An indictment against Lawrence V. Ray was announced in Manhattan in 2020.Credit...Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Lawrence Ray was convicted of extortion, sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other charges.
When Lawrence V. Ray arrived on the campus of Sarah Lawrence College in 2010, he presented himself as a mentor to the young men and women who lived in a dormitory there with his daughter.
Mr. Ray, then 50, began spending nights in the dormitory, holding forth on the importance of honesty and extolling the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. He asked students about their lives, they said, and regaled them with dramatic tales about his own.
But Mr. Ray’s dark side soon emerged, according to testimony in a trial last year that ended with his conviction on extortion, sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other charges.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Ray, who was arrested in 2020 after the publication of a New York magazine article about him, studied cults and mind control, grooming his victims and bending them to his will. Over a decade, he abused a group of young people, gaining their trust and isolating them from their parents, the prosecutors added, then coerced them into making false confessions that he used as leverage to extort millions of dollars.
Four of Mr. Ray’s former followers testified during his trial, describing how he had won them over. He then made them feel worthless, they said, denigrating them and directing them to have sex with each other and with strangers. One of those former followers, Claudia Drury, has said that Mr. Ray forced her into prostitution and on at least one occasion touched her sexually. Another, Felicia Rosario, testified that she at one point had a romantic relationship with Mr. Ray. The trial did not include any allegation that he had committed sexual assault.
On Friday, Judge Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced Mr. Ray to 60 years in prison. Several U.S. marshals stood behind Mr. Ray as he rose, wearing pale green jail garb, to hear the judge issue his sentence. Afterward he was led from the courtroom, still in custody.
Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in prison, writing to the court that Mr. Ray was “incapable of contrition” and would present a serious danger even at an advanced age.
“While the defendant’s victims descended into self-hatred, self-harm, and suicidal attempts under his coercive control,” prosecutors wrote, “the evidence showed that the defendant took sadistic pleasure in their pain and enjoyed the fruits of their suffering.”
Mr. Ray himself had been subject to physical, verbal and sexual abuse while growing up in Brooklyn, defense lawyers wrote to the judge, while asking that he be sentenced to 15 years in prison.
They added that he had already experienced significant punishment, becoming the subject of “derisive news articles, salacious television miniseries, and sensational documentaries” and held for three years in federal jails during a pandemic.
Understand the Sarah Lawrence Cult Case
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The case. Lawrence V. Ray, who was found guilty of extortion, sex trafficking and other offenses that prosecutors said he perpetrated after moving into his daughter’s college dorm room, was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Here is what to know:
A bizarre tale. Mr. Ray began spending nights at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester County in 2010, after being released from prison on charges related to a child custody dispute. Soon after, he started “therapy sessions” with her roommates.
Years of abuse. According to the authorities,Mr. Ray acted like a cult leader, exploiting victims he met at Sarah Lawrence by alienating them from their parents and convincing them that they were “broken and in need of fixing.” His physical and psychological abuse continued for about a decade, as he kept exploiting a group of the students who had moved in with him at a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Victim and accomplice. Isabella Pollok, one of the Sarah Lawrence students who fell under the influence of Mr. Ray, pleaded guilty to conspiring to launder money, after being accused by prosecutors of serving as the man’s “trusted lieutenant” in crimes he perpetrated.
A guilty verdict After a nearly monthlong trial in 2022, jurors found Mr. Ray guilty of 15 counts, including extortion, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Prosecutors claimed that he had used his sway over the young adults to extort money from them, to make them work without pay and to force a young woman into prostitution.
“Mr. Ray will never again be in a position to form the relationships that led to the conduct underlying his convictions,” his lawyers wrote, adding that he “has effectively been incapacitated by virtue of the very public nature of his trial.”
Before being sentenced, Mr. Ray addressed the court, saying he had suffered from worsening physical ailments while in jail, including insomnia, ringing in his ears and failing vision.
“It’s frightening to feel this bad,” said Mr. Ray, whose lawyer gave his age as 63. “Being in jail has been horrible.”
Minutes later, before issuing his sentence, Judge Liman praised the former followers who had testified in Mr. Ray’s trial, saying they had “exhibited a courage that was extraordinary” in standing up to a man who had beaten and tortured them.
“He preyed on his victims’ vulnerabilities and took pleasure in degrading them,” Judge Liman added of Mr. Ray. “He sought to take every bit of light from his victims’ lives.”
For years, Mr. Ray cultivated ties with law enforcement officials and accused criminals. Bernard Kerik, who was appointed in 2000 by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as New York City’s police commissioner, helped Mr. Ray get a job with a construction company that was accused of having links to organized crime. Later, Mr. Ray cooperated with prosecutors investigating Mr. Kerik, who pleaded guilty to state and federal charges related to his relationship with the company, Interstate Industrial Corp.
After Mr. Ray’s indictment, officials at Sarah Lawrence, in Westchester County, just north of New York City, faced questions about how he managed to be on the campus without the school’s knowledge. Alumni suggested that the school’s decentralized layout and accepting culture may have helped make that possible, according to a report in The Journal News, which covers Westchester.
Mr. Ray showed up at the college after a stint in state prison in New Jersey stemming from child custody charges. But his daughter, Talia, said he was “a hero” who had been imprisoned because of “corrupt politicians,” one of her roommates, Santos Rosario, testified.
A second roommate, Ms. Drury, testified that Mr. Ray boasted of knowing generals and having powerful friends while also saying he believed that Mr. Kerik wanted to bring about his downfall.
When Lawrence V. Ray arrived on the campus of Sarah Lawrence College in 2010 he presented himself as a mentor to the young men and women who lived in a dormitory there with his daughter.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Those two students were among several who, entranced by Mr. Ray’s charisma and seeming empathy, began living with him the summer after their sophomore year in an apartment he had the use of on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
There, students said, Mr. Ray held “therapy” sessions that he claimed would improve their lives. Eventually, he began subjecting them to lengthy interrogations in which students said they became exhausted and fearful as he badgered them into false confessions about having damaged his property or harming him. He would later cite these admissions, they said, while demanding money as compensation.
Ms. Drury, who falsely confessed to poisoning Mr. Ray at the behest of Mr. Kerik, said she admitted to things she had not done partly due to his insistence that she had and partly because other students were confessing to imagined infractions.
“Once I sort of started confessing to those things, each one was like further proof of all the others,” she testified.
Mr. Rosario testified that Mr. Ray directed him to have sex with another student, Isabella Pollok, who prosecutors said helped abuse her classmates and who pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to launder money. Ms. Drury testified that Mr. Ray urged her to have sex with a tool salesman who visited the apartment.
He also verbally abused and assaulted students, according to testimony and to video and audio recordings. Mr. Rosario testified that Mr. Ray struck him repeatedly with a hammer and then ordered him to leap from a window of the Manhattan apartment. Ms. Drury testified that she saw Mr. Ray tell a student named Daniel Levin he was going to “cut him up” while calling for Ms. Pollok to fetch plastic sheeting from another room.
Mr. Levin referred to the incident in a victim impact statement he read in court on Friday, saying that he will always remember “sobbing while Lawrence Ray brandishes a knife over me, asking Isabella to go line the bathtub with plastic to catch my blood and the pieces of my body he’s about to cut off.”
Mr. Rosario read a statement in court describing how Mr. Ray “ripped apart” his family, drawing his sisters, Felicia and Yalitza, into a web of exploitation.
Other former followers submitted written statements. Ms. Drury described Mr. Ray as “a malevolent, violent, deceitful shadow of a man” and said that his abuse felt like “an attack on my soul.” Felicia Rosario, who had graduated from Harvard and Columbia medical school before she met Mr. Ray, wrote that he had directed her to find strangers at highway rest stops to have sex with and that she had tried to kill herself “after Larry entered my life.”
Prosecutors wrote to Judge Liman that one former Sarah Lawrence student, Iban Goicoechea, over whom Mr. Ray had “asserted control,” had killed himself in 2020. Mr. Rosario, both of his sisters and Ms. Drury had attempted suicide while being abused by Mr. Ray, the prosecutors added.
Ms. Drury testified that she had overdosed on Tylenol in 2014 in an attempt to kill herself because she was feeling “trapped” by Mr. Ray’s threats that she would go to prison for poisoning him. After a hospitalization, she testified, she worked as a hostess at sex clubs, something Mr. Ray had recommended.
Mr. Ray also encouraged her to have sex with a cab driver in lieu of payment, Ms. Drury said, and to have sex with a stranger in Central Park.
Toward the end of 2014, she testified, Mr. Ray suggested she become a prostitute, saying it would be “fun” and that she could use the money she earned to pay reparations to him for the supposed poisonings.
Over about four years, Ms. Drury said, she saw multiple men per day in hotels, seven days a week, and gave Mr. Ray about $2.5 million.
She also testified that she finally parted with Mr. Ray after an incident in 2018 in which he handcuffed her to a chair in a Midtown hotel room and covered her head with a plastic bag, at one point saying: “I am going to kill you.”
Source：https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/nyregion/sarah-lawrence-ray-sex-cult.html
