"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin revealed on air that she single-handedly blocked a guilty verdict in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the man who killed, dismembered, and cannibalized his roommate, and she sounded proud of it.
Hostin, 57, a former federal prosecutor, made the disclosure Tuesday during a panel discussion about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial and whether a holdout juror in that case should face investigation. Hostin pivoted from defending the unnamed Clancy juror to dropping her own bombshell: she was the lone holdout who prevented a murder conviction in one of New York City's most gruesome cases, the New York Post reported.
Rakowitz, a known marijuana dealer and East Village eccentric nicknamed the "Butcher of Tompkins Square Park," killed his 26-year-old roommate Monika Beerle in 1989. He punched her in the throat, dismembered her body, boiled her head, left her skull in a bucket of kitty litter in the baggage room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and, according to news reports and police accounts from the time, boasted that he ate her brains and fed her remains to homeless people, including a soup that contained an intact human finger.
On air, Hostin read aloud from a February 23, 1991, New York Times article about Rakowitz's acquittal. The article stated:
"Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict."
The same article quoted a juror identified as Asuncion Cummings, Hostin's given name, saying:
"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."
Hostin's co-hosts reacted with visible alarm. Joy Behar interjected, "The guy who ate the victims?" Hostin confirmed. Alyssa Farah Griffin gasped and clasped her hand to her chest: "You were on that jury?" Star Jones, seated next to Hostin, half-joked, "Excuse me, can I move over? I don't need to be here." Sara Haines appeared to nervously tie her hair up and shift in her seat.
Hostin was undeterred. She explained that the jury was sequestered for nine days, that one juror threw a chair at her during deliberations, and that she wore down the other eleven one by one until all twelve voted unanimously that Rakowitz was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.
"That's how much I believe in the insanity defense," Hostin told her co-hosts, adding that Rakowitz "fed her body parts to the unhoused." When Griffin shot back, "And you got this guy off?!", Hostin did not flinch. She said Rakowitz was "psychotic" and "in psychosis," that he did not intend to kill Beerle, and that once the killing happened, "he panicked."
The exchange was the latest flashpoint on a show that has already drawn sharp viewer backlash over its handling of the Lindsay Clancy case and the insanity defense more broadly.
The backlash extended well beyond the studio. Rep. Nancy Mace responded on social media, as Breitbart reported:
"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 the core objection: not that the insanity defense exists as a legal mechanism, but that a television personality would volunteer this history on camera and treat it as a credential rather than a burden.
Hostin framed the revelation as a defense of jury independence. She argued that attorney Kevin Reddington's push to investigate the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy mistrial, over alleged cellphone use during deliberations and alleged untruthfulness on a pre-trial questionnaire, would set a dangerous precedent.
"That's going to have a chilling effect on juries," Hostin said. "Jury duty is duty. 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."
Griffin pushed back on the legal framework itself: "That's my issue with the law." Fox News noted that Hostin had also defended the insanity defense in the Clancy case specifically, arguing that Clancy was "not criminally responsible by reason of insanity."
The not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict meant Rakowitz was never sentenced to prison. Instead, a court ordered him confined to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Wards Island in New York City. He remained there for nearly three decades.
In 2020, Rakowitz was among roughly 100 Kirby inmates deemed criminally insane who were relocated to the nearby state-run Manhattan Psychiatric Center. He remained incarcerated at MPC as of December, when the New York Post documented him being taken outside the facility for fresh air after a plumbing mishap.
Hostin noted on air that Rakowitz "is still in a mental institution being treated." That framing, "being treated", glosses over the fact that the man who killed a 26-year-old dance student, dismembered her, boiled her remains, and allegedly served them to unsuspecting people has never faced a day of criminal punishment for it. He was acquitted. The system classified him as sick, not guilty.
Hostin's on-air conduct fits a pattern. She has previously drawn scrutiny for pulling rank during a confrontation with MTA police after her son was cited for trespassing, an incident captured on bodycam that raised questions about whether she applies the same standards to her own family that she demands for others.
Hostin built her media career in part on her background as a former federal prosecutor, someone who, by training and oath, was supposed to seek convictions against people who committed serious crimes. Before she became a prosecutor, she sat in a jury box and used that same legal knowledge to talk eleven fellow citizens out of holding a confessed killer accountable under criminal law.
She did not present her role as a difficult moral compromise. She did not describe it as a painful decision she wrestled with for decades. She read from the New York Times clipping. She identified herself by her maiden name. She walked through the deliberations with the confidence of someone delivering a closing argument, on her own behalf.
The Lindsay Clancy case, which prompted the discussion, involved a woman who raised an insanity defense after the deaths of her three children. A judge declared a mistrial, and Clancy's attorney Reddington moved to investigate the holdout juror. Hostin called that effort "despicable." She said the insanity defense had been part of Massachusetts law for 182 years and was "well established."
None of that history changes what happened to Monika Beerle. She was 26 years old. She was a dance student. She shared an apartment with a man who killed her, took her apart, cooked her remains, and, if the witness testimony holds, fed pieces of her to people who had no idea what they were eating.
"The View" itself has faced institutional turbulence in recent months. ABC has slashed the show's budgets and cut host pay as advertisers have drifted away. The network confirmed all six co-hosts would return for Season 30 after weeks of cast shakeup rumors, a decision that now looks like it guaranteed more moments exactly like this one.
Hostin did not treat her revelation as a confession. She treated it as a résumé line. And that tells you everything about the gap between the people who sit on television panels and the people who live with the consequences of the verdicts those panelists helped deliver.
