Sunny Hostin’s Shocking Claim About Being Holdout Juror in 1991 Cannibal Case Gets Murkier the Deeper You Dig

The View’s Sunny Hostin may just possibly have survived the first charge against her extraordinary story about serving on a notorious 1991 cannibal murder jury as a lone holdout committed to an insanity verdict, but her own words from the time are harder to explain.

Hostin shocked her co-hosts on ABC’s The View Tuesday with her on-air confession that she was the holdout juror who dug in for an insanity verdict in the trial of Daniel Rakowitz, 35 years ago, then painstakingly persuaded the rest of the panel “one by one” that he was not criminally responsible for killing and dismembering his roommate Monika Beerle.

The bragging irked conservatives online immediately and contemporaneous reporting soon emerged that initially appeared to blow Hostin’s story apart. A New York Daily News article from 1991 identified the holdout as an “unemployed man,” not Hostin — prompting online accusations that she had simply rewritten her role in the case decades later.

But then another newspaper clipping emerged which kept Hostin’s basic claim alive. A Newsday account from the same day, unearthed by Newsbusters, reported there were actually two holdouts.

But the full account presents a different problem – what Hostin herself told reporters in 1991 bears little resemblance to the story she told on The View this week.

Hostin Cast Herself as the Juror Who Changed the Room

While discussing the insanity defense in the recent Lindsay Clancy trial on Tuesday, Hostin argued the defense type was “well established” and by example recalled serving on the Rakowitz jury under her former name, Asuncion Cummings.

“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,” she said.

“The guy who ate the victims?” co-host Joy Behar gasped.

“Yes!” Hostin confirmed.

“I’m in The New York Times,” she told to her co-hosts. “And apparently, several jurors questioned afterwards said, ‘One holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.’”

“That was me,” she boasted.

Hostin said her position was clear from the start: “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, yes, tried to commit the perfect crime –”

Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin reacted: “And you got this guy off?!”

“No, but that’s how much I believe in the insanity defense – and he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” Hostin added.

As her co-hosts squirmed awkwardly, she continued: “All that being said it was so clear to me in the jury room. We were sequestered for 9 days , one juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me but one by one I picked them off and said ‘what about this’ ‘what about that’ and we, all 12, unanimously voted that he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.”

The Holdout Outed as an ‘Unemployed Man’

The story began unraveling Thursday when a February 23, 1991 New York Daily News report resurfaced and went viral.

“One juror won a battle of wills by holding out for an insanity verdict. Another juror accused this panelist, an unemployed man, of wanting to extend his $15-a-day juror’s fee,” the newspaper reported.

Juror Valerie Holmes, quoted in the piece, described the holdout as “very determined, very manipulative and he didn’t mind how long he stayed here.”

That was enough to ignite claims online that Hostin had falsely cast herself as the jury’s famous holdout. The New York Post ran an exclusive describing Hostin’s claim as “shot down.”

But a report from the same time by Newsday, unearthed by Newsbusters’ Nicholas Fondacaro, provided an unlikely defense of Hostin’s claim and supplied the wrinkle the other accounts did not.

Its report said that near the end of deliberations, 10 jurors wanted to convict Rakowitz while two jurors maintained he was mentally ill and should not be held criminally responsible. The 10 eventually deferred to “the two holdouts” rather than produce a hung jury. One of those holdouts was described as the same unemployed man, the other was not identified.

Pressed Thursday by The New York Post on the Newsday report, Hostin said that unnamed second juror was her: “I was the holdout juror,” she said.

The detail made the cleanest viral accusation — that Hostin simply invented having been a holdout — much harder to sustain.

‘He Knew What He Was Doing’

But the Newsday article opens another question because Hostin’s own words from 1991 do not sound much like those of a juror confidently crusading for Rakowitz’s insanity defense.

Emerging from the courthouse Newsday reporters recorded Hostin seemingly describing the verdict as a concession rather than a triumph: “We had to compromise,” she was quoted as saying then. “But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime.”

The New York Times quoted her saying: “We don’t think he intended to kill her. But once he did he dismembered the body in an effort to commit the perfect crime.”

The New York Daily News quoted her even more bluntly: “Yes we believe he did it. I believe he butchered the body and almost committed the perfect crime. He knew what he was doing.”

The quotes deliver a strikingly different picture from Hostin’s account this week that she “saw clearly that [Rakowitz] was psychotic” and personally peeled away the opposition until the entire jury joined her, rather she told the press “he knew what he was doing” and that “we” – a self-referential slip – “had to compromise.”

So while the 1991 record does not prove Hostin was not the holdout — or, at least, a holdout — who eventually led others to change their minds, what the archive does clearly undermine is the version of events she presented on The View in which stood alone, certain of Rakowitz’s insanity, converting 11 skeptical jurors “one by one.”

——

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!