The trial of ex-con and alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray, 60, begins with jury selection in Manhattan's Federal Court today
The trial of ex-con and alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray begins with jury selection in Manhattan's Federal Court today.
Ray, 60, stands accused of 17 counts including sex-trafficking, extortion, money laundering, violent crime in aid of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and forced labor in a bizarre case that reaches back more than a decade.
In 2010 Ray - real name Lawrence Grecco – moved into his daughter Talia's dorm room in elite liberal arts establishment, Sarah Lawrence College, just north of New York City.
Fresh out of jail following charges related to a custody battle with his ex-wife, Ray slept on a dorm room couch and, prosecutors allege, set about dominating the lives of a group of his daughter's friends.
According to the state, the convicted conman who has also served time for securities fraud, began a campaign of coercion, abuse and attempts at mind control, forcing more than one student into prostitution to 'repay' the bogus debts he claimed she owed.
He held court in a campus common room, presenting himself as a friend and father-figure. And he used 'therapy' sessions to gain students' trust, convince them they were 'broken' and that only he could 'fix' them.
In September 2010, Ray moved in to his daughter Talia's student apartment in Sarah Lawrence College, New York. They are shown when she was a teenager
Lawrence Ray, who goes by Larry, is shown in a 2016 interview where he described being assaulted by a mafia boss. He is accused of manipulating his daughter's friends by turning them into a cult-like group
Ray is seen in this court sketch at his trial on Monday. Ray pressed his victim into prostitution for at least four years during which he took nearly all her proceeds - over half a million dollars - through force, threats of force, fraud and coercion
That summer he persuaded five students to move into a one-bedroom Upper East Side apartment with him. According to prosecutors, that is when he really flipped the switch.
Using techniques like those employed by Nxivm cult leader Keith Raniere he isolated the students from their families and began amassing compromising material, including videos and photographs, that he then used to extort and control them.
Talia, pictured , had been brainwashed by her father into thinking that she was abused by her mother from a young age, friends say
Among the evidence expected to be presented in court is data gleaned from the 44 hard drives, 37 cellphones, five laptops, four palm pilots, three cameras, seven recording devices and a polygraph machine seized by the FBI from Ray's New Jersey home.
They also discovered Ray's email account containing 200,000 messages and four iCloud accounts of videos, picture and audio files.
According to the federal indictment filed June 2020, 'Over the course of nearly a decade, between in or about 2010 to the present, Ray subjected the Victims to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse.
'Ray extracted false confessions from at least seven Victims that they had caused harm and damage to Ray and to his family members and other associates. Ray leveraged the Victims' false confessions to extort money from the Victims, to force some to perform unpaid manual labor, and to cause one of the female Victims to engage in commercial sex acts for Ray 's financial benefit in New York City and elsewhere.'
He subjected students to hours of interrogation, bombarding them with false allegations of having stolen from him or, even more outlandishly, poisoned him.
Sleep deprived and threatened with physical violence and sexual humiliation the students ultimately broke with many making false confessions that Ray recorded and used to extort them for money, unpaid labor or worse.
For example, the indictment, cites several occasions in which Ray accused male students of having damaged his property. He 'brandished a knife and threatened to dismember Male Victim 1,' if he did not confess.
He held a knife to a second victim's throat and threatened to use it
