"The View" co-host Sunny Hostin declared on air that she single-handedly forced a not-guilty verdict in the 1991 trial of a confessed New York City cannibal, but contemporary news accounts and a law enforcement source tell a different story.
Hostin, 57, made the claim during a segment on "The View" this week while discussing the insanity defense in another high-profile case. She read aloud from a 1991 New York Times article about the trial of Daniel Rakowitz, a man who admitted killing his 26-year-old roommate Monika Beerle in 1989, dismembering her body, and, by his own boast, boiling her head and making soup from her brains and fingers, which he ate and fed to homeless people near Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan.
The Times passage Hostin read stated that "several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict." Hostin then told her co-hosts and the live audience: "That was me." When the New York Post investigated her claim, she doubled down, saying, "I was. I was the holdout juror."
But the Post's reporting found that multiple sources from the time, fellow jurors quoted in Newsday, the Daily News, and the Associated Press, along with a law enforcement source contacted this week, all identified the holdout as an unemployed man, not a 22-year-old female paralegal named Asunción Cummings, which was Hostin's name in 1991.
Juror Valerie Holmes told Newsday after the verdict that the holdout was motivated not by conscience but by self-interest. She described the holdout as an unemployed man who enjoyed the $15 daily juror stipend and three free meals:
"He was unemployed and liked the $15 a day and the three free meals. He liked that we were arguing on and on."
Holmes also described the holdout as "very determined" and "manipulative." She reiterated her account to the Post and the Daily News.
Jury forewoman Lois Markle gave a similar description to the Associated Press at the time of the 1991 verdict:
"From day one, this particular person was determined that the jury was going to find Rakowitz not guilty by reason of mental disease."
Markle's use of "this particular person" matched every other contemporary account, a single male juror. None of the post-verdict coverage from 1991 identified Hostin, then known as Asunción Cummings, as the holdout.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case confirmed the same detail to the Post this week:
"We were told that the juror who held out was a man. There was no other description."
Hostin was indeed a juror in the Rakowitz trial. That much is not in dispute. She was quoted by name, as Asunción Cummings, in both Newsday and the New York Times after the verdict. But her own words at the time sound nothing like those of someone who fought to spare the defendant.
She told Newsday in 1991: "We had to compromise. But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime." She told the Times: "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."
A juror who believed the defendant "literally got away with murder" and "attempted to commit the perfect crime" does not sound like someone who spent days persuading her fellow jurors to acquit on insanity grounds. The language is that of a reluctant compromiser, not a determined holdout.
Hostin's on-air account included additional dramatic details: she said she was sequestered for nine days and that a fellow juror threw a chair at her during deliberations before she persuaded all twelve jurors to vote not guilty by reason of insanity.
One Newsday article from 1991 did suggest there may have been two holdout jurors who pushed the remaining ten to find Rakowitz not guilty or risk a hung jury. But that same article focused on the unemployed man as the primary holdout and did not provide details about who the second supposed holdout was. No contemporary account named Hostin in that role.
The underlying case remains one of the most disturbing in New York City criminal history. Rakowitz admitted he killed Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student, in their shared apartment in 1989. He dismembered her body and bragged about boiling her head and making soup from her brains and fingers, soup he claimed to have eaten himself and served to homeless people in the Tompkins Square Park neighborhood.
The jury found Rakowitz not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center on Ward's Island. A 2005 court hearing found him still too mentally unstable to be released, and he was ordered to remain in the facility.
Hostin is no stranger to controversy. She invoked her television credentials and legal résumé on officers who caught her son trespassing near train tracks, an incident captured on bodycam footage that drew public criticism.
Her claim this week came during a broader discussion about the Lindsay Clancy case and the controversy surrounding a holdout juror in that separate insanity-defense trial. Hostin used her purported experience to defend the legitimacy of insanity defenses and to argue that investigating holdout jurors would discourage citizens from serving.
She told her co-hosts: "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."
"The View" itself has faced increasing questions about its role as a political platform. The FCC weighed an equal-time case against the program earlier this year, and ABC invoked the First Amendment to block the agency's review.
Several questions remain unanswered. Hostin offered no evidence beyond her own assertion to support her holdout claim. No other juror from the 1991 trial has come forward to identify her as the holdout. And the contemporary record, from the New York Times, Newsday, the Daily News, the Associated Press, and now a law enforcement source, consistently points to an unemployed man.
Hostin's own words from 1991, in which she said the defendant "literally got away with murder," sit in direct tension with her 2026 claim that she fought to acquit him. She has not addressed that contradiction.
When the facts on the record all point one direction and the only evidence on the other side is "trust me, I'm on television," the record wins. Or at least it should.
