Sarah Lawrence Sex Cult Dad Gets 60 Years In Human Trafficking Case | Mount Vernon, NY Patch

Ray, who was convicted in April of extortion, and forcing students he met at his daughter's on-campus housing at Sarah Lawrence College into slave labor and prostitution, was sentenced to 60 years in federal prison.

Federal prosecutors had sought a maximum life sentence. Larry Ray, 63, was, however, sentenced to far more than the minimum 15 years his lawyers had asked for in a Manhattan courtroom this morning.

U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman stressed “the resiliency of the human spirit and the courage of the victims.”

In addition to his prison sentence, Ray was sentenced to a lifetime of supervised release. He will have to forfeit $2,444,349, the proceeds from the sale of his GoDaddy portfolio, and the Pinehurst, North Carolina, property where the forced labor took place. The court will decide upon restitution within 90 days.

“Larry Ray is a monster. For years, he inflicted brutal and lifelong harm on innocent victims. Students who had their lives ahead of them. He groomed them and abused them into submission for his own gain,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a Department of Justice release. “Through physical and psychological abuse, he took control over his victims' minds and bodies and then extracted millions of dollars from them. The sentence imposed today will ensure that Ray will never harm victims again. I commend the brave victims who testified in Court in the face of incredible trauma. I also thank the career prosecutors in this Office and our law enforcement partners who made the just conviction and sentence in this case possible.”

Witnesses at Ray's trial painted a picture of how he targeted his daughter's friends and subjected them to physical abuse and sexual and psychological manipulation.

Ray lived with some of the victims in a dormitory and afterwards in an Upper East Side apartment and in North Carolina. He used physical and psychological threats and coercion to indoctrinate and exploit the college students.

Prosecutors revealed how he extorted nearly $1 million from five of the victims, coercing them to perform unpaid labor through force and fraud. He is also accused of forcing at least one victim to engage in prostitution. Ray laundered the proceeds of his crimes through an internet domain business.

In 2010, Ray moved into on-campus housing with his daughter and her male and female roommates at Sarah Lawrence College. He presented himself as a “father figure.”

His tactics included sleep deprivation, psychological and sexual humiliation, verbal abuse, threats of physical violence, actual physical violence, threats of criminal legal actions, alienating the victims from their families and exploiting the victims' mental health vulnerabilities.

The manipulation allowed Ray to get false confessions from seven of the victims that they caused damage to him and his family and associates. He then extorted payment for those false damages.

The victims made payments to Ray by draining their parents' savings, opening lines of credit, selling real estate ownership and, at Ray's direction, performing unpaid labor and earning money through prostitution.

Ray forced one student to engage in commercial sex acts to pay damages to him that she did not actually owe.

“Mr. Ray allegedly used his proximity to his victims to lay the groundwork for psychological conditioning, eventually leading several young adults to become unwitting victims of sexual exploitation, verbal and physical abuse, extortion, forced labor, and an egregious case of prostitution,” FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said last year. “For the better part of the last decade, we allege there was no limit to the abuse Ray's victims received, and there is no way of knowing the amount of damage he may have caused them in the years to come.”

In total, Ray collected more than $500,000 in forced prostitution proceeds from this victim.

Ray also forced three of the female students to work for free on a family member's property in North Carolina. He used psychological and physical abuse to force the three women to do extensive physical labor, sometimes in the middle of the night, for no pay.

The 63-year-old was convicted of racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit extortion, extortion, sex trafficking, obtaining forced labor, forced labor trafficking, conspiracy to obtain forced labor, violating the “Travel Act,” four counts of tax evasion and money laundering.

Ray's co-defendant Isabella Pollok is scheduled to be sentenced on February 22.

Williams praised the efforts of the FBI and the NYPD.

The case is being handled by the Office's Violent and Organized Crime Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Danielle Sassoon, Mollie Bracewell, and Lindsey Keenan are in charge of the prosecution.