Feds: Animal rescue owner plotted to kidnap former employee rather than pay her
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The former actor Leo Grillo met the man in a camper at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank.“They’ve got ‘em,” the man said.He showed Grillo a photo of a zip-tied couple, duct tape over the woman’s mouth, according to a criminal complaint.But the plan had hit a snag, he said.
The kidnappers needed another $10,000.Unbeknownst to Grillo as he wrote out the check was that this was all part of an FBI sting.Within seconds, agents arrested Grillo, 77, who once starred alongside Katherine Heigl in Zyzzyx Road, which has been dubbed the lowest-grossing movie in history.Grillo is charged in a criminal complaint with attempted kidnapping and, if convicted, faces up to 20 years in prison.Grillo’s appointed deputy federal public defender did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The complaint noted that Grillo denied to FBI agents that he’d paid for a kidnapping.What drove Grillo to allegedly pay $30,000 toward a kidnapping plot was a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee of his animal sanctuary who said she’d been wrongfully terminated and discriminated against due to her pregnancy.An L.A.County jury found in favor of the woman in November 2024, awarding her $6.7 million.Instead of paying his former employee, federal authorities allege that Grillo hatched a plan to kidnap her and fly her to Mexico.Grillo is a well-known figure in the animal rescue world.
He founded his nonprofit wilderness animal rescue organization, Dedication and Everlasting Love to Animals, decades earlier.He previously told The Times his epiphany came during a road trip in 1979, when he rescued a stray black dog in apparent distress in the Angeles National Forest.He named the dog “Delta” and, according to his website, that “was just the beginning of many more wilderness rescues to come.” That morphed into what the website described as the “largest no-kill, care for lif...