Sarah Lawrence Parent Accused of Sex Trafficking and Abusing Students

Over time, using threats and coercion, he persuaded the young adults in his orbit at the school, Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, to confess to crimes they had not committed and then extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, prosecutors said.

He eventually compelled some of them to work for free on his family property in North Carolina, and he threatened others with knives. He forced one young woman into prostitution, taking nearly everything she made from selling sex to strangers, the prosectors said.

On Tuesday, Ray, 60, was charged in a federal indictment in Manhattan with conspiracy, extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor and related charges. For eight years, through 2018, the indictment said, Ray “subjected his victims to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse.”

The charges depict Ray as a man who exploited his victims, initially college sophomores, like a cult leader, learning intimate details of their private lives and their mental health struggles under the pretense of helping them.

He alienated several of the young adults from their parents, convincing them that they were “‘broken’ and in need of fixing” by him, the indictment said.

“For so many of us and our children, college is supposed to be a time of self-discovery and newfound independence, a chance to explore and learn all within the safety of a college community,” Geoffrey S. Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said Tuesday at a news conference announcing the charges.

Ray “exploited that vulnerable time in these victims’ lives through a course of conduct that shocks the conscience,” Berman said.

Ray’s extortion scheme relied on false confessions to crimes that he extracted from his victims, using tactics like sleep deprivation, psychological and sexual humiliation, verbal abuse, physical violence and threats of legal action, the indictment charged. He got them to falsely confess to damaging property, stealing from him and in some cases to trying to poison him, then used those confessions as leverage, the indictment said.

Ray was also accused of laundering about $1 million he obtained from his victims, the indictment said. He was arrested Tuesday morning at his home in Piscataway, New Jersey.

The investigation that led to the charges against Ray was prompted by an article in New York magazine in April titled “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” a law enforcement official said.

Ray played a central role in the state and federal prosecutions of the disgraced former police commissioner of New York, Bernard B. Kerik, and previously acted as an informant for the FBI, law enforcement officials said.

Ray was best man at Kerik’s wedding and paid for much of the event, according to news reports.

Weeks later, Kerik recommended Ray for a $100,000-a-year job with a New Jersey-based construction firm with tens of millions of dollars in city contracts, law enforcement officials said.

In the New York magazine article last year, Kerik was quoted as saying: “Larry Ray is a psychotic con man who has victimized every friend he’s ever had. It’s been close to 20 years since I last heard from him, yet his reign of terror continues.”

Sarah Lawrence said in a statement that the school had just learned of Ray’s indictment and called the charges “serious, wide-ranging, disturbing and upsetting.” The school said it would cooperate with investigators if asked.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .