"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin revealed on air that she single-handedly persuaded a jury to acquit the man known as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park, and she's proud of it.
Hostin, 57, dropped the bombshell during a Tuesday panel discussion about the insanity defense, telling her co-hosts she was the lone holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, a New York City drug dealer who killed his 26-year-old roommate Monika Beerle, dismembered her body, boiled her remains, and, by his own account, fed them to homeless people in the East Village. The jury ultimately returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty by reason of mental disease, and Hostin claimed on camera that she was "principally responsible" for that outcome, the New York Post reported.
The revelation left her co-hosts visibly unsettled. Alyssa Farah Griffin gasped and clasped her hand to her chest. Star Jones half-joked about changing seats. Sara Haines shifted in her chair. The moment played out on national television in front of a live studio audience, and Hostin treated it not as a confession but as a credential.
The segment began as a discussion about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial in Massachusetts, where attorney Kevin Reddington filed a motion asking the judge to investigate a holdout juror over alleged cellphone use during deliberations and alleged dishonesty on a pre-trial questionnaire. Hostin objected to the idea of investigating jurors, calling it "despicable" and warning it would have "a chilling effect on juries."
Then she pivoted to her own history.
Hostin told the panel she had served on the Rakowitz jury and read aloud from a New York Times article dated February 23, 1991:
"Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict."
She then read a second passage from the same article, which quoted a juror identified as "Asuncion Cummings", Hostin's given name:
"We don't think he intended to kill her. But once he did, he dismembered her body in an effort to commit the perfect crime."
Joy Behar interjected mid-story: "The guy who ate the victims?" Hostin confirmed without hesitation. Griffin cut in: "And you got this guy off?!"
Hostin described the deliberations in detail. The jury was sequestered for nine days. One juror, she said, threw a chair at her out of frustration. She said she worked through the holdouts one by one, pressing her case that Rakowitz was psychotic and did not intend to kill Beerle.
"It was so clear to me in the jury room. We were sequestered for nine days, one juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me but one by one I picked them off and said 'what about this, what about that,' and we ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity."
She framed the experience as proof of how strongly she believes in the insanity defense. "That's how much I believe in the insanity defense," she told the panel, "and he fed her body parts to the unhoused."
The casual delivery of that line, tacked onto a statement of personal conviction, captured the disconnect that made the segment so jarring. Hostin was not recounting a burden she carried reluctantly. She was making an argument, and the gruesome facts of the case were supporting evidence for her legal philosophy.
The underlying crime was one of the most notorious in New York City history. In 1989, Rakowitz, described as a known weed dealer and East Village eccentric, punched Beerle, his roommate, in the throat during a fight, causing her to suffocate. He then dismembered her body, boiled her head, and left her skull in a bucket of kitty litter in the baggage room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. News reports and police accounts from the time indicated he boasted that he had eaten her brains and fed her remains to homeless people near Tompkins Square Park.
Beerle was 26 years old and a dance student. She had no say in what happened to her after she died, and no voice in the courtroom where a single juror steered the outcome.
After the not-guilty verdict, Rakowitz was ordered confined to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island in New York City. In 2020, he was among roughly 100 inmates deemed criminally insane by a court and relocated to the nearby Manhattan Psychiatric Center, a state-run facility. He remained there as of December, when the New York Post documented him being taken outside the facility for fresh air after a plumbing problem.
The backlash was swift. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded publicly:
"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. I have nothing to add. Speechless."
Mace's reaction captured what many viewers likely felt: not just discomfort with the verdict itself, but discomfort with the pride Hostin attached to it. This was not a former juror reluctantly disclosing a painful chapter. This was a television personality citing a 35-year-old acquittal as a badge of moral authority.
The context made the disclosure worse. Hostin brought up the Rakowitz case specifically to defend the insanity defense in the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, a case involving a mother accused of killing her children. She told the panel she believed Clancy was "not criminally responsible by reason of insanity" and cited the 182-year history of the defense in Massachusetts law.
Griffin pushed back directly. "That's my issue with the law," she said after hearing Hostin's account. The exchange laid bare a real fault line: Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, treated the insanity defense as an article of faith. Griffin treated the outcome, a man who dismembered and cannibalized a woman walking away from a guilty verdict, as evidence that the doctrine can produce results that offend common sense.
Hostin also argued that investigating holdout jurors, as Clancy's attorney Reddington sought to do, would undermine the jury system. "Jury duty is duty," she said. "It is one of the most important things I think I've ever done in my life. It was extremely difficult, but to investigate a juror for doing his or her duty is despicable."
That framing conflated two different questions. Whether jurors should be harassed for their votes is one matter. Whether a single juror should boast on national television about overriding eleven colleagues to acquit a man who boiled a woman's head is another.
Hostin noted on air that Rakowitz "is still in a mental institution being treated." That is true. He has been confined to psychiatric facilities since 1991, first at Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center and now at Manhattan Psychiatric Center. He has never been released into the public.
But confinement to a psychiatric facility is not a prison sentence. Rakowitz was not convicted. He was found not guilty. The distinction matters legally, and it mattered to the eleven jurors who, by Hostin's own account, wanted a different result and were talked out of it over nine contentious days by one holdout who believed she knew better.
Monika Beerle's name barely surfaced in the segment. She was 26. She was killed by a man who then desecrated her body in ways that still shock three decades later. The jury system is supposed to deliver justice for people like her. Hostin used her case to deliver a talking point.
When the most important thing a television host has ever done is help a cannibal avoid conviction, the audience is entitled to ask whose side she's really on, the law's, or the accused's.
