4.5 yrs. for sex cult ‘lieutenant’
Was best pals with daughter of Sarah Lawrence mastermind
Isabella Pollok, follower and right hand of Sarah Lawrence College sex cult leader Lawrence Ray, was sentenced to 4½ years behind bars on Wednesday.
Once she is out, she’ll be on three years of supervised release, Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Liman said.
Pollok, who was Ray’s daughter’s best friend, was the Svengali’s “trusted lieutenant” who lined up johns for his victims and acted as the “lead agent” in carrying out his extortion, sex-trafficking and money laundering misdeeds, prosecutors said. She pleaded guilty to money laundering in Manhattan Federal Court in September.
Ray, 63, was sentenced to 60 years in January for inflicting a campaign of terror on his daughter’s classmates at the prestigious Westchester County college between 2010 and 2020, mentally and physically abusing them.
He met his victims through his daughter, Talia Ray, and moved into her dorm during her sophomore year at the small liberal arts school.
Liman rejected lengthy arguments from Pollok’s lawyers seeking home confinement, in which they described her as a victim of Ray’s who had been “brainwashed.” The judge said Pollok’s role in Ray’s crimes was small but critical and that she had engaged in “sadistic” harm.
“... You were in no way innocent,” Liman said, noting that Pollok’s participation “didn’t occur over one day, one week, or one month” but from 2014 to 2019.
“There were many moments over the years when you could have walked away, or at least shown some mercy,” Liman said.
“He did not have the means to threaten you with the kind of prison he threatened his other victims with,” the judge said.
Before Liman handed down the sentence, Pollok tearfully addressed the court.
“I believed and supported someone who controlled me in ways I cannot understand,” Pollok said. “I will live with the guilt forever. I pled guilty because I am guilty. I did what they said I did. I badly hurt my friends, and I am ashamed and deeply regret it. I am truly sorry.”
At Ray’s trial, jurors heard harrowing testimony about how Pollok, 31, joined Ray when he tortured victim Claudia Drury in a Manhattan hotel room.
Drury testified that Pollok watched on with a sneer as Ray forced her to strip, poured cold water over her in front of an air conditioner on full blast, smothered her with a pillow, choked her with a collar, a leash and a pillow, and cut her hair.
“I pushed myself past every limit. I didn’t think that I deserved boundaries or rest or choice or privacy or care. The exhaustion I experienced was extreme and indescribable,” Drury said in a letter at Ray’s sentencing. “His evil has withered us.”
While arguing that his client was “brainwashed,” Pollok’s lawyer David Keith Bertan said even Drury didn’t want Pollok to go to prison.
Citing a letter Drury sent to the court, Bertan said Drury acknowledged that Pollok was among the youngest of Ray’s followers and believed she had no control over what Ray wanted her to do.
“She is thankful she was not in Isabella’s position,” Bertan said in court. “Claudia believes Isabella deserves leniency and mercy, she does not want vengeance.”
Pollok’s other lawyer Jill Shellow said Ray easily molded Pollok when she was still a teenager. Her father and brother were in jail and her mother had a drug addiction.
“She was a loner with no social skills, and mostly she was vulnerable,” said Shellow. “She was a blank slate, ready to be molded.”
Liman pointed out that communications showed Pollok, an adult, was “gleeful” in “delighting in the torture of victims.”
Evidence at his trial showed how Ray forced victims of his self-named “Ray Family” cult to film themselves confessing to crimes and threatened to blackmail them with if they abandoned him.
Pollok must surrender to the federal Bureau of Prisons by April 25.