The cereal world can be a cruel, unforgiving place. Just ask Sonny, the mascot for General Mills’ “Cocoa Puffs.” Sucked into the business in his late teens, Sonny thought he was just another pretty face pushing a breakfast product.

“I wasn’t always cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Sonny sighs, recalling the alliterate catch phrase that has been claim to fame since the cereal first hit the market. “I was pretty normal. I had some good ideas for slogans. They tried a few of them in test markets, but they bombed pretty hard,” he admits.

Sonny thought an educational approach would appeal to parents. General Mills executives were not convinced.

“They kept saying that it didn’t sell in the test markets because of my ’stay in school and don’t do smack’ message. I kept telling them, ’look, the cereal looks like rabbit turds. Just give it a corn-colored outer shell.’ They wouldn’t listen.”

Soon, Sonny’s outspoken anti-sugar, anti-smack rhetoric was turned against him.

“They brought me in one day and gave me a bowl of Cocoa Puffs to eat for the commercial. They didn’t tell me that they’d laced them with LSD.”

Soon, Sonny was more cuckoo than any self-respecting cuckoo bird could stand.

“It just came out of me: I’m cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. That was the beginning of the end.” Sonny maintains that General Mills have kept him on a tight leash ever since.

“They made me work for smack and a small salary. I needed the drugs too bad to say no. I lost my apartment because they cut my salary three years in a row until I couldn’t afford it. Then there was the whoring. I don’t want to talk about that.”

General Mills continues to refute Sonny’s claims of abuse. “Sonny volunteered to take pay cuts during hard financial times. We were worried he was desperate to support his drug habits, and that’s why we had an intervention. It didn’t go as planned,” recounts GM spokesperson Brian Harper.

Accounts of the intervention differ greatly. By all accounts, Sonny was at the cereal factory that night, which was not unusual—he often gave tours there. Sonny claims that he was thrown out for trying to stop the workers from over-sugaring the cereal. “They were poisoning those kids,” he insists.

Harper’s account paints a different picture.

“When Sonny’s bosses arrived, they found Sonny, along with Ozzy Osbourne, deficating into the cereal vat. The visitor logs showed that they’d been in the factory dozens of times prior. There’s no telling how much cereal was contaminated.”

Sonny protests his innocence. “They keep showing these fake security camera photos. It’s all bunk. But as long as they keep paying off the analysts to say they’re legit, I don’t have a case, and have no choice but to keep working for them to pay off the costs for these alleged contaminations.”

Harper sums up the General Mill side of the argument succinctly: “He’s cuckoo. Period.”