NJ Weedman Joint co-owner defends boyfriend’s actions amid fallout over brawl

TRENTON >> Debi Madaio, the co-owner of The Joint, is standing by her marijuana advocate boyfriend after he was caught on tape decking two men with a fire extinguisher inside their restaurant.

The mother, nurse and the primary financier of the East State Street business has soaked tens of thousands of dollars into the joint venture, stubbornly continuing to pay the rent on the restaurant and cannabis church while Edward Forchion, better known as NJ Weedman, was locked up for more than a year on drug and witness tampering charges.

She said in an interview Monday she won’t pull the plug on the business now amid safety concerns spurred by an all-out brawl out front of and inside The Joint last week.

Her boyfriend was caught on tape bashing two men with a fire extinguisher, one of whom was knocked unconscious.

“I’m not going to sit here and point fingers,” Madaio said. “Everybody can be a Monday morning quarterback and say, ‘Shoulda, woulda, coulda.’ But if someone comes tumbling into your house … They were just trying to get them out. Of course, everybody is going to look at the one part of the video, but they’re not showing that [Forchion] got up off the ground after being smashed in the head with a hookah lamp. … We can’t risk everything we have. But we’re still gonna try to do some stuff. Just kinda switch up a little bit.”

Forchion posted a video defense of himself, and provided pictures of his injuries to The Trentonian to support his claim that he was acting in self-defense. No one has been charged as police continue to investigate.

NJ Weedman is no stranger to controversy in the city. He blamed, and sued, the Trenton Police for the decline of his business, prompted by a raid in 2016 that the authorities claimed netted tens of thousands of dollars in pot.

Forchion, famous for his jury nullification defenses and thumbing his nose in the authorities’ faces, coaxed a not guilty verdict out of jury in the retrial of witness tampering charges.

Much to the chagrin of his girlfriend who advised him to try to keep a lower profile once he got out of the slammer, NJ Weedman began shaking the hornet’s nest upon his release from jail.

He dared police to arrest him, openly smoking and selling dime bags of marijuana outside the Statehouse in protest of legislation to legalize marijuana he said would leave people like him out of the business.

The couple celebrated the reopening after The Joint.

Now Forchion faces another possible legal mess, stemming from the emergence of video of the restaurant brawl.

The marijuana legalization activist and his staunchly loyal girlfriend insists he did nothing wrong and was only protecting his turf.

“It was inevitable this stuff was going to happen,” Madaio said. “What can you do it’s Trenton?”

She said her and Forchion plan to “beef up” security at future events, which will likely appeal to a different crowd. The Joint doesn’t have metal detectors but people are patted down for weapons at the door, Madaio said.

“We’re going to try to have a chill type of afterwork type thing, a grown and sexy type thing, appeal to older people and really discourage anyone from having too much to drink,” she said.

Madaio accused people with a “crabs-in-abucket mentality” of bringing down her activist boyfriend.

“[People] have always felt like our place was a safe haven away from that stuff,” Madaio said. “People don’t want to necessarily see you have a good thing, and to make it out of that environment, but a lot of people do. I throw my hands up in the air a lot.”

Madaio still subsidizes some of the business expenses but was starting to see a turnaround in her investment.

She hopes the negative publicity won’t deter people from continuing to come to The Joint.

“That fight could have happened at McDonald’s,” she said. “If you saw, there was a big fight at Disneyland.”

NJ Weedman’s girlfriend is happy her man made it out of the scary ordeal alive. She said the cops,

who have in the past targeted the marijuana activist, appeared to feel for him

this time around.

“We just have to see what happens with that,” she said.

Asked whether she fears possible retaliation, against NJ Weedman or The Joint, Madaio said the fight “really

had nothing to do with us.”

“I don’t think there’s animosity,” she said. “Nobody wants to press charges or anything like that. We’re not going anywhere. Most people know the truth about what

happened and most people know about us. We don’t think it’s going to escalate. There was no guns involved. There was no knives involved. There was just fists. You can’t stop people from coming in with their fists.”