Trouble-Making Cookie Monster Is 'National Nuisance'

Adam Sandler, the man behind the blue mask, has left trail of complaints from coast to coast
By Michael Harthorne,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 15, 2016 11:32 AM CDT
Trouble-Making Cookie Monster Is 'National Nuisance'
Adam Sandler, currently causing trouble in Los Angeles while dressed as Cookie Monster, is a "national nuisance."   (AP Photo/San Francisco Police Dept.)

"No one wants to hear the Cookie Monster say he's going to kill their family," says a man who filed a battery report against the Sesame Street character. The Los Angeles Times takes a long look at Adam Sandler (not that one), a man currently cavorting around Los Angeles in a Cookie Monster costume but who's been a "serial troublemaker" from coast to coast. “This guy is like a national nuisance,” LAPD Det. Jeana Franco says. Back when Sandler, 52, was in New York and dressing like Elmo, he was filmed in the midst of an anti-Semitic rant. He was also charged with trying to extort the Girl Scouts, demanding $2 million or income for life or he would start making false allegations. And he claimed to have started a porn site called "Welcome to Rape Camp."

After being run out of New York and San Francisco, Sandler—now dressed as Cookie Monster—is living out of a van in Los Angeles and posing for photos with children outside the Los Angeles Zoo. The zoo says it's received 67 formal complaints—"scary, disruptive, made people feel unsafe"—about him in the past year but can't do anything because he's in a "designated free speech area." Other complaints include Sandler threatening to beat up a rival Cookie Monster, telling people not to shop at zoo stores because they're owned by Muslims, and yelling at diners eating outside a neighborhood restaurant, claiming the restaurant poisoned a child and bribed a politician to cover it up. Sandler tells the Times he's "tamed my behavior down...since New York." Read the full story here. (More Cookie Monster stories.)

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