ABC’s The View co-host Sunny Hostin admitted that she had been a holdout juror in a 1991 trial, regarding a man who murdered and butchered a woman to pieces, and then boiled her and fed her to homeless people.
Hostin’s comments came during an episode of The View on Tuesday, while discussing the holdout juror in the Lindsay Clancy case, who ignited a mistrial, after refusing to find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity.
Hostin had been a juror involved in the “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park” case, regarding a man named Daniel Rakowitz, who had murdered Monika Beerle, the New York Post reported. While Rakowitz reportedly “dismembered” and “boiled” Beerle’s “head for soup” and “boasted that he ate her brains,” he was “found not guilty by reason of mental disease”:
The gruesome Butcher of Tompkins Square Park case involved Daniel Rakowitz, a known weed dealer and East Village eccentric, who slaughtered his roommate, 26-year-old dance student and sometime-stripper Monika Beerle, in 1989.
He then dismembered her and boiled her head for soup.
He boasted that he ate her brains and also fed some to local homeless people.
Rakowitz was found not guilty by reason of mental disease — an outcome Hostin, 57, took credit for as the jury’s only member not pushing for a conviction.
“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 explained. “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.”
“You were on that jury?” The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin was heard asking.
“You’re going to need to explain more,” The View co-host Sara Haines said.
“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 explained. “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.”
Hostin explained that she saw him as “psychotic” adding that he “was in a psychosis.” Hostin continued to explain that “he did not mean to kill her,” while admitting that he “chopped” up a woman’s body parts and “boiled her body parts.”
Hostin went on to admit that Rakowitz had “fed her body parts to the unhoused,” as her co-hosts reacted with shock.
In response to Hostin’s revelation, several people such as Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and former Los Angeles Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt took to social media to state that they were “speechless.”
“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,” Mace wrote in a post on X. “I have nothing to add. Speechless.”
“I told you this Clancy insanity didn’t start with TikTok,” Pratt wrote in a post on X. “It goes back well into the 90s when Sunny Hostin was nullifying verdicts for cannibals.”