TV host Sunny Hostin revealed a daunting secret on a recent episode of "The View."
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The former prosecutor revealed that she was the lone holdout juror who convinced 11 other jurors to find cannibal killer Daniel Rakowitz not guilty by reason of insanity in the 1991 New York City murder trial.
Hostin spoke about her time serving on that jury during a discussion about the Lindsay Clancy case, which ended this month in a mistrial with the jury split 11-1.
"The reason I felt that I feel so strongly about this holdout juror is that I was a holdout juror in a case, in the Daniel Rakowitz case," Hostin said on Tuesday's episode, to the shock of her castmates.
Rakowitz 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.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity at his high-profile 1991 trial.
TV Host Discusses Serving as Juror in Cannibal Killer Case
Hostin said she served on the jury before attending law school.
"When I brought it up at the Hot Topics meeting, I don't think everyone believed me. And then my producer looked it up, and I'm in The New York Times," she said.
The show then aired an old New York Times newspaper clipping that read: "Several jurors questioned afterward said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict."
"That was me," Hostin said. "It was because I saw clearly that he was psychotic. He was in psychosis. He did not mean to kill her. Once he killed her, he panicked. He chopped up her body parts. Yes, boiled her body parts. Tried to commit the perfect crime. He fed her body parts to the unhoused."
Hostin said that things got heated between the jurors during the nine-day deliberation period, claiming that one juror threw a chair at her.
Following his 1991 acquittal, Rakowitz was sent to the Kirby Forensic Psychiatric Center. He was transferred to the Manhattan Psychiatric Center in 2020, where he has remained.
