Sunny Hostin shocked her co-hosts on Tuesday’s episode of The View by revealing that she was the holdout juror who stopped a Manhattan jury from convicting Daniel Rakowitz, the East Village killer cannibal known as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.
Rakowitz killed a woman, dismembered her, ate her, and claims to have fed parts of her remains to homeless people.
The women were discussing the Lindsay Clancy mistrial in Massachusetts, where one juror refused an insanity verdict in the case of the mother who brutally strangled her three children to death.
Hostin said she wanted Clancy to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
“The reason I felt so strongly about this holdout juror is because I was a holdout juror in the Daniel Rakowitz case. I don’t know if people remember it, the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” Hostin said.
Joy Behar asked, “The guy who ate the victims?”
Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “You got this guy off?!”
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense. He fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin explained. “All that being said, it was so clear to me in the jury room. 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. I said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ We ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible on reason of insanity. He is still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick.”
WATCH:
Sunny Hostin brags about being a holdout juror that prevented The Butcher of Thompson Square Park from going to prison.
She admits “once he killed her, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts … and fed her body parts to the unhoused.” pic.twitter.com/sLbElgLuGt— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026
Hostin said producers checked and found her in The New York Times under her birth name, Asuncion Cummings.
Several jurors told the paper one holdout had blocked a guilty verdict.
“That was me,” she said. “And it was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic; he was in 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, and then he fed her body parts to the unhoused.”
She said the jury was sequestered for nine days, and one got so mad they threw a chair at her.
“One juror threw a chair at me; they were so angry with me. But one by one, I picked them off. I said, ‘What about this? What about that?’ We ended up, all 12, unanimously voting that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. He is still in a mental institution being treated. That’s a different type of prison, and he’s being treated because he’s sick.”
Guest host Star Jones joked about moving down the couch.
On August 19, 1989, Rakowitz, then a 28-year-old dishwasher and pot dealer in the East Village, killed Monika Beerle, 26, a Swiss dance student at the Martha Graham school who also worked as a dancer and shared an apartment with him.
Police said she had tried to make him move out.
Rakowitz told detectives they fought and he killed her, then bought a saw and bags and dismembered her in the bathtub.
He boiled bones, he said, “to disinfect them.”
He left her skull in a bucket of kitty litter in a Port Authority Bus Terminal baggage room and led detectives there after his arrest.
A homeless man, Milton Irrizary, testified that Rakowitz brought soup into Tompkins Square Park that contained a human finger.
Rakowitz bragged about the killing in the park and later referred to himself as a cannibal.
The jury deadlocked on an evidence-tampering count over the dismemberment. The judge declared a mistrial on that count.
Rakowitz ended up being sent to Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center, the maximum-security hospital on Wards Island.
In 2004, a retention jury found him still mentally ill, lacking insight, and in need of inpatient care, but not currently dangerous.
Beerle never received justice.
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