operated a big-cat sanctuary in Florida and campaigned to end private ownership of tigers altogether. He accused her incessantly of murdering her missing husband. He filmed mock executions of her likeness, fired bullets at effigies bearing her face, and built his internet persona around her as the antagonist of a story only he seemed to be directing. She responded with lawsuits, not weapons. One of those lawsuits left Joe financially strangled and set in motion the collapse of his zoo.
Joe spoke often about hating Carole. He said it online. He said it in interviews. He said it in a tone that blurred rage with performance. For years, it was treated as grotesque talk. Then, according to federal agents, it crossed into something they could prosecute.
The witness at the centre of that transformation was Allen Glover, a zoo employee who moved through Joe’s orbit at its most unstable phase. He carried a criminal record. He carried addiction. He carried the same survival instincts that shaped so many people who passed through the Wynnewood property. When he climbed into the witness box in 2019, he told jurors that Joe had done more than talk.
Glover testified that in late 2017 Joe approached him with an offer to kill Carole Baskin. He said Joe gave him $3,000 in cash and provided a prepaid phone. He said Joe expected him to travel to Florida and carry out the murder. According to his trial account, he accepted the money and left Oklahoma under that understanding. He never went to Florida. He never contacted Carole. But his testimony constructed a bridge between Joe’s violent rhetoric and an alleged real-world attempt to turn it into action.
It was not the only evidence the jury heard, but it was the most human. It gave the murder-for-hire charge a face.
In that same courtroom, jurors also heard recordings introduced by the FBI through another cooperating witness, James Garretson, in which Joe was captured discussing payment and logistics for killing Carole. They heard about an undercover agent posed as a hitman. They heard about months of violent talk. They also heard about tigers that had been shot, buried, sold, and moved across state lines using falsified paperwork.
Joe testified in his own defence. He admitted he had said he wanted Carole dead. He insisted it was talk, not intent. He admitted he had given Glover money but denied that it was payment for murder. He described himself as reckless, vulgar, theatrical. Not homicidal.
The jury deliberated less than a day.
Joe was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and seventeen counts of wildlife crime. In January 2020, he was sentenced to 22 years in federal prison. The murder-for-hire counts carried the greatest weight. They transformed him from chaotic trafficker into would-be killer in the eyes of the law.
For years afterward, Glover’s testimony remained embedded in the case file as fact.
Then came the affidavit.
Years after the verdict, Glover signed a sworn statement reversing key elements of what he had told the jury. In that document, he claimed that Joe had never truly hired him to kill Carole Baskin. He said the money he received was not intended as payment for murder. He said that what had been framed in court as a concrete plot had been exaggerated and shaped under pressure. He stated directly that parts of his trial testimony were untrue.
Around the same period, a statement circulated publicly under his name in which he wrote: “I committed perjury during my grand jury testimony regarding my involvement as the hitman in the murder for hire.” The sentence reverberated immediately across social media and legal commentary alike. To Joe’s supporters, it was vindication in a single line. To prosecutors and courts, it was a late and unreliable reversal from a witness who had always been compromised.
The law treats recantations with suspicion for good reason. Witnesses reverse themselves for many reasons: fear, loyalty, regret, pressure, calculation. Judges measure them against contemporaneous evidence, not against cultural momentum. When Joe’s attorneys presented Glover’s affidavit to the courts as grounds for a new trial, the request was reviewed and denied. Judges acknowledged the recantation but concluded that it did not outweigh the recorded conversations, financial records, and cumulative testimony presented at trial.
Legally, nothing moved.
Publicly, everything reopened.
Joe seized on the recantation from inside federal custody. Through lawyers and media statements he framed it as the missing proof of what he had always claimed: that he had talked violently but never actually hired anyone to kill Carole Baskin. He portrayed Glover not as a reformed truth-teller but as a man undoing a falsehood that had destroyed a life. He described the recantation as his closest brush with vindication since his arrest.
The reactions fractured along familiar lines.
Supporters pointed to the affidavit and the perjury statement as evidence that Joe’s murder-for-hire conviction was built on lies. They argued that without Glover’s testimony, the remaining evidence showed only rage, not conspiracy. They launched renewed campaigns calling for his release. They framed him as the victim of a system that rewards informants with freedom in exchange for narrative.
Critics dismissed the recantation as opportunistic. They emphasised that the jury had not relied on Glover alone. They pointed to the FBI recordings in which Joe itself discussed payment. They pointed to corroboration through multiple witnesses. They argued that the recantation changed nothing of legal substance.
Carole Baskin responded not with certainty but with guarded distance. In court she had previously testified that she still feared Joe. Outside of court she later acknowledged a different possibility: that if Joe truly helped dismantle the cub-petting industry and the private tiger trade he once profited from, she could imagine supporting a reduction in his sentence. It was not an assertion that the murder plot had been fictional. It was an admission that punishment is not the only currency in long wars.
Behind all of it stood the deeper context that made Glover’s testimony so powerful in the first place.
Joe’s world at the time of the alleged plot had been collapsing. Legal debts from Carole’s civil lawsuit had crushed him financially. Ownership of his zoo had slipped into other hands. His broadcast studio burned in a suspicious fire. His younger partner Travis Maldonado shot himself accidentally in the zoo office while heavily impaired. Staff scattered. Investors circled. Rage intensified. The zoo that once functioned as spectacle had become a siege.
Glover existed within that chaos. He lived on the property. He depended on Joe. He also feared him. When he testified in 2019, he described a man unraveling into lethal obsession. Now, in reversal, he describes himself as someone who spoke under pressure while trapped in a collapsing ecosystem where truth was as negotiable as loyalty.
It is impossible to speak of perjury without also speaking of incentive.
At trial, the defence argued that Glover had testified in exchange for leniency on unrelated charges and protection from prosecution. Glover denied receiving immunity. Years later, his affidavit suggested that incentives had indeed existed. Courts examined those claims and found that even if limits on prosecution had been discussed, they did not nullify the rest of the evidence.
What has not changed is the human collision between two irreconcilable versions of the same moment in time.
In one version, Joe Exotic hires a man to kill his rival and only fails because the would-be killer never follows through.
In the other, Joe Exotic makes violent noise in a world addicted to violent noise, and a man later shapes that noise into a criminal act to save himself.
Both versions now exist under oath.
Joe remains in a federal medical facility serving a 21-year sentence. His health has deteriorated. He has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer. He has spoken of metastasis. He has described bone pain and respiratory decline. Time now presses on him differently than it did at sentencing.
He has formally asked for a presidential pardon. He has aimed those requests most directly toward Donald Trump. He has framed himself as a victim of a politicized prosecution led by animal-rights activism and built on perjured testimony. Each new wave of public discussion following the recantation feeds the same question: whether mercy will come from the courts or from politics.
Petitions calling for Joe’s release continue to circulate. Media cycles flare and fade. The legal docket remains unchanged.
At the center of it all stands a single contradiction that cannot be reconciled by law alone.
A man once testified that Joe Exotic tried to hire him to kill Carole Baskin.
Years later, he says he lied.
And between those two sentences lies 21 years of a life now measured in prison counts, medical charts and unanswered appeals.
You can get updates about Joe by heading over to Jessica Kraus’ Substack - she’s been covering the case for a long time and has interviewed him.
I’ll be interviewing Joe this coming week too. Stay tuned.