The View cohost Sunny Hostin revealed on a recent episode of Finding Your Roots that she changed her name earlier in her career because Nancy Grace had trouble pronouncing it. Hostin’s real name is Asunción Cummings.
While appearing on Court TV with Grace in the early 2000s, Hostin said the CrimeFeed host had such a hard time pronouncing her Spanish name that she asked her to change it. “She struggled, every take,” Hostin said. “It was just so crazy. She couldn’t get it.”
“Then she said, at the break, ‘Can I say something to you?’ I was like, ‘Sure.’ She was like, ‘Do you have another name? A nickname?’ And she just kept at it. She was basically telling me, You’re very good at this, but that name is not gonna fly. You need to just go by a nickname,” the Truth About Murder host added. “I said, 'Some friends in school who couldn’t pronounce my name call me Sunny. But, no one in my family calls me Sunny, I don’t use it professionally.' The next segment, I was Sunny Hostin.”