It started with a dad sleeping on a dorm room couch. That’s the part people always get stuck on. How does a 50-year-old ex-con move into a tiny campus apartment at an elite liberal arts school and basically dismantle the lives of half a dozen brilliant students? It sounds like a bad movie plot, but the cult at Sarah Lawrence was a decade-long nightmare of psychological warfare, "therapy" sessions that were actually interrogations, and millions of dollars in extortion.
Honestly, the term "cult" almost feels too clinical for what Lawrence Ray did. He didn't have a temple or a wacky religion. He just had a terrifying ability to find the cracks in people's self-esteem and pry them wide open.
The Slonim Woods 9 "Family"
In 2010, Larry Ray was released from prison and had nowhere to go. His daughter, Talia, was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York. She lived in a suite called Slonim Woods 9 with several other students. Ray didn't just visit; he moved in. He slept on the couch. He cooked for them. He listened to their problems.
At a school like Sarah Lawrence, which prides itself on being a "bubble" of free-thinking and inclusivity, Ray stood out as a worldly, intense figure. He claimed to be a former intelligence operative who knew the "truth" about how the world worked. To 19-year-olds trying to find themselves, he looked like a mentor.
He started "helping" them.
The students—including Daniel Levin, Santos Rosario, and Isabella Pollok—began to view him as a father figure. But that mentorship quickly curdled. Ray used "therapy sessions" to record their deepest secrets, then turned those secrets into weapons. He convinced them they were "broken" and that only he could fix them.
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The Mechanics of Coercive Control
How do you get someone to hand over $2.5 million or confess to crimes they didn't commit? You break their reality. Ray used sleep deprivation and physical abuse to keep his "family" in a state of constant panic. He would wake them up in the middle of the night to "interrogate" them about supposed slights or "damages" they had caused to his property.
One of the most famous and heartbreaking stories involves Claudia Drury. Ray convinced her that she had poisoned him and his family. He "fined" her for this imaginary transgression, eventually forcing her into sex work to pay off a "debt" that never existed. Over several years, she gave him millions of dollars—money he spent on a lavish lifestyle while the students often lived in squalor.
It wasn't just about the money, though. It was about the power.
Ray’s tactics were classic coercive control:
- Isolation: He convinced students their parents were toxic or even trying to kill them.
- False Confessions: He forced them to write "confessions" to crimes like property damage or poisoning, which he then used as blackmail.
- Physical Torture: At his trial, evidence showed he used plastic bags to suffocate victims and knives to threaten them.
- Forced Labor: Several victims were taken to a property in North Carolina and forced to perform grueling manual labor in the heat, often without adequate food.
Why Didn't the College Stop It?
This is the question that still haunts the Sarah Lawrence community. Parents had reached out to the administration years before the story broke. They were worried. Their kids were dropping out, cutting off contact, and asking for huge sums of money.
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The school’s response? Their "hands were tied."
Because the students were adults, the administration felt they couldn't intervene in "private" living arrangements. It’s a massive failure of institutional duty that led to a 2019 New York Magazine exposé, which finally blew the lid off the whole thing. The article, "The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence," changed everything. Suddenly, the "quiet" weirdness of Slonim Woods 9 was national news.
The Trial and What Followed
In 2022, Lawrence Ray was finally held accountable. A federal jury in Manhattan convicted him on 15 counts, including racketeering, sex trafficking, and forced labor. The evidence was overwhelming, largely because Ray was so narcissistic that he had recorded hours of his own abuse.
In January 2023, Judge Lewis Liman sentenced Ray to 60 years in prison. He called Ray’s actions "sadism, pure and simple."
The survivors are still picking up the pieces. Some, like Daniel Levin, have written memoirs to process the trauma. Others, like Felicia Rosario—a Harvard-educated doctor who was weeks away from finishing her residency when she fell under Ray's spell—are working to reclaim their careers.
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Isabella Pollok, who was seen as Ray's "lieutenant" and girlfriend, was sentenced to over four years in prison for her role in the conspiracy. It’s a complex situation; many see her as both a victim and a perpetrator.
Lessons for the Real World
The cult at Sarah Lawrence is a brutal reminder that these things don't just happen to "weak" people in the woods. They happen to brilliant, ambitious students in the middle of New York.
If you or someone you know is in a situation that feels "off," look for these red flags:
- Total Isolation: Is a new friend or partner trying to cut you off from your family or old friends?
- Economic Abuse: Are you being told you "owe" someone money for vague reasons?
- Reality Testing: Do you feel like you're constantly "wrong" or "broken" in ways only one person can fix?
The most important takeaway is that recovery is possible. The survivors of Larry Ray have shown incredible resilience in speaking out. They’ve proven that while a predator can steal a decade, they can’t steal a person's future if they have the support to find their way back.
If you're interested in the deeper psychology of this case, I'd suggest looking into the Hulu docuseries Stolen Youth. It uses the actual footage Ray recorded to show exactly how the manipulation worked. It’s hard to watch, but it explains the "how" better than any news report ever could.
What to Do Next
- Research Coercive Control: Understanding the legal definition of coercive control can help you identify non-physical abuse in domestic and group settings.
- Review Campus Safety Policies: If you are a student or parent, ask your institution about their "person of interest" policies and how they handle reports of non-student residents in dorms.
- Support Survivor Advocacy: Organizations like the Cult Education Institute provide resources for deprogramming and supporting families who have lost loved ones to high-control groups.