Sunny Hostin Reveals She Was a Holdout Juror in Notorious NYC Cannibalism Case

Sunny Hostin brought The View to a standstill on Tuesday when she disclosed that she had once served as the lone holdout juror in a notorious New York City murder trial involving a man accused of killing and dismembering a 26-year-old Swiss dancer in 1989.

The unexpected revelation came as the cohosts debated the Lindsay Clancy case, which ended in a mistrial this month after one juror refused to join the rest of the panel.

That juror, later identified as Michael Desronvil, wanted Clancy found guilty of murdering her children by strangulation in 2023.

Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, agreed with the other 11 jurors who accepted Clancy’s insanity defense. She pointed out that Massachusetts has recognized the defense for 182 years, while Clancy’s attorneys argued that their client bore no “criminal responsibility” for the killings.

“I thought absolutely she was not criminally responsible, by reason of insanity,” Hostin said.

She then explained why she felt particular sympathy for the holdout juror in the Clancy trial.

“In the Daniel Rakowitz case—I don’t know if people remember it,” Hostin revealed, recalling her own experience as a juror.

Her admission visibly surprised the panel. After Hostin described the disturbing details of the case, Alyssa Farah Griffin asked, “You got this guy off?”

“The guy who ate the victims?” Joy Behar asked, referring to the killer’s notorious nickname, “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” which Hostin had just mentioned.

“It was before I went to law school,” Hostin said as she began recounting the case.

She said a producer later located a newspaper clipping confirming that she had served on the jury during Rakowitz’s 1991 murder trial.

Rakowitz, an eccentric cannabis dealer known for walking around Manhattan’s East Village carrying a Bible and accompanied by a live rooster, was ultimately acquitted.

“I’m in The New York Times,” Hostin said. The article included a statement from her about Rakowitz, which appeared on screen: “We don’t think he intended to kill her.”

Rakowitz’s victim, Monika Beerle, had been living with him as his roommate when she was killed.

The Times credited Hostin with helping prevent a guilty verdict. She appeared in the report under her birth name, Asuncion Cummings, and the article remains available on the newspaper’s website.

“That was me,” Hostin said with a smile. She added that she could clearly see Rakowitz was psychotic and believed the Texas native had been experiencing psychosis when he killed Beerle in their East Ninth Street apartment.

The killing occurred after an argument where Beerle tried to throw him out, the Times reported at the time.

‘He did not mean to kill her. And once he killed her, he panicked,’ Hostin maintained.

She went on to recall how Rakowitz dismembered Beerle, bleached and boiled her bones in a bid to disinfect them, and hid them.

‘He tried to commit the perfect crime,’ Hostin said. Griffin, 37, let out her joking protest at this point, and was met with finger-wave and scolding from Hostin in return.

‘No. No,’ Hostin said, before getting to perhaps the most disturbing detail of the case.

Rakowitz fed Beerle’s ‘body parts to the unhoused,’ she said.

‘One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me. But, one by one, I picked them off,’ Hostin recalled.

‘I said, “What about this? What about that?”‘

All 12 jurors ended up unanimously finding Rakowitz not criminally responsible for the crime on reason of insanity.

‘He is still in a mental institution being treated,’ Hostin said.

Rakowitz willingly led cops to Beerle’s skull after stashing it in the Port Authority Bus Terminal baggage room after first being questioned. 

A former mental patient, he told the court he would rather be imprisoned than held at a mental hospital because he did not like to be medicated.

He is being held at the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center in New York.