“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin said on air Tuesday that she was the holdout juror in the 1991 trial of Daniel Rakowitz, known as the Butcher of Tompkins Square Park, who killed and dismembered his roommate Monika Beerle. Hostin said she persuaded fellow jurors “one by one” to find him not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.
She said the jury was sequestered for nine days and that one juror threw a chair at her. Co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin reacted, “And you got this guy off?!”
A February 1991 New York Daily News report then resurfaced identifying the holdout as “an unemployed man,” and the New York Post described her claim as “shot down.”
But a Newsday account from the same period, unearthed by Newsbusters, reported two holdouts, one of them unidentified.
Pressed by the Post, Hostin said that second juror was her.
Her own words from 1991, compiled by Mediaite, sit uneasily with the on-air version.
Newsday quoted her saying, “We had to compromise.” The Daily News quoted her: “He knew what he was doing.”
Mediaite concluded that the record does not prove Hostin was not a holdout, but undermines her account of standing alone and converting 11 skeptical jurors.
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