When Lawrence V. Ray arrived on the campus of Sarah Lawrence Faculty in 2010, he offered himself as a mentor to the younger women and men who lived in a dormitory together with his daughter.
Ray, then 50, started spending nights within the dormitory, holding forth on the significance of honesty and extolling the Roman emperor and thinker Marcus Aurelius. He requested college students about their lives, they stated, and regaled them with dramatic tales about his personal.
However Ray’s darkish aspect quickly emerged, in keeping with testimony in a trial final yr that ended together with his conviction on extortion, intercourse trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and different costs.
Prosecutors stated that Ray, who was arrested in 2020 after the publication of a New York journal article about him, studied cults and thoughts management, grooming his victims and bending them to his will. Over a decade, he abused a bunch of younger folks, gaining their belief and isolating them from their dad and mom, the prosecutors added, then coerced them into making false confessions that he used as leverage to extort tens of millions of {dollars}.
4 of Ray’s former followers testified throughout his trial, describing how he had gained them over. He then made them really feel nugatory, they stated, denigrating them and directing them to have intercourse with each other and with strangers. A kind of former followers, Claudia Drury, has stated that Ray pressured her into prostitution and on no less than one event touched her sexually. One other, Felicia Rosario, testified that she at one level had a romantic relationship with Ray. The trial didn’t embrace any allegation that he had dedicated sexual assault.
On Friday, Decide Lewis J. Liman of the U.S. District Courtroom in Manhattan sentenced Ray to 60 years in jail. A number of U.S. marshals stood behind Ray as he rose, carrying pale inexperienced jail garb, to listen to the choose difficulty his sentence. Afterward, he was led from the courtroom, nonetheless in custody.
Prosecutors had requested for a sentence of life in jail, writing to the court docket that Ray was “incapable of contrition” and would current a severe hazard even at a complicated age.
“Whereas the defendant’s victims descended into self-hatred, self-harm, and suicidal makes an attempt below his coercive management,” prosecutors wrote, “the proof confirmed that the defendant took sadistic pleasure of their ache and loved the fruits of their struggling.”
Ray himself had been topic to bodily, verbal and sexual abuse whereas rising up in Brooklyn, New York, protection legal professionals wrote to the choose whereas asking for a sentence of 15 years.
They added that he had already skilled important punishment, turning into the topic of “derisive information articles, salacious tv miniseries, and sensational documentaries” and held for 3 years in federal jails throughout a pandemic.
“Mr. Ray won’t ever once more be ready to kind the relationships that led to the conduct underlying his convictions,” his legal professionals wrote, including that he “has successfully been incapacitated by advantage of the very public nature of his trial.”
Earlier than being sentenced, Ray addressed the court docket, saying he had suffered from worsening bodily illnesses whereas in jail, together with insomnia, ringing in his ears and failing imaginative and prescient.
Minutes later, earlier than issuing his sentence, Liman praised the previous followers who had testified, saying that they had “exhibited a braveness that was extraordinary” in standing as much as a person who had overwhelmed and tortured them.
“He preyed on his victims’ vulnerabilities and took pleasure in degrading them,” Liman stated. “He sought to take each bit of sunshine from his victims’ lives.”
For years, Ray cultivated ties with legislation enforcement officers and accused criminals. Bernard Kerik, who was appointed in 2000 by Mayor Rudy Giuliani as New York Metropolis’s police commissioner, helped Ray get a job with a building firm that was accused of getting hyperlinks to organized crime. Later, Ray cooperated with prosecutors investigating Kerik, who pleaded responsible to state and federal costs associated to his relationship with the corporate, Interstate Industrial Corp.
After Ray’s indictment, officers at Sarah Lawrence, in Westchester County, simply north of New York Metropolis, confronted questions on how he managed to be on the campus with out the varsity’s data. Alumni recommended that the varsity’s decentralized structure and accepting tradition could have helped make that doable, in keeping with a report in The Journal Information, which covers Westchester.
Ray confirmed up on the faculty after a stint in state jail in New Jersey stemming from youngster custody costs. However his daughter, Talia Ray, stated he was “a hero” who had been imprisoned due to “corrupt politicians,” one in all her roommates, Santos Rosario, testified.
A second roommate, Claudia Drury, testified that Ray boasted of realizing generals and having highly effective buddies whereas additionally saying he believed that Kerik wished to result in his downfall.
These two college students had been amongst a number of who, entranced by Ray’s charisma and seeming empathy, started dwelling with him the summer time after their sophomore yr in an residence on the Higher East Aspect of Manhattan, New York.
There, college students stated, Ray held “remedy” periods that he claimed would enhance their lives. Finally, he started subjecting them to prolonged interrogations wherein college students stated they grew to become exhausted and fearful as he badgered them into false confessions about having broken his property or harming him. He would later cite these admissions, they stated, whereas demanding cash as compensation.
Drury, who falsely confessed to poisoning Ray on the behest of Kerik, stated she admitted to issues she had not carried out partly as a consequence of his insistence that she had and partly as a result of different college students had been confessing to imagined infractions.
“As soon as I form of began confessing to these issues, every one was like additional proof of all of the others,” she testified.
Rosario testified that Ray directed him to have intercourse with one other pupil, Isabella Pollok, who prosecutors stated helped abuse her classmates and who pleaded responsible final yr to conspiracy to launder cash. Drury testified that Ray urged her to have intercourse with a device salesperson who visited the residence.
He additionally verbally abused and assaulted college students, in keeping with testimony and to video and audio recordings. Rosario testified that Ray struck him repeatedly with a hammer after which ordered him to leap from a window of the Manhattan residence. Drury testified that she noticed Ray inform a pupil named Daniel Levin he was going to “reduce him up” whereas calling for Pollok to fetch plastic sheeting from one other room.
Levin referred to the incident in a sufferer affect assertion he learn in court docket Friday, saying that he’ll at all times bear in mind “sobbing whereas Lawrence Ray brandishes a knife over me, asking Isabella to go line the bath with plastic to catch my blood and the items of my physique he’s about to chop off.”
Rosario learn a press release in court docket describing how Ray “ripped aside” his household, drawing his sisters, Felicia and Yalitza, into an internet of exploitation.
Different former followers submitted written statements. Claudia Drury described Ray as “a malevolent, violent, deceitful shadow of a person” and stated that his abuse felt like “an assault on my soul.” Felicia Rosario, who had graduated from Harvard and Columbia medical college earlier than she met Ray, wrote that he had directed her to seek out strangers at freeway relaxation stops to have intercourse with and that she had tried to kill herself “after Larry entered my life.”
Prosecutors wrote to Liman that one former Sarah Lawrence pupil, Iban Goicoechea, over whom Ray had “asserted management,” had killed himself in 2020. Santos Rosario, each of his sisters and Drury had tried suicide whereas being abused by Ray, the prosecutors added.
Drury testified that she overdosed on Tylenol in 2014 in an try and kill herself as a result of she was feeling “trapped” by Ray’s threats that she would go to jail for poisoning him. After a hospitalization, she testified, she labored as a bunch at intercourse golf equipment, one thing Ray had really helpful.
Ray additionally inspired her to have intercourse with a cabdriver in lieu of fee, Drury stated, and to have intercourse with a stranger in Central Park.
Towards the tip of 2014, she testified, Ray recommended she change into a prostitute, saying it might be “enjoyable” and that she may use the cash to pay reparations to him for the supposed poisonings.
Over about 4 years, Drury stated, she noticed a number of males per day in resorts, seven days every week, and gave Ray about $2.5 million.
She additionally testified that she lastly parted with Ray after an incident in 2018 wherein he handcuffed her to a chair in a midtown resort room and coated her head with a plastic bag, at one level saying, “I’m going to kill you.”
