Sarah Lawrence ‘sex cult’ trial gets off to disturbing start in NYC
The trial of Lawrence Ray, the accused sex cult leader charged with preying on his daughter’s classmates at Sarah Lawrence College and pimping out one of the victims, gets underway in Manhattan Tuesday.
Jury selection in the case is scheduled to begin Tuesday and prosecutors and Ray’s defense team are expected to deliver opening arguments Wednesday, a spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan said.
Ray, a 62-year-old former Wall Street trader and onetime friend of ex-NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, landed on the feds’ radar after a lengthy 2019 New York Magazine story that revealed his alleged abuse and manipulation of a group of Sarah Lawrence students.
The accused sicko moved into his daughter’s dorm room on the leafy Yonkers campus in 2010, days after being sprung from prison after serving time for a securities fraud conviction.
He soon began to assert control over a number of the students, luring them under his thumb with fantastical tales about his life and providing “therapy” sessions to manipulate them, according to the indictment against him and the New York Magazine story.
Accused Sarah Lawrence College sex cult leader Lawrence Ray once handcuffed a naked woman to a chair, then repeatedly suffocated her with a plastic bag because he felt her slipping from his sadistic control, a federal prosecutor charged Thursday.
The sordid details were laid out in Manhattan federal court by Assistant US Attorney Lindsey Keenan as she told jurors about the alleged abuse Ray inflicted on his victims to further a criminal enterprise she called the “Ray Family.”
The horrific scene allegedly happened in a New York City hotel room in 2018, Keenan said.
“He took the bag off of her face. He towered over her as she was handcuffed to that chair, gasping,” Keenan said in opening statements. “She was helpless. Unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to scream for help.
“For hours he tormented her, putting it over her head again and again and again,” Keenan went on. “The defendant’s message was clear: He told her to behave. Keep making money.”
Within hours, Keenan said, the woman whom Ray had forced into prostitution had gone back to meeting johns. The money she earned, which eventually totaled some $2 million, was passed up to Ray and used to fund his criminal operation, Keenan said.
“He ruthlessly threatened and extorted his victims to get what he wanted — sex, money and power,” Keenan said.
Ray is charged in a 17-count indictment for allegedly forcing a group of young men and women to perform unpaid labor, extorting money from them and forcing one of them into prostitution for more than a year.
The accused madman began his criminal operation after moving into his daughter’s dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College in suburban Westchester County, prosecutors charge.
At the school, he enticed a group of his daughter’s friends with wild tales about his life, which he claimed included hobnobbing with a former Soviet president and disgraced ex-NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
He convinced a group of the students to move into his one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side and began asserting control over them by coaxing them into making false, video-recorded confessions about them trying to poison him and hurt his family, prosecutors charge.
Over the course of 10 years, Ray extorted more than $2 million from his victims while he also physically abused them at times in his pursuit of his goals, the feds allege.
The first former Sarah Lawrence student to testify at the trial, Santos Rosario, told jurors Thursday that Ray started to physically abuse him after he began spending time at the Upper East Side apartment in the summer of 2011.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/10/larry-ray-sex-cult-trial-gets-off-to-disturbing-start-in-nyc/