The friends of ripped into “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, blasting the lefty broadcaster as a “moronic” and “toxic” liar — as they threatened to sue her for defamation.
Lawyers representing three of wrote to Hostin Wednesday demanding she retract, delete and apologize within 10 days for defamatory comments they say she made –– or face legal consequences.
“Your brand of ‘journalism’ is no Sunny Delight: rather, your ‘brand’ is toxic, moronic, and daft,” attorneys Edward Andrew Paltzik and J. Tyler Cox wrote in the blistering pre-suit demand letter seen by The Post.
“We now understand why, instead of seeking justice, you now work for The View, a show that long betrayed any semblance of fairness, reason, or common sense,” they added.
Paltzik and Cox represent Warren Hudson, Jax Pitalo and Morgan Seymour, three pals who were with Wells on Horn Island off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast before he went missing during a July 4 boating trip.
The college football player, 18, was , prompting questions from and online amateur sleuths about why his friends left him behind and were allegedly in possession of his phone and keys.
Authorities have said they believe Wells drowned and do not suspect foul play, while official autopsy results have still not been made public over two months on.
Paltzik and Cox took aim at former federal prosecutor Hostin, 57, over comments she allegedly made about the case on The View’s “Behind the Table” podcast on July 13 and on a segment about the Wells case aired on The View the following day.
According to the pre-suit letter, she referred to “a lot of inconsistencies” regarding Wells’ cell phone and “social media profiles being erased,” an apparent reference to claims that Snapchat messages may have been deleted from Wells’ phone.
Hostin said she found it “extremely odd” that “the three boys he went on the boat with” had not faced separate interviews at the police department, adding, “I don’t know that that’s happened here, and that is shocking to me,” according to the letter.
In the segment which aired on “The View” the following day, Hostin allegedly said that there were “some racial undertones” to the case and that Wells “was the only black kid on an island full of kids that were white,” according to the letter.
She was also said to have claimed “three boys with him that were good friends with him” had “kept his phone and didn’t give it to his parents.”
Contrary to those claims, Paltzik and Cox denied that their clients ever touched or had “actual possession of Nolan’s phone,” which they said had been brought back to land by the wider group of friends and kept safe in another pal’s truck.
The lawyers said of their three clients that “at no time did they alter, delete, modify, or erase any data or information on Nolan’s phone” and claimed that the phone was returned to a friend of Wells’ family “without incident or delay” by a female friend.
They claimed that Hudson, Pitalo and Seymour had, in fact, traveled to the island on different boats from Nolan and had never been alone with him there.
They also denied that Wells was “the only black kid on an island full of kids that were white,” and claimed that their clients had “repeatedly cooperated with law enforcement and turned their phones in for inspection long ago.”
The lawyers described Hostin’s comments as “allegations of murder, hindering prosecution, and tampering with physical evidence,” adding that they have “no basis in evidence or reality.”
“It is hard to fathom the pure negligence and recklessness you have shown through your multiple interviews regarding these young men and the tragic death of their friend, Nolan Wells,” their letter stated.
“Your unwillingness to research the most basic facts surrounding the incident before commenting publicly is downright baffling.
“Moreover, as a former prosecutor, you of all people should know the importance of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You swore an oath with that principle in mind.”
The lawyers also blasted Hostin for allegedly having a conflict of interest in covering the case due to her “extremely close personal relationship” with .
They claimed that Hostin was “starstruck” by Crump and admitted on air that her daughter Paloma was interning with him this summer.
“It is abundantly clear that you were not acting as an objective journalist when you defamed Warren, Jax, and Morgan, but rather, you were acting as a mouthpiece for Mr. Crump,” Paltzik and Cox wrote. “This is unacceptable.”
Last month, the lawyers sent a separate pre-suit demand letter to the Reverend Al Sharpton, who has publicly supported the Wells family and officiated Wells’ funeral in his hometown of Ocean Springs on Jul. 20.
Sharpton has denied defaming or accusing Hudson, Pitalo and Seymour of any crime and insisted that he has been asking questions at the center of the investigation into Wells’ death, CNN reported.
The Post reached out to a rep for Hostin for comment.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
