Faces life in Sarah Lawrence sextort
Sarah Lawrence College sex-cult leader Larry Ray was convicted of all counts by a Manhattan jury Wednesday — ending a yearslong prosecution launched after the fiend’s tyrannical abuse of a group of young people was exposed in a magazine article.
Ray, 62, faces life in prison when he is sentenced by federal Judge Lewis Liman in September.
The convicted sex trafficker stood and faced the jury, appearing emotionless, as the foreperson repeated “guilty” to the 15 counts.
The panel deliberated for about five hours after being given the case Tuesday night.
Throughout the monthlong trial, prosecutors and victims painted Ray as a calculating predator who asserted control over a group of college students and others to enrich himself as the leader of a criminal organization he dubbed “The Ray Family.”
‘For his own greed’
“When his victims were completely subdued, when they were under his control, he committed crimes to get them to pay — extortion, forced labor, sex trafficking, obstruction of justice, financial crimes,” Assistant US Attorney Mollie Bracewell told jurors in her closing argument.
“The defendant did all of this for control, for his own greed, and to increase his power, to cement his position in the organized group that he led.”
Ray’s abuse began when he moved into his daughter’s campus dorm at the prestigious Westchester County college in 2010 after he was sprung from prison in an unrelated case.
Almost immediately, Ray began grooming his daughter’s friends, wowing them with fantastical tales about his supposed involvement in overseas military operations and his friends in law enforcement and politics, such as former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, witnesses said.
In the summer of 2011, a number of the students moved into an Upper East Side one-bedroom apartment with Ray, where his abuse and control over them increased, prosecutors said.
For nearly the next decade, Ray extorted his victims and forced one into prostitution while laundering the proceeds of the scheme — which totaled millions of dollars.
The feds began investigating Ray after a 2020 New York magazine article drew the curtain back on his relationship with the former Sarah Lawrence students.
Ray subjected his victims to physical, mental and sexual abuse, prosecutors said at trial. He recorded his victims confessing to damaging his property, plotting against him and poisoning him and his family — and then used the mea culpas as blackmail.
Ray carried out his criminal enterprise with the help of Isabella Pollok, an ex-student turned coconspirator, the feds alleged.
His most lucrative scheme was collecting money that victim Claudia Drury earned while working as a prostitute at his direction.
For about five years, Drury worked seven days a week, meeting wealthy clients who paid her exorbitant amounts of money in exchange for sex, she testified. Drury turned over about $2.5 million in proceeds to Ray.
When Ray felt threatened that Drury was slipping from his grasp, he and Pollok confronted her at Midtown’s Gregory Hotel, where he tortured her over the course of a night, prosecutors said.
He ordered her to strip naked, handcuffed her to a chair and tried to suffocate her repeatedly with a plastic bag, Drury told jurors.
“I was terrified. I was trembling,” she testified last month.
Ray has been held at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center since his arrest in 2020. Pollok was subsequently charged for her alleged role in the enterprise and has pleaded not guilty. She’s scheduled to go to trial later this year.