In 2010, Larry Ray moved into his daughter's college dorm room and began manipulating her friends, forming what became known as the Sarah Lawrence cult.
SaidieLou/Wikimedia CommonsThe recognizable façade of Sarah Lawrence College, where Larry Ray created his chilling cult.
In 2010, a man named Larry Ray moved into his daughter’s dorm at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He befriended her roommates, enchanting them with tales about his time in the U.S. Marine Corps and the CIA. Then, Ray began brainwashing the college students — and soon, he was leading what became known as the Sarah Lawrence cult.
It turned out that almost everything Larry Ray said was a lie. He’d never actually served in the Marines, and there are no records of his employment with the CIA. However, his falsehoods didn’t end there. Ray convinced many of his young followers that they’d been abused as children, isolating them from their families. He also blackmailed them into sex work and then extorted them for millions of dollars.
Then, in 2019, New York Magazine published a scathing exposé on the Sarah Lawrence cult after a friend of one of Ray’s victims discovered a blackmail website Ray had created and informed a reporter. The magazine feature sparked a legal investigation, and Ray was charged with extortion, sex trafficking, and racketeering conspiracy.
Larry Ray was found guilty of 15 federal counts in 2022 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Now, thanks to news articles about his crimes and documentaries like Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, his shady past has finally come to light.
How Did Larry Ray End Up At Sarah Lawrence College?
Larry Ray’s life of lies began at an early age. By the time he was in his 20s, he was working on Wall Street despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree. He often fibbed about his career, claiming he owned an Italian restaurant in Manhattan or made a living as a consultant for various industries. And although he would later tell the followers of his cult at Sarah Lawrence that he was a U.S. Marine during this time, he actually served in the Air Force in the early 1980s — but only for 19 days.
U.S. Attorney’s OfficeLarry Ray, the man behind the Sarah Lawrence cult.
In 1988, he married a woman named Teresa, and they soon welcomed a daughter, Talia. But by 2004, their marriage was failing. That year, Teresa filed for divorce, and things turned messy when Larry and Talia accused her of child abuse. Investigators determined the allegations were unfounded, but the custody battle revealed a lot about Larry’s character.
According to the New York Magazine exposé on the Sarah Lawrence cult, a psychological evaluation of Larry Ray found that “his personality dynamics are so configured that he is able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself” and called him a “calculating, manipulative, and hostile man.”
These manipulative tendencies had gotten Ray in trouble before. In 2003, he’d been sentenced to five years of probation after he agreed to act as an informant in regard to a pump-and-dump scheme involving the Gambino crime family — all while he was actually involved in the racket. While he avoided jail time initially, he was arrested for domestic violence against his girlfriend in 2006, and although the charges were dropped, the incident was a violation of his probation. He was sent to prison, and upon his release in 2010, he had nowhere to stay.
By then, Talia was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College, and Larry Ray began crashing on the couch of the campus apartment she shared with several roommates, Slonim Woods 9. He started cooking for Talia’s friends, giving them advice about school and life, and letting them confide in him about any problems they were having. In the Hulu docuseries Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, Raven, one of the students who lived in the dorm at the time, stated, “Everyone, at the beginning, thought he was weird. And then one by one, he would get them alone, have these conversations, and suddenly they’re like, ‘Oh, he’s not so bad.'”
Soon, Larry Ray had all but brainwashed Talia’s friends to believe everything he said — and he quickly started wielding that power against them.
Inside The Disturbing Cult At Sarah Lawrence
Before long, Larry Ray was not-so-subtly controlling Talia’s friends and roommates. Ray determined what they ate, who they spoke to, and when they went to bed. He started holding “house meetings” for the roommates, during which one person would be put in the “hot seat” and bombarded with questions that were meant to reveal “breakthroughs” about their lives. Through these sessions, Ray convinced some of his victims that they’d been abused as children. This continued for years after they left Slonim Woods 9 when many of them lived in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City together.
Hulu/YouTubeLarry Ray sexually abused and psychologically tortured his young followers.
“He did this with everyone,” said Felicia Rosario, one of Ray’s victims. “He rewrote everyone’s childhood, and he said all kinds of horrible things happened to me. He had me saying that my dad had prostituted me and that I was sexually abused by him. All sorts of horrible things that just were not true.”
The Sarah Lawrence cult ultimately turned into something much more disturbing than these house meetings, however. Ray started forcing his victims to perform manual labor, such as installing a drainage system at his stepfather’s house. He’d then claim they damaged the property and demanded they pay him back. He forced one woman, Claudia Drury, to work as an escort seven days a week in order to repay him. She ultimately handed over $2.5 million to him.
Larry Ray maintained control over his followers in the Sarah Lawrence cult by depriving them of sleep, filming them performing sexual acts on himself and others so he could use the footage as blackmail, and even threatening to kill them. Drury said that Ray once handcuffed her to a chair, covered her head with a plastic bag, and choked her.
What’s more, Ray filmed himself interrogating his victims about things that never happened, forcing false confessions from them. One woman admitted to poisoning Ray with cyanide simply because he convinced her that she had.
Hulu/YouTubeLarry Ray often took embarrassing or incriminating videos of his victims that he later used to extort them.
Felicia Rosario’s brother and sister, Santos and Yalitza, were also members of the Sarah Lawrence cult. Their parents reportedly paid Larry Ray $200,000 to cover fees for supposed damages the siblings had caused, and they even had to sell their house to cover the cost.
The sex trafficking, extortion, physical abuse, and more went on for nearly a decade — but it all came to an end when Claudia Drury’s friend Raven discovered a website Ray had created to blackmail Drury. It featured written confessions as well as a video of Drury claiming that she had poisoned Larry and Talia Ray. Raven reached out to fellow Sarah Lawrence alum Ezra Marcus about the website, which ultimately led to Marcus authoring the New York Magazine exposé on Ray.
And once the magazine feature was published, the police began taking a closer look at the Sarah Lawrence cult.
Bringing Down The Sarah Lawrence Cult
Authorities finally arrested Larry Ray in February 2020 and charged him with racketeering conspiracy, violent crime in aid of racketeering, extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor, tax evasion, and money laundering offenses. Many former followers of the Sarah Lawrence cult testified against Ray in court. Some of them recalled how impressive Ray seemed upon first introduction in 2010.
“Larry, we’d learned, was an incredible human being,” Daniel Levin wrote in his 2021 memoir Slonim Woods 9. “He’d been a Marine, and then spent years working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’d been a liaison for Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited the United States. He’d helped negotiate the end of the Kosovo War.”
Levin testified at trial that Ray once threatened him with castration, leading him to contemplate suicide. He and Felicia Rosario both gave victim impact statements, while Sarah Lawrence College issued a public statement denouncing Ray’s crimes. The trial notably involved harrowing footage that Ray himself had recorded.
Stephanie Keith/Getty ImagesThe announcement of Larry Ray’s indictment in 2020.
In one video shown in court, Ray was seen forcing pliers into a victim’s mouth. In another, he asked for the “sharpest razor” and a hammer and shouted at Santos Rosario, “I swear I’ll put this through your skull.” The jury also heard about Ray isolating his victims at properties in North Carolina and New Jersey for forced labor.
Ray was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
In a January 2023 press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams stated, “Larry Ray is a monster. For years, he inflicted brutal and lifelong harm on innocent victims. Students who had their lives ahead of them. He groomed them and abused them into submission for his own gain. Through physical and psychological abuse, he took control over his victims’ minds and bodies and then extracted millions of dollars from them.”
Williams continued, “The sentence imposed today will ensure that Ray will never harm victims again.”
After reading the disturbing story of the Sarah Lawrence cult, learn what life was like inside nine famous cults. Then, go inside the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo.
