Man who destroyed Trump's Walk Of Fame star has been arrested for stealing Marilyn Monroe statue
Last July, a man named Austin Clay was arrested after he destroyed Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk Of Fame star with a pickax that he had hidden in a guitar case. As the story goes, he then called the cops on himself, told them “see you soon,” and patiently waited for the police to show up and arrest him—at which point his bail was supposedly paid by James Otis, the heir to the Otis Elevator fortune who had also previously destroyed Trump’s star in 2016. Now, Clay has (allegedly) struck again, but the motivations for this latest stunt seem less obvious.
According to Variety, Clay has been arrested climbing on top of Los Angeles’ Ladies Of Hollywood gazebo along the Walk Of Fame and cutting down a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe with a hacksaw. The statue itself has not been recovered, but the police claim that they have surveillance footage of a man climbing down the gazebo and then entering the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel with an unidentified accomplice and then another two unidentified “persons of interest.” The Variety story doesn’t offer any insight into why Clay may have followed his anti-Trump stunt with this (alleged) anti-Marilyn Monroe stunt, but the Walk Of Fame luckily just announced that it’s giving Batman a star for some reason, so hopefully that’ll scare off any Los Angeles ne’er-do-wells.
The Variety story doesn’t mention how James Otis may feel about any of this, but in looking him up we realized that the Otis Elevator Company at least has a Twitter account. No mention of Marilyn Monroe statues there, but there are a lot of tweets about elevator safety.