Ringleader of Intercourse Cult at Sarah Lawrence School Gets 60-12 months Sentence

When Lawrence V. Ray arrived on the campus of Sarah Lawrence College in 2010, he offered himself as a mentor to the youthful males and ladies who lived in a ‌dormitory there with his daughter.

Mr. Ray, then 50, began paying out evenings in the dormitory, holding forth on the importance of honesty and extolling the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. He asked students about their life, they explained, and regaled them with spectacular tales about his personal.

But Mr. Ray’s dark side before long emerged, in accordance to testimony in a trial previous calendar year that finished with his conviction on extortion, sexual intercourse trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other expenses.

Prosecutors reported that Mr. Ray, who was arrested in 2020 after the publication of a New York journal short article about him, examined cults and mind command, grooming his victims and bending them to his will. More than a 10 years, he abused a team of younger folks, gaining their have confidence in and isolating them from their mom and dad, the prosecutors included, then coerced them into creating phony confessions that he utilized ‌as leverage ‌to extort thousands and thousands of bucks.

Four of Mr. Ray’s former followers testified during his trial, describing how he had won them in excess of. He then created them truly feel worthless, they reported, denigrating them and directing them to have intercourse with each and every other and with strangers. 1 of people former followers, Claudia Drury, has explained that Mr. Ray forced her into prostitution and on at minimum one celebration touched her sexually. An additional, Felicia Rosario, testified that she at a person place experienced a passionate romantic relationship with Mr. Ray. The demo did not incorporate any allegation that he experienced committed sexual assault.

On Friday, Choose Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Court in Manhattan sentenced Mr. Ray to 60 several years in prison. Many U.S. marshals stood at the rear of Mr. Ray as he rose, putting on pale eco-friendly jail garb, to hear the choose difficulty his sentence. Afterward he was led from the courtroom, nevertheless in custody.

Prosecutors had questioned for a sentence of lifetime in prison, crafting to the courtroom that Mr. Ray was “incapable of contrition” and would present a severe hazard even at an innovative age.

“While the defendant’s victims descended into self-hatred, self-damage, and suicidal attempts under his coercive handle,” prosecutors wrote, “the evidence confirmed that the defendant took sadistic pleasure in their agony and loved the fruits of their struggling.”

Mr. Ray himself experienced been issue to actual physical, verbal and sexual abuse although growing up in Brooklyn, defense lawyers wrote to the judge, although inquiring that he be sentenced to 15 many years in jail.

They additional that he had currently experienced important punishment, becoming the issue of “derisive news article content, salacious tv miniseries, and sensational documentaries” and held for three many years in federal jails all through a pandemic.

“Mr. Ray will under no circumstances once more be in a placement to type the interactions that led to the perform fundamental his convictions,” his attorneys wrote, incorporating that he “has effectively been incapacitated by virtue of the pretty general public nature of his trial.”

Prior to being sentenced, Mr. Ray addressed the courtroom, declaring he had endured from worsening bodily conditions even though in jail, which includes insomnia, ringing in his ears and failing eyesight.

“It’s terrifying to come to feel this terrible,” reported Mr. Ray, whose lawyer gave his age as 63. “Being in jail has been awful.”

Minutes later, just before issuing his sentence, Judge Liman praised the previous followers who had testified in Mr. Ray’s trial, expressing they experienced “exhibited a braveness that was extraordinary” in standing up to a person who had beaten and tortured them.

“He preyed on his victims’ vulnerabilities and took pleasure in degrading them,” Decide Liman added of Mr. Ray. “He sought to take each bit of gentle from his victims’ life.”

For a long time, Mr. Ray cultivated ties ‌with regulation enforcement officials and accused criminals. Bernard Kerik, who was appointed in 2000 by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as New York City’s law enforcement commissioner, assisted Mr. Ray get a occupation with a development company that was accused of obtaining back links to structured criminal offense. Afterwards, Mr. Ray cooperated with prosecutors investigating Mr. Kerik, who pleaded responsible to point out and federal expenses relevant to his romance with the corporation, Interstate Industrial Corp.

Soon after Mr. Ray’s indictment, officers at Sarah Lawrence, in Westchester County, just north of New York City, faced issues about how he managed to be on the campus with no the school’s know-how. Alumni proposed that the school’s decentralized format and accepting lifestyle could have assisted make that probable, in accordance to a report in The Journal Information, which handles Westchester.

Mr. Ray showed up at the university right after a stint in point out jail in New Jersey stemming from boy or girl custody expenses. But his daughter, Talia, mentioned he was “a hero” who experienced been imprisoned because of “corrupt politicians,” a single of her roommates, Santos Rosario, testified.

A next roommate, Ms. Drury, testified that Mr. Ray boasted of realizing generals and acquiring powerful good friends while also indicating he thought that Mr. Kerik needed to carry about his downfall.

Individuals two learners were being among the numerous who, entranced by Mr. Ray’s charisma and seeming empathy, began living with him the summer time soon after their sophomore calendar year in an apartment he had the use of on the Higher East Facet of Manhattan.

There, learners claimed, Mr. Ray held “therapy” classes that he claimed would increase their lives. Eventually, he began subjecting them to lengthy interrogations in which pupils explained they grew to become exhausted and fearful as he badgered them into bogus confessions about having damaged his assets or harming him. He would later cite these admissions, they stated, while demanding money as compensation.

Ms. Drury, who falsely confessed to poisoning Mr. Ray at the behest of Mr. Kerik, said she admitted to points she had not performed partly because of to his insistence that she experienced and partly mainly because other learners had been confessing to imagined infractions.

“Once I kind of begun confessing to those items, every one was like further evidence of all the other individuals,” she testified.

Mr. Rosario testified that Mr. Ray directed him to have intercourse with a different student, Isabella Pollok, who prosecutors stated served abuse her classmates and who pleaded responsible final calendar year to conspiracy to launder cash. Ms. Drury testified that Mr. Ray urged her to have sexual intercourse with a device salesman who visited the condominium.

He also verbally abused and assaulted pupils, in accordance to testimony and to video clip and audio recordings. Mr. Rosario testified that Mr. Ray struck him frequently with a hammer and then purchased him to leap from a window of the Manhattan condominium. Ms. Drury testified that she saw Mr. Ray tell a university student named Daniel Levin he was going to “cut him up” when contacting for Ms. Pollok to fetch plastic sheeting from another place.

Mr. Levin referred to the incident in a target influence assertion he browse in court docket on Friday, indicating that he will constantly bear in mind “sobbing though Lawrence Ray brandishes a knife above me, asking Isabella to go line the bathtub with plastic to capture my blood and the items of my human body he’s about to slash off.”

Mr. Rosario study a statement in courtroom describing how Mr. Ray “ripped apart” his family members, drawing his sisters, Felicia and Yalitza, into a internet of exploitation.

Other previous followers submitted penned statements. Ms. Drury described Mr. Ray as “a malevolent, violent, deceitful shadow of a man” and claimed that his abuse felt like “an assault on my soul.” Felicia Rosario, who had graduated from Harvard and Columbia professional medical school prior to she achieved Mr. Ray, wrote that he experienced directed her to uncover strangers at highway relaxation stops to have sexual intercourse with and that she experienced tried using to get rid of herself “after Larry entered my daily life.”

Prosecutors wrote to Choose Liman that 1 previous Sarah Lawrence college student, Iban Goicoechea, around whom Mr. Ray had “asserted command,” had killed himself in 2020. Mr. Rosario, both equally of his sisters and Ms. Drury experienced attempted suicide while remaining abused by Mr. Ray, the prosecutors included.

Ms. Drury testified that she experienced overdosed on Tylenol in 2014 in an try to eliminate herself simply because she was experience “trapped” by Mr. Ray’s threats that she would go to prison for poisoning him. After a hospitalization, she testified, she labored as a hostess at sexual intercourse golf equipment, a little something Mr. Ray experienced encouraged.

Mr. Ray also inspired her to have sexual intercourse with a taxi driver in lieu of payment, Ms. Drury said, and to have sexual intercourse with a stranger in Central Park.

Towards the finish of 2014, she testified, Mr. Ray recommended she come to be a prostitute, saying it would be “fun” and that she could use the cash she acquired to fork out reparations to him for the intended poisonings.

Around about 4 decades, Ms. Drury explained, she observed multiple gentlemen for each working day in resorts, 7 times a 7 days, and gave Mr. Ray about $2.5 million.

She also testified that she lastly parted with Mr. Ray immediately after an incident in 2018 in which he handcuffed her to a chair in a Midtown resort space and covered her head with a plastic bag, at a single place expressing: “I am likely to get rid of you.”