Sunny Hostin and her husband, Emmanuel “Manny” Hostin, have been by each other’s side through ups and downs.
The View cohost wrote in her 2020 book, I Am These Truths: A Memoir of Identity, Justice, and Living Between Worlds, that she met Manny at a church when they were living in Maryland in 1996. “He was gorgeous, decked out in a beautifully tailored suit,” she wrote, per People.
After the service, Sunny followed him to a bagel shop and tried to strike up a conversation. Their meet-cute ultimately became a “running joke” between the pair.
“He would tell folks that we’d met in a bagel shop, but I’d let him and everyone else know that we’d met in church,” she wrote. “That’s where the connection happened. He just hadn’t seen me.”
Two years later, Sunny and Manny exchanged vows. They welcomed their first child, son Gabriel, in 2002 and added daughter Paloma to their brood in 2006.
Scroll down for a timeline of their relationship:
August 1998
Sunny and Manny tied the knot.
August 2002
Sunny and Manny welcomed their first child, son Gabriel.
May 2006
The couple added daughter Paloma to their family.
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September 2020
Sunny shared that opening up about motherhood in her book was emotional. “I struggled for years with infertility and I was ashamed of it and embarrassed about it for so long,” she said on ABC’s Windy City Live. “I suffered through five miscarriages. My son almost didn’t make it. I was on bed rest for probably seven months with my pregnancy and I fell into a deep depression. I don’t think a lot of women talk about depression, they don’t talk about IVF, they don’t talk about infertility. I thought, ‘I need to talk about this so that women know they’re not alone and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be embarrassed by.’”
January 2021
During an episode of The View, Sunny shared that Manny’s parents died of COVID-19 weeks earlier.
“Although I’ve chosen a very public career, as most of you know, those of you that know my husband, Manny, know that he is intensely private. But after speaking with him, he felt that from a public health standpoint it was very important for me to share that we are deeply saddened that Manny lost both of his parents over the holidays,” Sunny said at the time.
Sunny noted that Manny’s parents “were both physicians and they were both very careful” and “didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving with us because we all decided that it wasn’t safe. And after a lot of contact tracing, we still don’t know how they contracted this virus and this disease.”
September 2021
Sunny and cohost Ana Navarro were asked to leave The View during a live broadcast after testing positive for COVID-19. The results were later revealed to be false positives. While reflecting on the incident, Sunny shared how the health scare impacted Manny, who is a surgeon. “He was in the operating room and had to be pulled out,” she said.
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January 2023
Sunny told People that Manny initially tried to talk her out of undergoing plastic surgery. He told her, “You’re beautiful. You’re hot. You’re sexy.”
However, Sunny made her decision and waited until two days before the procedure to inform her husband. “I said, ‘I’m not asking for permission or a discussion or input,’” Sunny recalled. “‘I’m just giving you information, because I have complete agency over my body, and I need to do this for myself.’”
February 2024
Sunny revealed in an appearance on the “Behind the Table” podcast that Manny wasn’t pleased when she had an interaction with Doug E. Fresh on the show the year before. (Manny appeared on an episode in 2023 for Sunny’s birthday.)
“I don’t know if you remember,” Sunny told the show’s executive producer Brian Teta, “during my 50th birthday show when we had the 50 Years of Hip-Hop, Doug E. Fresh came up to me and, in my husband’s view, danced a little too close to me.”
She continued, “We got into the car, and [Manny] said, ‘What the bleep was that?’”
While Sunny joked that “Doug E. got too fresh for Manny,” she shared that both she and her husband have a tendency to get jealous in their relationship. “You could say that he is worse than I am,” Sunny added. “We don’t like that stuff.”
When a viewer asked whether Manny gets bothered by her obsession with Idris Elba, Sunny replied, “Oh, he doesn’t like it.”
After actor Alan Ritchson appeared as a guest on The View, Sunny quipped that he “may be my new hall pass.” She added, “He can buy me a drink any day. Don’t tell Manny that.”
May 2024
Sunny exclusively told Us Weekly the one thing she wishes she could change with her parenting. “I would take more pictures,” Sunny explained. “I would tell myself, ‘Cherish every single second.’ Because it goes by this quickly. They always tell you that, right? ‘Oh it goes by so quickly.’ I’m like, ‘Uh, no. I’m nursing and I’m up every two hours. It’s not going by quickly at all.’”
Sunny admitted that she “would definitely have almost been more present,” adding, “My husband’s like, ‘You’re crazy.’ I was making baby food and doing all the things. But I would have taken more video and more pictures and spent even more time, if that’s even possible.”
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January 2025
News broke in January 2025 that Manny was one of almost 200 defendants included in an insurance fraud lawsuit filed with the New York Eastern District Court, seeking at least $450 million in damages.
Per court documents obtained by the Daily Mail and viewed by Us, Manny is accused of federal insurance fraud and “getting kickbacks by performing surgery and … billing a company that insured taxi companies and Uber and Lyft drivers.”
The lawsuit read, “Hostin knowingly provided fraudulent medical and other healthcare services including arthroscopic surgeries.” The filing also alleged that insurance firm American Transit was then billed “in exchange for kickbacks and/or other compensation which were disguised as dividends or other cash distributions.”
Us reached out to reps for Sunny and Manny at the time.
Manny denied “each and every allegation,” and called the suit a “blanket, scattershot, meritless lawsuit by a near-bankrupt insurance carrier,” his attorney, Daniel Thwaites, said in a statement to the Daily Mail.
Thwaites said that the filing is “meant to intimidate and harass doctors from collecting for care given to American Transit insureds and their passengers,” while noting that Manny has an “impeccable” record.
“American Transit has rushed into the lawsuit without ever conducting an examination of Dr. Hostin or expressing any concerns to his lawyers,” Thwaites continued. “The real story here is about an insurance carrier abusing the legal system to limit and restrict health care benefits to its insureds and their passengers, and write off its proper obligations.”
In a separate statement to the outlet, a representative for American Transit said: “These substantial possible no-fault recoveries can incentivize providers with ill intent to over-diagnose, over-treat, and over-bill to recover the most money for themselves.”
