ABC’s “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin revealed on air Tuesday that she was the lone holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, the man known as the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” who murdered, dismembered and boiled his roommate before feeding parts of her body to homeless people.
Hostin, 57, made the admission during a discussion about the mistrial in the Lindsay Clancy case, where a single holdout juror refused to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. Weighing in on that case, Hostin pivoted to her own history on a jury decades earlier.
“The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it’s well established, and I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” Hostin said. “The reason I feel so strongly about this holdout juror, is because I was a holdout juror in a case — in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked, “You were on that jury?” while Sara Haines pressed for more detail.
“It was before I went to law school, and when I brought it up at the Hot Topics meeting, I don’t think everyone believed me,” Hostin said. “And, then my producer looks it up, and I’m in the New York Times. Apparently, ‘several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’ That was me.”
Rakowitz killed 26-year-old dance student Monika Beerle, his roommate, in 1989. He dismembered her, boiled her head for soup, and boasted that he ate her brains and fed some of her remains to homeless people in the East Village. He was ultimately found not guilty by reason of mental disease — a verdict Hostin took credit for as the jury’s only member who resisted a conviction.
Hostin described Rakowitz as “psychotic” and said he “was in a psychosis,” arguing “he did not mean to kill her.” She acknowledged in the same breath that he had “chopped” up the woman’s body and “boiled her body parts,” and that he had “fed her body parts to the unhoused.” Her co-hosts reacted with visible shock.
The comments quickly drew condemnation online. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) wrote on X: “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.”
Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt also weighed in: “I told you this Clancy insanity didn’t start with TikTok. It goes back well into the 90s when Sunny Hostin was nullifying verdicts for cannibals.”
