A “monster”, an “evil genius”: On Friday, the American judiciary sentenced a sixty-year-old to 60 years in prison for sexually exploiting his daughter’s college friends at a small university near New York.
Lawrence Ray made headlines during his trial last spring when he was found guilty of 15 counts including establishing a sexual “system of exploitation”, sex trafficking, assault and violence, forced prostitution of young women and deriving millions of dollars in dirty money from them get out .
“Larry Ray is a monster,” exclaimed Manhattan federal attorney Damian Williams in a prosecutorial statement announcing the 60-year prison sentence against the 63-year-old man.
Beginning in 2010, for years he “seized (…) the consciences and bodies of his victims and siphoned off millions of dollars,” thundered the judge.
“Sadism. Pure and simple (…) An evil genius,” added Judge Lewis Liman, quoted by the New York judicial press present at the sentencing hearing, which for this 60-year-old is worth a life sentence.
It was Ray’s diabolical plan that has long intrigued investigators: Beginning in 2010, the man broke into his own daughter’s studio, or dorm, at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts college in upscale New York’s northern suburbs.
Along with his daughter, Lawrence Ray, aka “Lawrence Grecco,” has acted as a father or protective godfather to several students for months, gradually gaining her confidence.
Then the psychological grip tightened with manipulation, deprivation, harassment, humiliation, verbal and physical threats, assaults, according to the civil parties at his trial in March and April 2022.
The 60-year-old was also guilty of extorting money, in part, from his victims’ parents, whom he also forced into work and prostitution.
In April 2019, a lengthy investigation by New York magazine The Cut revealed that at least one Sarah Lawrence College administrator knew of Lawrence Ray’s misdeeds as early as 2011, after parents alerted the establishment to his presence on the small isolated campus north of The New Yorker Megalopolis in Bronxville, near the city of Yonkers.
One of Ray’s co-defendants, Isabella Pollok, is expected to be sentenced in February.