Sarah Lawrence sex cult leader Larry Ray sentenced to 60 years in prison

On Friday, Sarah Lawrence sex cult leader Larry Ray was sentenced to 60 years in prison for abusing a group of young people he forced into unpaid labor, mental manipulation and sexual exploitation for nearly a decade.

“Mr. Ray’s behavior in this case was especially aggravating, his crimes especially heinous,” Judge Lewis Lyman said before sentencing Friday morning in Manhattan federal court.

Liman said that Ray stripped his victims of their self-esteem, memories, and “eventually their bodies”, adding that he had an evil genius to mentally break his victims.

“It was pure sadism,” Liman said of the torture that Ray subjected one of his victims.

Ray, 63, looked unconcerned when the verdict was announced. There is no parole in the federal system.

Several of Ray’s victims made statements in court at the sentencing hearing, including a representative for Claudia Drury, whom Ray had forced into prostitution for years.

Drury wrote that she had suffered horrendous damage from years of abuse at the hands of Ray.

“I barely have the energy to exist day in and day out,” Drury said in a statement.

“He ruined my life,” she added. “I have nightmares almost every night. Everything makes me tired.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Bracewell urged Lyman to jail Ray for life until sentencing, arguing that his case is like a murder case due to the full and far-reaching impact of his abuse on his victims.

“What the court and jurors saw was the unspeakable cruelty of the defendant,” Bracewell said of the testimony and evidence presented at the trial.

“He took the lives of those victims,” she added.

Briefly, Ray told Lyman that in the two federal prisons where he had been incarcerated since his arrest three years earlier, he had been under harsh conditions, but showed no remorse or apologized to his victims.

“Being in jail was terrible, especially because of the lockdown,” Ray said.

At the end of his statement, he briefly suffocated, telling the judge that his father, stepfather, and mother died while he was in prison.

Ray was convicted in April 2022 on a range of charges including racketeering conspiracy, money laundering, sex trafficking, forced labor and tax evasion.

During Ray’s month-long trial last year, federal prosecutors showed jurors how Ray physically and mentally abused a group of young people he met after moving into his daughter’s dorm on campus in 2010.

Ray captivated impressionable classmates with stories about his life, which allegedly included meetings with world leaders, participation in military operations and a bitter feud with former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.

Ray convinced several students to move into his one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side after the school year, where, according to court testimony, he exercised tyrannical control over them.

The demon brainwashed the young people, convincing some of them that they damaged his property or poisoned him. He recorded false confessions from his victims and used the video as leverage to control them.

Ray forced Drury into prostitution for nearly five years and pocketed the estimated $2.5 million she earned off high-end johns she had sex with in Manhattan hotel rooms.

In October 2018, Ray feared that Drury might slip out of his control and tortured her for hours in a Manhattan hotel room, she testified at her trial.

Ray ordered Drury to strip naked and then handcuffed her hands and feet to a chair, which she used as props with her underpants, she testified.

He then doused her with water and placed a chair next to the air conditioner to lower her body temperature. He also strangled her with a plastic bag, she told jurors.

“I was out of breath. I was scared. I was trembling. You cannot breathe. You want to breathe a lot. It only makes it much worse. It was terrible,” she told jurors about the alleged sadistic abuse.

Ray’s crimes were first exposed in a 2019 New York Magazine article. A few months later, the FBI arrested him at his home in New Jersey.

His senior assistant, former student Isabella Pollock, pleaded guilty in September to one count of money laundering.