The View cohost Sunny Hostin told a national television audience she single-handedly prevented a guilty verdict against a man who killed, dismembered, and boiled his roommate, and she sounded proud of it.
Hostin, 57, dropped the revelation on Tuesday's episode of The View during a panel discussion about the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, which ended in a mistrial on September 4 after jurors deadlocked 11 to 1. Hostin had been defending the lone dissenting juror in the Clancy case, a Massachusetts woman charged with strangling her three young children to death in January 2023, when she pivoted to her own past and stunned her cohosts into visible disbelief.
She told the panel she had served as the holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, a New York City marijuana dealer known as "The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park," who was accused of killing 26-year-old Swiss dance student Monika Beerle in 1989. Hostin said she spent nine days sequestered with the jury, endured a chair being thrown at her by a fellow juror, and ultimately persuaded all 12 jurors to return a unanimous verdict of not guilty by reason of mental disease.
The exchange, reported by The U.S. Sun, began when Hostin defended the insanity defense in the Clancy case.
"The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it's well established. I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity."
Then she turned personal. Hostin told her cohosts she felt "so strongly about this holdout juror" because she had been one herself, in the Daniel Rakowitz case. Joy Behar interjected immediately: "The guy who ate the victims?" Alyssa Farah Griffin's jaw dropped. "You were on that jury?"
Hostin pressed on, describing how she saw "clearly that he was psychotic" and believed Rakowitz "did not mean to kill her." She acknowledged the gruesome facts of the case without flinching:
"He was in a psychosis, he did not mean to kill her and once he killed her, he panicked, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts, tried to commit the perfect crime."
Griffin shot back: "And you got this guy off?!" Hostin corrected her, "No, no, no. That's how much I believe in the insanity defense", and described her campaign inside the jury room.
"But all that being said, it was so clear to me in the jury room, and 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 on reason of insanity."
Star Jones, another cohost, offered a dry verdict of her own: "Excuse me, can I move over. I don't need to be around you."
The case Hostin described so casually remains one of New York City's most disturbing crimes. Rakowitz, a known marijuana dealer who carried a pet rooster and had founded a religion built around marijuana as a sacrament, had been living with Beerle for a few months before her death. Neighbors heard frequent arguments, often about rent.
Then-Deputy Chief Ronald J. Fenrich described what happened next in a 1989 account published by The Villager and cited by Breitbart:
"They got into an altercation, he beat her, then stabbed her, resulting in her death. Rakowitz kept her body in the apartment at least a week before decapitating it, boiling the flesh away, and cutting the larger bones into smaller ones."
Rakowitz left Beerle's skull in the baggage room at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He turned her remains into soup and, according to trial testimony, fed it to homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. One witness testified the soup contained a human finger. The New York Post reported that Rakowitz claimed to have eaten Beerle's brain.
At trial, Rakowitz testified he did not kill Beerle but admitted to dismembering her body. The jury, with Hostin as the decisive voice, found him not guilty by reason of mental disease. After the verdict, Rakowitz told reporters: "I hope someday we can smoke a joint together."
Hostin's role was not a secret buried in sealed records. A Fox News report noted that a 1991 New York Times article, found during the show's pre-show preparation, identified Hostin under her maiden name, Asuncion Cummings, as the juror who blocked a guilty verdict. The Times reported at the time: "Several jurors questioned afterward said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict."
Hostin herself was quoted in that same 1991 Times article: "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."
The backlash was swift. Rep. Nancy Mace responded directly to Hostin's on-air disclosure. As the New York Post reported, Mace wrote:
"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."
Hostin, a former prosecutor, framed her actions as a civic duty. She argued that investigating a holdout juror, as some have called for in the Clancy case, would have a "chilling effect on juries" and called such investigations "despicable."
"Jury duty is duty," Hostin 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."
Hostin said Rakowitz remains in a mental institution, calling it a "different type of prison because he is sick."
Hostin built a career as a legal commentator and prosecutor, someone who, by profession, puts criminals behind bars. Her decision to champion the insanity defense in a case involving a man who beat, stabbed, dismembered, and boiled a 26-year-old woman raises a straightforward question about consistency. She has spent years on The View offering confident legal opinions on cases far less gruesome than this one.
This is not the first time Hostin's conduct off-camera has drawn scrutiny. Bodycam footage surfaced showing Hostin pulling rank after MTA police cited her son for trespassing on railroad tracks, an incident that raised questions about whether Hostin applies the same rules to her own family that she demands for everyone else.
Hostin's willingness to invoke her television platform in personal encounters with law enforcement stands in contrast to her stated belief in civic duty. Megyn Kelly called out the contradiction directly after the bodycam footage became public.
The View itself has faced its own pressures. ABC has slashed the show's budgets as advertisers drift away, and the program's hosts have taken pay cuts, a backdrop that makes Hostin's decision to generate controversy with a 35-year-old jury confession all the more notable.
Monika Beerle was 26 years old. She came to New York from Switzerland. She was beaten, stabbed, dismembered, boiled, and fed to strangers in a public park. Sunny Hostin made sure no one went to prison for it, and went on national television three decades later to tell the world she'd do it again.
The insanity defense exists for a reason. But so does accountability. When a former prosecutor treats the worst crime on her résumé as a point of pride, the problem is not the legal doctrine, it is the judgment of the person wielding it.
