The trial of ex-con and alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray, 60, begins today with jury selection in Manhattan Federal Court.
The trial of ex-con and alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray begins today with jury selection in Manhattan Federal Court.
Ray, 60, is charged with 17 counts, including sex trafficking, extortion, money laundering and violence. a crime in aid of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and forced labor in a bizarre case that goes back over a decade.
In 2010, Ray (real name Lawrence Grecco) moved into his daughter Talia’s dorm room at the elite liberal arts institution of Sarah Lawrence College north of New York.
Fresh out of jail following charges related to a custody fight with his ex-wife, Ray slept on the dorm room couch and, prosecutors allege, began to dominate the lives of his daughter’s group of friends.
According to the state, the convicted fraudster, who was also serving time for securities fraud, launched a campaign of coercion, abuse and mind control attempts by forcing more than one female student into prostitution to “pay off” fictitious debts he claimed she owed. .
He held court in the campus common room, presenting himself as a friend and father figure. And he used the “therapy” sessions to gain the trust of the students, to convince them that they were “broken” and that only he could “fix” them.
In September 2010, Ray moved into his daughter Talia’s student apartment at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. They are shown when she was a teenager
Lawrence Ray, whose name is Larry, is featured in a 2016 interview where he described being attacked by a mob boss. He is accused of manipulating his daughter’s friends into a cult group.
This court sketch shows Ray in court on Monday. Ray forced his victim into prostitution for at least four years, during which he took almost all of her income – more than half a million dollars – by force, threats of force, fraud and coercion.
That summer, he persuaded five students to move into his one-room apartment on the Upper East Side. That’s when he actually flipped the switch, prosecutors say.
Using methods similar to those used by Nxivm cult leader Keith Raniere, he isolated the students from their families and began collecting incriminating material, including videos and photographs, which he then used to extort and control them.
Talia, pictured in the photo, was brainwashed by her father into thinking her mother abused her from a young age, friends say.
Among the evidence expected to be presented in court is data from 44 hard drives, 37 mobile phones, five laptops, four PDAs, three cameras, seven recording devices, and a polygraph seized by the FBI from Ray’s home in New York. Jersey.
They also found Ray’s email account with 200,000 messages and four iCloud accounts with videos, images, and audio files.
According to a federal indictment filed in June 2020, “For nearly a decade, from approximately 2010 to the present, Ray has been sexually and psychologically manipulated and physically abused by victims.
“Ray received false confessions from at least seven victims that they caused harm and damage to Ray, his family members and other associates. Ray used victims’ false confessions to extort money from the victims, force some to do unpaid manual labor, and force one of the female victims to engage in commercial sex acts for Ray’s financial gain in New York City and elsewhere. ‘
He subjected students to hours of interrogation, bombarding them with false accusations that he stole from him or, more outlandishly, poisoned him.
Deprived of sleep and threatened with physical abuse and sexual humiliation, the students eventually broke down, making many false confessions, which Ray recorded and used to extort money, unpaid labor or worse from them.
For example, the indictment mentions several instances where Ray accused male students of damaging his property. He “brought a knife and threatened to dismember the male victim 1” if he did not confess.
He held a knife to the throat of the second victim and threatened to use it if he did not confess. And the third time he strangled a student.
According to the indictment, “for nearly a decade, Ray subjected the victims to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse.”
Ray often stated that the damage amounted to tens of thousands of dollars, which he then withheld from his victims as “debts” that needed to be paid.
Some spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in their parents’ savings, opened lines of credit, solicited loans from friends, sold property, or provided Ray with free manual labor.
And, according to investigators, at least one student was forced into prostitution in order to compensate for the alleged damage to his property and to make amends for his “poisoning”.
This followed Ray’s “several years of sexual grooming” for a victim named only “Female Victim 1” in the indictment, a process that included “a case in which the female victim and male victim 1 were still students at a college where RAY supervised [them] have sex under RAY’s supervision.”
Ray forced his victim into prostitution for at least four years, during which time he took almost all of her income – more than half a million dollars – by force, threats of force, fraud and coercion.
He once tied her to a chair in a hotel room, put a plastic bag over her head, and nearly suffocated her, telling her to “behave and focus on paying him more money.”
In an article published by New York Magazine in 2019, some of Ray’s accusers detailed the brutal and sadistic abuse they endured.
One male student who had doubts about his sexuality described how Ray made a noose out of shredded aluminum foil and wrapped it around his genitals.
The young man was also forced to get dressed and go to the entrance of the apartment building where they lived. Upon returning to the apartment, Ray gave him a dildo and told him to penetrate himself in front of the group.
Ray is also accused of starving some of his victims to death by putting a lock on the refrigerator and forcing them to do manual labor on his North Carolina property.
Ray is accused of starving some of his victims to death by putting a lock on the fridge and forcing them to do manual labor on his North Carolina property.
This is the student residence where Ray lived with students in 2010. At first he charmed them by cooking them meals and taking them home, but he soon began to control them through “group” therapy and counseling sessions.
Isabella Pollock (pictured) was Talia’s best friend. In 2010, Ray began sleeping in her room, claiming that she needed him because she was going through a breakup.
Ray’s daughter, now 32, has not been charged in connection with her father’s alleged crimes, but, ironically, one of the women the FBI initially treated as a victim has since been charged as his accomplice and “lieutenant.”
Isabella Pollock, Ray’s daughter’s former roommate, will be tried separately, but she was one of two former students he lived with and called his wife when he was arrested at his New Jersey home on February 11, 2020.
In March 2021, Pollock was indicted on 11 counts, including extortion, sex trafficking and money laundering. She claimed that she was only 19 years old when she met Ray and “wasn’t in the best place” and that “he started to help me through the process and understand a lot of things that I just couldn’t understand”.
Pollock claimed that Ray quickly began instructing her to have sex with other men.
However, she remained loyal to the man whom investigators initially branded as her abuser, even emailing one of his alleged victims calling her “vile” and accusing her of trying to poison five people.
Pollock’s trial is due to begin in July, and until then she’s free on $100,000 bail.
For his part, Ray, who was denied bail five times, claimed that he was an innocent victim of a sprawling conspiracy and that his daughter’s friends poisoned him at the behest of a former NYPD commissioner at the behest of Bernie Kerik.
Kerik and Ray met in 1995 and were once close friends – so close that Ray was best man at Kerik’s wedding. Then Kerik was an NYPD detective.
But in 2000, Ray was charged with complicity in a mafia-related pump-and-dump scheme. When he turned to his old friend for help in dealing with the accusations, Kerik refused. For Ray, this was the start of a lifelong feud.
Ray’s defense team is also expected to delve into the past of his accusers to discredit them.
Opening statements will begin immediately after the seating of the jury.