Tour de Farce: Sunny Hostin Backpedals Like A Cyclist On Lone Holdout Juror Claim

One problem with being a TV personality on a daytime talk show is that everything you say gets dissected, examined, and scrutinized. That fact was especially true for “The View’s” Sunny Hostin last week when she boasted to the world that she was the lone holdout juror in the murder trial of The Butcher of Tompkins Square Park. But after journalists and critics dug into contemporaneous reports and unearthed the truth, Hostin backpedaled hard on their Behind the Table podcast with help from Executive Producer Brian Teta.

Back on September 22, Hostin framed herself as the lone holdout juror who faced off with the rest, utilizing her intelligence and charisma to sway the other 11 to her way of seeing the evidence, and that she allegedly experienced violence in the deliberation room:

And we were sequestered for nine days; one juror threw a chair at me. They were so angry with me and 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].

The production team even backed up Hostin’s claims by pulling up a New York Times article that reported: “Several jurors questioned afterwards said one holdout juror was principally responsible for preventing them from returning a guilty verdict.” “That was me,” she touted.

Sunny Hostin brags about being a holdout juror that prevented The Butcher of Thompson Square Park from going to prison.
She admits “once he killed her, he chopped up her body parts, yes, boiled her body parts … and fed her body parts to the unhoused.” https://t.co/sLbElgLuGt

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 22, 2026

But it wasn’t.

Investigations by NewsBusters and others discovered numerous reports from the time referring to the holdout as a male, with only a Newsday article attesting to the fact that there were two holdouts.

After days of mounting criticism and public pressure, Teta had Hostin appear on Monday’s Behind the Table podcast to walk it all back and explain what she had actually meant. “So, the amount of attention this got was a little bit outsized, I thought,” Teta huffed.

Gingerly tiptoeing through what had been uncovered, Teta brought up those reports from the time and how “they were talking about a man that other people pointed to as saying this is the reason we couldn’t come to a verdict.”

“I remember him,” Hostin finally recalled.

Hostin argued that they were both holdouts, but for different charges the killer was facing. According to her, she was the holdout on the murder itself, while the other guy was a holdout on the desecration of the victim’s body:

Yes, he was insane when he killed her. And he said that. He confessed that he didn’t realize that she was even dead. But then he decides to dismember her. I just thought that was so clear and gruesome and despicable to do that to someone’s remains. I thought that he should be found guilty of that. And everyone else did too, except for this one guy. And we were, like, kind of looking at him, like, that was the easy one.

While Teta did bring up how Hostin “talked about having to convince the other jurors” on the show, he didn’t really press her on why they didn’t bring her up when talking to the press, nor why they didn’t mention a chair being thrown in the room.

“So, when I was explaining it to The Times and the news, I guess Newsday or the Daily News or whatever, we were, all of us were really honing in on that mistrial piece. Because it felt bad,” Hostin added, trying to explain why the other jurors didn’t mention her holdout.

Before Teta pivoted the conversation to one of her other controversies from that week (lashing out at Judge Judy), Hostin took a swipe at her critics for essentially being too stupid to understand the case. “So, while I know it’s complex for the average person, it’s not only, it wasn’t complex to me then. And 35 years later, now as an attorney for over 30 years, it’s not complex to me now,” she chided.

Nah, Sunny. You’re just upset that people had the nerve to look into your claims instead of just taking you at your word. Rightfully so.

***

Nicholas C. Fondacaro is the associate editor for the Media Research Center and NewsBusters.

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