Sunny Hostin wasn't known as Sunny Hostin until the early stages of her successful career.
Before making her mark on television, the 55-year-old had always been referred to by her birth name, Asunción Cummings, however, her whole public identity changed after working alongside Nancy Grace on Court TV (now truTV), where she made her television debut as a legal analyst, many years ago.
"She struggled, every take," Hostin explained during a recent episode of the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots. "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.'"
"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," she continued of her time on CourtTV, which she joined nearly two decades ago.
Once changing her name, The View panelist said, "all of a sudden, people remembered who I was" and her "career took off," which she admitted says "something about our world" in comparison to how she was viewed when using her real name.
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Elsewhere in Hostin's episode of Finding Your Roots, which examines celebrities' ancestral histories, the mom-of-two — who tied the knot with Emmanuel Hostin in 1998 — discovered parts of her family were once slaveholders from Spain.
Before joining the show, Sunny had always thought both sides of her family were from Puerto Rico.
"Wow, I’m a little bit in shock," the Senior Legal Correspondent and Analyst for ABC News expressed during the show. "I just always thought of myself as Puerto Rican, half Puerto Rican, I didn’t think my family was originally from Spain and slaveholders."
"I think it’s actually pretty interesting that my husband and I have shared roots, so I do appreciate that, and I think it’s great for our children to know this information," she added of their daughter, Paloma, 17, and son, Gabriel, 21. "I guess it’s a fact of life that this is how some people made their living, on the backs of others."
