BS BULLETIN:

• Sunny Hostin said this week she was the holdout juror who helped secure an insanity verdict for the notorious “Butcher of Tompkins Square Park.”
• Contemporary reporting indicates there were actually two holdouts — including an unidentified male juror.
• Even more awkwardly, Hostin’s own comments immediately after the 1991 trial sound considerably different from the story she told on “The View” this week.

Sunny Hostin’s incredible cannibal-jury story just got considerably more complicated.

“The View” co-host stunned her colleagues this week by revealing that she served on the 1991 jury that found Daniel Rakowitz not guilty by reason of insanity in the gruesome killing of Monika Beerle.

Hostin, then known as Asunción Cummings, told viewers she was the holdout.

“I saw clearly that he was psychotic,” Hostin said, describing nine days of contentious deliberations.

Hostin said another juror became so angry that a chair was thrown at her and claimed she gradually persuaded the others.

“One by one I picked them off,” she recalled, until all 12 ultimately agreed Rakowitz was not criminally responsible.

But newspaper accounts published immediately after the verdict paint a considerably messier picture.

An old New York Daily News report identified the principal holdout as an unemployed man who allegedly wanted deliberations to continue while collecting his $15-per-day juror fee.

That initially prompted accusations online that Hostin couldn’t have been the holdout she described.

Then another contemporary account surfaced.

Newsday reported that there were actually two holdouts as deliberations neared their conclusion. Ten jurors favored conviction while two believed Rakowitz was mentally ill and should not be held criminally responsible.

The other ten ultimately deferred to them rather than produce a hung jury.

One of those holdouts was the unemployed man.

The reporting indicates Hostin was the other.

So Hostin’s basic claim that she was a holdout appears to have contemporary support.

The bigger problem may be what Hostin herself said in 1991. After the verdict, Newsday quoted the then-22-year-old paralegal saying the jury “had to compromise.”

She also said it was obvious Rakowitz had butchered Beerle’s body and “literally got away with murder.”

The New York Daily News reported an even more striking comment from Hostin: “He knew what he was doing.”

That is difficult to square neatly with Hostin’s description this week that she immediately “saw clearly” Rakowitz was psychotic and then methodically persuaded the other jurors to accept the insanity defense.

The New York Times also quoted Hostin after the 1991 verdict saying jurors did not believe Rakowitz intended to kill Beerle, but that after the killing he dismembered her body while attempting to commit “the perfect crime.”

Rakowitz was accused of killing the 26-year-old dancer in 1989, dismembering her and boiling parts of her remains. He was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric facility.

Hostin brought up the decades-old case while defending the legitimacy of the insanity defense during a discussion of the Lindsay Clancy trial.

But the much more dramatic version told on television 35 years later isn’t nearly as tidy as it first sounded.

MY QUICK TAKE

Maybe the lesson here isn’t that Sunny Hostin wasn’t a sole holdout.

The lesson is that when you tell a 35-year-old story on national television, somebody on the Internet is going to dig through microfilm until they find 22-year-old you talking to a reporter outside the courthouse.

And 22-year-old you doesn’t know she’s supposed to keep the story straight for 2026.

DBS WIRE SOURCES:

• Mediaite — Sunny Hostin’s shocking claim about being holdout juror gets murkier
• NBC News — Sunny Hostin reveals she was holdout juror in 1991 Rakowitz trial
• NewsBusters — Contemporary reports examined after Hostin’s holdout claim
• Daily Beast — Hostin reveals role in notorious Rakowitz trial