The co-host of The View revealed on live television that she single-handedly talked eleven jurors out of convicting a man who killed, dismembered, and cooked his roommate, and she did it with unmistakable pride.
Sunny Hostin dropped the bombshell during a Tuesday panel discussion about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, casually volunteering that she had been the holdout juror in the 1991 murder trial of Daniel Rakowitz, a case so gruesome it earned the defendant the tabloid nickname "The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park." Hostin, now 57 and a former federal prosecutor, told her co-hosts she convinced every other juror to find Rakowitz not criminally responsible by reason of insanity, a process she said took nine days of sequestration and, at one point, drew a chair thrown at her by an angry fellow juror.
The case she was describing is not some obscure legal footnote. Rakowitz, a Texas-born cannabis dealer and former mental patient known for wandering New York's East Village with a Bible and a live rooster, killed 26-year-old Swiss dancer Monika Beerle in their shared apartment on 9th Street in 1989. The killing followed an argument in which Beerle tried to throw Rakowitz out. What came next was far worse than the killing itself.
After Beerle's death, Rakowitz dismembered her body. He bleached and boiled her bones, telling detectives later that he did so "to disinfect them." He then carried her remains to Tompkins Square Park, a well-known gathering spot for the homeless in lower Manhattan, and fed body parts to homeless men in a soup. Fox News reported that the soup allegedly contained Beerle's finger.
When police first questioned Rakowitz, he led them to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, where he had stashed Beerle's skull in the baggage room.
At trial in 1991, all twelve jurors ultimately voted to acquit Rakowitz by reason of insanity. But the unanimous verdict did not come easily. A New York Times article published on February 23, 1991, credited a single holdout juror, identified under the name Asuncion Cummings, Hostin's birth name, with preventing a guilty verdict. The Times quoted her saying, "We don't think he intended to kill her."
Hostin confirmed all of this on air, telling the panel plainly:
"That was me. It was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic."
She went further, explaining her reasoning in detail. "He did not mean to kill her. And once he killed her, he panicked," Hostin said. "He tried to commit the perfect crime." She added that the experience came before she attended law school.
Her co-hosts did not share her satisfaction. Alyssa Farah Griffin, visibly taken aback, asked, "You got this guy off?" Joy Behar cut in: "The guy who ate the victims?" Hostin did not flinch.
Hostin described the deliberation as a battle of wills. She claimed she endured nine days of sequestration and faced intense hostility from fellow jurors who wanted a conviction.
"One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me. But, one by one, I picked them off."
She recounted pressing other jurors with questions: "I said, 'What about this? What about that?'" The result was a unanimous acquittal. Rather than prison, Rakowitz was sent to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York, where he remains today. At sentencing, Rakowitz himself told the court he would rather be imprisoned than held in a mental hospital because he did not like to be medicated.
Hostin's pride in the outcome was explicit. She connected her own experience directly to the Clancy case, where holdout juror Michael Desronvil's refusal to convict caused a mistrial. Hostin sided with the other eleven jurors who, in the Clancy case, believed the defendant, a mother who strangled her three children in 2023, lacked criminal responsibility. "I thought absolutely she was not criminally responsible, by reason of insanity," Hostin said of Clancy.
She framed the insanity defense as a bedrock legal principle, citing on air that the defense "has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years." And she drew a direct line between her own holdout role decades ago and the Clancy juror's decision now, saying, "The reason I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in a case."
The View has faced its own share of scrutiny in recent months, including after ABC acknowledged that regulatory pressure influenced how the show books political guests.
The backlash was swift. Rep. Nancy Mace responded directly to the broadcast. Breitbart reported that Mace said: "Sunny Hostin announced on national television today, with some pride, that she was the lone juror who talked eleven people out of convicting a man who dismembered a woman and fed her to the homeless."
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck was blunter. "This is beyond parody," Houck said, according to Fox News. "Absolutely breathtakingly stupid that she would not only admit to this but also act like it's a badge of honor."
Hostin herself seemed to anticipate the criticism, and leaned into it. When Griffin pressed her, Hostin doubled down with a line that left little room for ambiguity about where she stands on the insanity defense:
"That's how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused."
The admission lands at a moment when The View is already under a regulatory microscope. The FCC has moved to review the show's classification and Disney's broadcast licenses, and Disney has responded with a lawsuit alleging the review amounts to retaliation for the show's content.
Hostin's revelation raises a question that goes beyond one old murder trial: What does it say about the judgment of a television commentator who shapes public opinion on criminal justice five days a week that she treats the acquittal of a man who cooked and served his roommate's body as a career highlight?
That broader conflict between Disney and federal regulators over ABC's broadcast standards only sharpens the stakes. A show already fighting to keep its news classification now has a host bragging about jury nullification in a cannibalism case.
Rakowitz has been held at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center since his acquittal. He has never been released. Hostin pointed to that fact as vindication of the jury's decision. "He is still in a mental institution being treated," she said.
But the framing cuts both ways. Rakowitz told the court at sentencing that he preferred prison to a psychiatric facility because he did not want to be medicated. He did not view the outcome as treatment. He viewed it as a different kind of confinement, one he liked less.
The 1991 New York Times report that confirmed Hostin's role described her as "principally responsible" for preventing a guilty verdict. Hostin, then Asuncion Cummings, was quoted under her birth name. The article remains on the Times' website. A show producer located it, and the broadcast displayed the relevant passage on screen during Hostin's admission.
Monika Beerle was 26 years old. She was a dancer from Switzerland sharing an apartment in one of New York's most storied neighborhoods. She tried to throw out a roommate who, by multiple accounts, was visibly unstable. He killed her for it, dismembered her, and fed her remains to strangers in a park. The jury's job was to decide whether that man bore criminal responsibility for what he did.
Hostin decided he did not, and three decades later, she went on national television to take a bow. Media figures who lecture the public about accountability might consider starting with their own judgment calls.
When someone who shapes how millions of Americans think about crime and punishment treats the acquittal of a cannibal killer as a point of personal pride, the problem is not the insanity defense. The problem is the person holding the microphone.
