A routine daytime television discussion took an unexpected turn this week when “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin revealed a personal connection to one of New York City’s most infamous murder trials.
The disclosure surfaced as panelists dissected the ongoing legal saga of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts mother whose trial collapsed into a mistrial after jurors deadlocked over her mental state at the time she killed her children.
One juror in that case broke from the rest of the panel entirely, insisting Clancy bore full criminal responsibility for the deaths and refusing to budge, ultimately forcing a hung jury.
It was this discussion of a lone dissenting juror that prompted Hostin to draw a comparison to her own past, one stretching back more than three decades to a case that gripped New York in horror.
Daniel Rakowitz, now remembered as “The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park,” murdered his roommate in 1989 before dismembering her body and cooking parts of her remains.
A jury later acquitted him by reason of insanity, a decision that stunned the city and has lingered in criminal justice discussions ever since.
According to Hostin, she was not merely a spectator to that verdict but the very juror who steered the panel toward acquittal.
“The insanity defense has been around in Massachusetts for 182 years, so I think it’s well-established. And I thought absolutely that she was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity,” Hostin said, referencing the Clancy case before pivoting to her own history.
“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 Tompkins Square. It was in 1991,” she continued.
A stunned Joy Behar sought clarification from her co-host, asking bluntly, “The guy who ate the victims?”
Hostin did not hesitate before confirming, answering, “Yes.”
Visible discomfort spread across the panel as Hostin pressed forward, pulling up a decades-old New York Times account of the trial and reading a passage aloud to her colleagues.
“Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict,” she read from the article. “That was me, 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.”
Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, still processing the revelation, asked pointedly, “And you got this guy off?”
Hostin’s response only deepened the unsettling nature of the exchange.
“That’s how much I believe in the insanity defense, and he fed her body parts to the unhoused,” she said. “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 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 of insanity. But he is still in a mental institution being treated.”
Yet a 1991 New York Daily News article covering the original trial paints a far different picture than the one Hostin described on air.
That contemporaneous report identified the holdout juror as “an unemployed man” — not a woman, and seemingly not Hostin at all.
Adding further complication, the same Daily News piece quoted Hostin, then known by her birth name Asunción Cummings, offering a viewpoint at odds with her recent claims.
At the time, she reportedly said of Rakowitz, “He knew what he was doing.”
The horror of Rakowitz’s crime extended beyond the killing itself.
Investigators later determined he boiled portions of his roommate’s remains and incorporated them into a soup he distributed to homeless individuals in the area.
That detail cemented the case’s place among the most disturbing insanity-defense verdicts in New York’s history, one still referenced in true-crime coverage today.
The gap between Hostin’s televised recollection and the archived reporting from 1991 has since drawn scrutiny, given how starkly the two accounts diverge on both her role and her stated views at the time.
As of this report, neither Hostin nor “The View” had issued any statement addressing the inconsistency between her on-air remarks and the historical record.
