Joe Rogan told listeners that a former guest on his show allegedly killed and dismembered a man roughly a month after sitting in the podcast studio and talking about personal redemption.
Rogan brought up the case during a Wednesday episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience" while discussing sociopaths with physician Zach Bush. The host did not ease into it.
"We had a guy in the studio that cut a guy's head off after the podcast," Rogan said. "He killed a guy and cut his head off."
The former guest was Sheldon Johnson, a 48-year-old ex-convict who had rebranded himself as a criminal justice reform advocate after spending more than two decades behind bars for a string of armed robberies committed in 1999. Johnson appeared on Rogan's show in 2024 alongside civil rights attorney Josh Dubin, who leads an organization focused on wrongful conviction cases. On the episode, Johnson cast himself as living proof that people can change.
"I said to myself, 'I've been doing bad for so long. I'm going to try to do something good,'" Johnson told Rogan during that 2024 appearance.
Approximately one month later, prosecutors say, Johnson shot 44-year-old Collin Small dead inside a New York City apartment, then dismembered the body and scattered the remains across multiple locations.
Officers who arrived at the scene first discovered Small's headless torso. They then located his dismembered feet inside a plastic bin. Additional body parts, including Small's head, legs, and one arm, were later found in a freezer inside Johnson's Harlem apartment, the Washington Examiner reported.
A neighbor reportedly heard a man begging for mercy before two gunshots rang out from the apartment building, the New York Post reported.
Surveillance footage from March 5, 2024, captured Johnson walking through the hallway of a Bronx apartment building carrying a blue bin. Additional footage showed him entering the victim's apartment in different outfits, including a blond wig, in the hours before the discovery of the remains.
Rogan described the alleged sequence on air, connecting the podcast appearance directly to what followed.
"He does the podcast and then afterward goes and visits this guy that apparently he had a beef with, kills him, cuts his head off, puts him in a [suitcase], like puts a wig on, and tries to escape in the hallway through the cameras."
Johnson was arrested in spring 2024 and charged with second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse. He appeared in Bronx Supreme Court on April 2, 2024, pleaded not guilty, and was held without bail.
Before his arrest, Johnson had assembled the kind of résumé that earns speaking invitations and media profiles. Released from prison in 2019 after serving roughly 20 years of a 50-year sentence for armed robbery, he went to work as a client advocate at the Queens Defenders public defender's office. He spoke publicly about prison reform and the possibility of rehabilitation. He appeared on one of the largest podcasts in the world.
Johnson also associated with prominent figures in New York's criminal justice establishment. The New York Post reported that he had been photographed alongside Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a detail that adds an uncomfortable layer to a case already rich with irony about the gap between advocacy and conduct.
On the Rogan podcast, Johnson had offered a line that now reads like a grim artifact.
"One thing I learned really, really quickly when I got to prison was that prison does two things to you: it brings out the best, or it brings out the worst."
New York Department of Corrections records showed that both Johnson and Small had served time in prison. Investigators have explored whether the two men had a prior conflict at Sing Sing, the state prison in Westchester County, though the exact nature of their relationship remains unclear.
Sheldon Johnson Sr. told reporters he was blindsided by the arrest.
"I am surprised my son was arrested. I was shocked. He learned and studied in prison for 26 years. He is a good man."
The elder Johnson added: "I think he threw his life away but I still love him. I don't know what happened."
That a father would stand by his son is unremarkable. What is remarkable is how many institutions and platforms gave Sheldon Johnson Jr. their seal of approval, a public defender's office hired him, a civil rights attorney vouched for him, a district attorney posed with him, and the most popular podcast host in America gave him a microphone, all on the strength of a personal narrative that prosecutors now say collapsed into an act of extreme violence within weeks of its most prominent telling.
Fox News reported that Rogan raised the Johnson case while talking with Bush about how convincingly some people can present a false version of themselves. The host's tone was blunt, not reflective, a man he had sat across from and listened to had, according to prosecutors, committed a horrific act almost immediately afterward.
Johnson has pleaded not guilty, and the case has not gone to trial. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence in court. But the facts already in the public record, the surveillance footage, the remains found in two apartments, the neighbor's account of gunshots, paint a picture that is difficult to square with the reformed advocate who sat on Rogan's set and talked about doing good.
The criminal justice reform movement has produced genuine success stories. It has also produced a pipeline in which ex-offenders are elevated to public platforms, hired by government-adjacent offices, and held up as proof that the system works, sometimes with minimal vetting and maximum credulity. When one of those stories goes wrong, the institutions that endorsed the person rarely face any accountability for the judgment call.
Nobody vetted Sheldon Johnson out of a podcast chair. But somebody hired him to advocate for defendants in a public defender's office. Somebody brought him on a media tour. And when the story fell apart in the worst way imaginable, the institutions moved on while a 44-year-old man's family buried him in pieces.
Redemption is worth believing in. But belief is not a background check, and the people who pay the price for getting it wrong are never the ones handing out the microphones.
