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Sarah Lawrence Cult Leader Convicted of Trafficking and Extortion

In 2010, Lawrence V. Ray moved into his daughter’s dormitory, gathered a circle of young followers around himself and began years of domination.

Lawrence Ray was found guilty of extortion, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Credit...U.S. Attorney's office, via Associated Press

For a decade, Lawrence V. Ray exerted near-total control over a group of young people he met after moving into a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College, prosecutors said. He presented himself as a mentor, isolating students from their parents, pressuring them into degrading acts and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from them.

Some remained loyal, even after a story in New York magazine in 2019 detailed a host of abuses ascribed to Mr. Ray. But during a nearly monthlong trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, four former followers provided detailed testimony about how he indoctrinated and exploited them.

On Wednesday, three of those witnesses watched from the gallery as the jury forewoman announced that Mr. Ray had been found guilty of all 15 federal counts, including extortion, sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.

Mr. Ray, 62, wearing a blue shirt and dark-colored dress pants, was impassive as the verdict was announced. Afterward, defense lawyers declined to comment.

Damian Williams, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement that the verdict was just and praised those who testified, saying, “We are in awe of their bravery in the face of incredible trauma.”

Mr. Ray is scheduled to be sentenced in September. The sex-trafficking charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum sentence of life.

The verdict, which came after about four hours of deliberation, brings some resolution to a bizarre series of events that began in 2010, when Mr. Ray emerged from a New Jersey prison where he had served time on charges related to a child-custody dispute. Prosecutors said he then moved into the dormitory where his daughter, Talia Ray, lived on the campus of Sarah Lawrence, in Westchester County, just north of New York City.

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Mr. Ray moved into a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College while his daughter attended the school.Credit...Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

Soon, Mr. Ray was cooking meals and leading conversations about the importance of honesty and morality, former students said. In summer 2011, several students began sleeping at an apartment where Mr. Ray was living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, witnesses said, taking part in “therapy” sessions that Mr. Ray said were meant to improve their lives.

Mr. Ray compared himself to the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, according to testimony, and described an approach to life called “Quest for Potential.” Former students said he regaled them with dramatic stories about his supposed military exploits and connections to law enforcement.

In Mr. Ray’s telling, he was a patriot with powerful enemies, several witnesses said, someone unjustly imprisoned after exposing corruption by his onetime friend, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner. Several former followers said Mr. Ray spoke often about Mr. Kerik and others who he believed were out to sabotage him and cause his downfall.

Prosecutors said Mr. Ray psychologically manipulated his victims while living with them in New York, North Carolina and New Jersey, controlling where they went, to whom they spoke, what they ate and when they slept.

He accused his followers of damaging his property and poisoning him, according to evidence from the government. Witnesses testified that he extracted false confessions from them during hourslong interrogations, then used those admissions as leverage to demand hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for imagined infractions.

Mr. Ray threatened to dismember one student while standing over him holding a knife, prosecutors said, and threatened to shatter another’s skull with a hammer. He was also accused of forcing a young woman into prostitution. Years later, she said, he tightened a plastic bag over her head while she fought for breath. About six months after that, she fled New York and Mr. Ray.

“He used the threatening displays of violence both to create fear and maintain control over his victims,” a prosecutor, Mollie Bracewell, said during her closing statement to the jury. “His victims would be too terrified to say no to his demands.”

Defense lawyers argued that Mr. Ray had become caught up in a group delusion created by his daughter’s friends and roommates, some of whom suffered from mental illness. Those young people, the defense said, embellished some of Mr. Ray’s tales of intrigue about Mr. Kerik and other topics, creating a “fantastic conspiracy” targeting Mr. Ray and leading him to collect confessions as evidence.

“The world that Larry and the others cultivated over the course of a decade may not be one that you or I could ever understand,” one of Mr. Ray’s lawyers, Marne Lenox, told jurors during her summation. “But for Larry and the others involved, through the looking glass this world was real.”

While making their case, prosecutors drew upon journal entries, email messages and written confessions by students. At one point they introduced into evidence a list of academic articles found on Mr. Ray’s hard drives, including one titled “Cult Membership: What Factors Contribute to Joining or Leaving?” and another called “Mind Control: The Ultimate Terror.”

Prosecutors also introduced photographs and audio and video recordings that provided a glimpse of life with Mr. Ray. One video shows a group of young people decorating a tree in Mr. Ray’s Manhattan apartment while listening to the song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Another shows a student, Claudia Drury, calmly telling Mr. Ray she had poisoned him with mercury, cyanide and arsenic — something she testified she had not actually done.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence in the trial came from several of Mr. Ray’s former followers who described how he had gone from paternal to abusive.

“He never thought they would have the courage to take the stand,” a prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, told jurors. “To face the abuser they had been taught to revere and trained to fear.”

Santos Rosario, who had been a student at Sarah Lawrence, testified that Mr. Ray had held a knife to his genitals, struck him with a hammer, persuaded him that he had damaged more than $100,000 worth of property in the Upper East Side apartment and suggested he could go to prison for as long as 400 years.

Mr. Rosario said that he asked his parents for money to give to Mr. Ray, at one point stealing $10,000 in cash from a business his mother ran.

Two of Mr. Rosario’s sisters, whom he introduced to Mr. Ray, also testified. One, Felicia Rosario, said that Mr. Ray had directed her to have sex with strangers while she was in a romantic relationship with him.

He then told her she owed him large sums, in part because she had “cheated” on him, she testified, and said during a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2012 that he would arrange for his law enforcement friends to “come after” her if she did not do as he directed.

Ms. Rosario testified that she tried to kill herself during that trip.

“I felt so guilty, because of the things that he was saying that I had done or had participated in that I hadn’t,” she said. “I was completely overwhelmed and terrified.”

Ms. Drury said that Mr. Ray created an atmosphere in which people were pressured so often into false confessions that they became easy. “Once I sort of started confessing to those things, each one was like further proof of all the others,” she said.

Mr. Ray demanded payments from her after she falsely confessed to poisoning him, she testified, and threatened her, too, with prison. In 2015 she became a prostitute at Mr. Ray’s suggestion, she said, working seven days a week for four years and giving him about $2.5 million in proceeds.

She fled New York, she said, after an incident in 2018 in which Mr. Ray came to a hotel room in Midtown where she was staying, handcuffed her naked to a chair, choked her with a leash and collar and repeatedly placed plastic bags over her head, causing her to gasp for oxygen.

Mr. Ray was taunting her all the while, Ms. Drury said.

When he was not using the bags to cut off her breathing, Ms. Drury said, Mr. Ray held them in his hands, toying “very delicately” with them and creating “rustling” and “snapping” sounds.

“He did that throughout the course of the night,” she testified. “It was terrifying.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Sarah Lawrence Cult Leader Is Convicted of Trafficking and Extortion. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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