THE View cohost Sunny Hostin has revealed she was a holdout juror on an infamous case where a man dismembered a woman and fed her to homeless people.
Hostin’s admission that she once served as a juror came on Tuesday as she revealed why she feels for the holdout juror in Lindsay Clancy’s grueling murder trial in Massachusetts.
The 57-year-old former prosecutor shocked her fellow The View panelists after she revealed she was a member of the jury in the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park trial.
The case involved Daniel Rakowitz, a known weed dealer in New York City who is said to have killed and eaten some of the remains of his girlfriend, Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student from Switzerland and occasional stripper, in 1989.
Rakowitz testified that he did not kill Beerle, but admitted to dismembering her body, bleaching and boiling her bones before hiding them, leaving her skull in the Port Authority Bus Terminal baggage room.
The man, known for carrying around his pet rooster and starting a religion where marijuana was a sacrament, then turned her remains into soup, feeding her to local homeless people in Tompkins Square Park.
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Rakowitz was ultimately found not guilty by reason of mental disease in 1991, a verdict that Hostin took credit for as she claimed she was the only juror not pushing for him to be convicted.
“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,” the host said of Clancy.
Clancy’s case ended in a mistrial on September 4 after jurors were deadlocked 11 to 1, with one juror unable to find her not guilty by reason of insanity after she strangled her three young children to death in January 2023.
“And the reason I felt that — 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 Thompkins Square. It was in 1991…” Hostin said.
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“The guy who ate the victims?” fellow cohost Joy Behar interjected.
Hostin said the trial happened before she went to law school, as panelist Alyssa Farah Griffin gasped, asking, “You were on that jury?” with her jaw dropped.
The cohost said she mentioned being on the trial in a pre-show meeting and some people didn’t believe her, but a producer found a New York Times article from Rakowitz’s 1991 acquittal referencing a holdout juror.
“Several jurors questioned afterward said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,” The Times reported.
Hostin, whose full name is Asuncion Cummings Hostin, was quoted in the New York Times’ report saying, “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,” she said.
After jurors returned their verdict, Rakowitz told them, “I hope someday we can smoke a joint together.”
Hostin said on Tuesday that she was holding out on a conviction because she “saw clearly that he was psychotic.”
“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,” she continued.
“And you got this guy off?!” Griffin shouted in shock.
“No, no, no. That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense,” Hostin pushed back as she told the panelists how Rakowitz fed his victim’s body parts to homeless people.
The other cohosts shuffled in their seats as Star Jones said, “Excuse me, can I move over. I don’t need to be around you.”
“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,” Hostin said.
“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.”
Hostin went on to say Rakowitz is still in a mental institution being treated, saying it is a “different type of prison because he is sick.”
Rakowitz and Beerle had been living together for a few months, and neighbors would overhear the two frequently arguing over rent, according to a 1989 report from The Villager, cited by AMNY.
“They got into an altercation, he beat her, then stabbed her, resulting in her death,” then-Deputy Chief Ronald J. Fenrich reportedly said of Beerle’s 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.”
The New York Post reported that Rakowitz claimed to have eaten Beerle’s brain, and one witness testified that the soup he served the homeless contained a human finger, per the New York Times.