Shaquille O’Neal has tried to downplay his involvement with Joe Exotic, but his TNT teammate isn’t letting him live it down just yet.

Charles Barkley played the role of prosecutor and jokingly pressed O’Neal on how much time he has spent with Exotic, the man in the middle of the popular Netflix docuseries “Tiger King,” on which O’Neal made a cameo. When O’Neal began to answer before stopping and starting multiple times, Barkley joked, “There’s a lot of stuttering going on right there!”

“Remember when OKC was playing San Antonio [in the playoffs]?” O’Neal finally said on an episode of “The Steam Room” with his “Inside the NBA” teammates Barkley, Ernie Johnson and Kenny Smith. “You guys were flying, but I was driving. So on the way there, on the highway, I saw a sign that said tigers. That was the first time I went. I went, said hi, gave him some money to give me a couple white tigers.”

That was apparently the visit O’Neal was referring to in 2014 when he said during an “Inside the NBA” show that he had visited Exotic at his G.W. Zoo in Oklahoma.

“Then I think we went to Oklahoma City one more time so I only saw Joe once,” O’Neal said. “The second time I went, they was like, ‘Hey man, they don’t think you should come back, a lot of stuff is going on.’ And I never went back.”

“I’m just asking, did he go see Exotic Joe twice,” Barkley said with a grin.

When Johnson made a point in O’Neal’s favor, the Hall of Fame center chimed in, “Listen to my attorney, Ernie Johnson at law. Only went twice, America.”

Exotic — whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage — is currently in jail after being found guilty of a murder-for-hire plot on his rival, Carole Baskin. Baskin had long accused Exotic of animal cruelty.

O’Neal also clarified that when he says he owns tigers, he means that he makes donations to zoos, and that the tigers never actually come into his possession.

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