Sunny Hostin loves being the smartest person in the room on The View.
This week she volunteered a decades-old secret nobody asked her to share.
Now reporters have gone digging, and the paper trail does not quite match her story.
A Chair Gets Thrown And A Confession Gets Made
The co-host of The View used a segment about the Lindsay Clancy mistrial to reveal something about her own past. Clancy was charged with the deaths of her three young children in Massachusetts, and that case ended earlier this month in a mistrial after a single holdout juror blocked what reports describe as eleven jurors leaning toward finding her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. The charges against Clancy remain unresolved, and a mistrial that left that kind of question mark hanging over three dead children is nothing short of an outrage.
Hostin used that discussion as her springboard. “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,” Hostin said on the show, to the shock of her castmates. Rakowitz became infamous decades ago as the so-called “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.” He was accused of killing and dismembering Monika Beerle, a 26-year-old dance student, then boiling her body parts and feeding them in a soup to people in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village of Manhattan in 1989.
Her co-hosts did not exactly know how to react. “You need to explain more,” co-host Sara Haines added. “The guy who ate the victims?” asked co-host Joy Behar. Hostin kept going anyway, painting herself as the lone voice of reason in a jury room full of angry people. “One juror threw a chair at me, they were so angry with me,” she recalled. “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 by reason by issue with insanity.”
She did not stop with the drama of the jury room. “I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” Hostin explained. “He did not mean to kill her, and once he killed her he panicked.” She then described the actual crime in blunt terms while defending her old vote, telling her stunned colleagues “once he killed her, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts.”
The Story Starts To Wobble Once Reporters Check
Conservative media watchdogs went looking for confirmation, and that is where things got complicated. A New York Daily News article from the time identified the holdout as an unemployed man, not a young paralegal named Asuncion Cummings, which is Hostin’s birth name. That detail alone was enough to set off accusations online that Hostin had simply inserted herself into someone else’s story decades later.
But a separate Newsday account from that same period, unearthed by NewsBusters, complicated the picture further rather than clearing it up entirely. That report described two holdouts rather than one, with ten jurors eventually deferring to those two rather than produce a hung jury. One of the two was the unemployed man already named elsewhere. The other was not identified by name in that particular clipping, though Hostin was quoted separately in the same reporting era under her birth name, saying something that sits awkwardly next to her version of events this week. “We had to compromise,” said Asuncion Cummings, a 22-year-old paralegal. “But it is obvious to me he butchered the body and he literally got away with murder. He attempted to commit the perfect crime.”
That is not exactly the voice of someone who spent nine days heroically convincing eleven skeptical strangers that a man was too psychotic to be held responsible. It reads more like a juror who went along with a compromise verdict and was still bothered by it afterward. NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck did not mince words about the whole spectacle. “This is beyond parody,” Houck told Fox News Digital, calling it “breathtakingly stupid that she would not only admit to this but also act like it’s a badge of honor.”
Pressed directly on the discrepancy, Hostin did not back off her claim. Pressed by the New York Post on the Newsday report, Hostin said the unnamed second juror was her. “I was the holdout juror,” she said. Her co-hosts, for what it is worth, had already reacted like people hearing something genuinely alarming rather than something quaint. Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin said, “And you got this guy off?”
Why This Fits A Pattern With Hostin
This is not the first time Hostin’s account of her own life has needed a fact-check. Hostin once lied about how Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) supposedly “terrorized me” in a congressional hearing. A NewsBusters investigation of the hearing footage showed that Jordan never addressed her. That episode barely made a ripple outside conservative media at the time, largely because nobody bothered to check the tape against her version of events. This week’s cannibal-trial story got the scrutiny the Jim Jordan claim never received, and it did not hold up any better.
There is an obvious parallel here to Brian Williams, the former NBC News anchor who spent years claiming his helicopter was shot down by enemy fire while reporting from Iraq in 2003, only to be suspended once the claim fell apart under scrutiny. Williams got caught elevating his own role in a story that did not need elevating. Hostin appears to have done something similar, except her version involves inserting herself into the more sympathetic role in one of New York City’s most gruesome murder trials rather than a war story.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The View has spent years functioning as a daytime pulpit for whichever grievance the political left wants amplified that week, and Hostin has been one of its most combative voices. A co-host who is willing to rewrite her own biography for a moment of daytime television drama is a co-host whose account of anything else discussed on that stage deserves the same level of scrutiny NewsBusters just applied here.
ABC has not addressed the discrepancy publicly, and there is no indication the network plans to. That silence is its own kind of statement. When a cable news anchor gets caught inflating his own story, the consequences are swift and public. When a daytime talk show host does something similar, the expectation inside these institutions seems to be that the news cycle will simply move on by the following week.
Maybe it will. But the next time Hostin tells her co-hosts a dramatic personal story to make a political point, viewers now have a reason to wonder whether the story is true or whether it is simply the version that plays best in the moment.
Sources: Sport & State, NewsBusters, NBC News, New York Post, Fox News Digital, The Daily Beast, TheWrap, Washington Times