Sarah Lawrence Parent Used Sex Tapes in Extortion, Prosecutors Say

Some of the videos were particularly disturbing, prosecutors said. The father, Lawrence V. Ray, has been accused of forcing at least one young woman into prostitution, and prosecutors said that he sometimes made her take footage of her sexual encounters with customers and then used it as leverage against her.

The disclosure by the prosecutors came at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wednesday afternoon where Ray pleaded not guilty to a nine-count indictment in which he stands accused of crimes including extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor and money laundering.

From 2010 to 2018, the indictment said, Ray, a felon with connections to mobsters, intelligence officers and former New York City police commissioner Bernard B. Kerik, subjected his victims to “sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse.”

The case against Ray, 60, began after New York magazine published a lengthy article in April — “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence” — that detailed how, after getting out of prison in 2010, he moved into his daughter’s dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College, an elite liberal arts school in Yonkers, New York, and set himself up as a Svengali-like figure for some of her troubled friends and classmates.

Ray at first held “therapy sessions” with his daughter and her friends, but over time he used threats, physical abuse and coercion to persuade them to confess to crimes they had not committed, then extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from them, the indictment said.

Ray, a stocky man with a bald head and a commanding manner, alienated several of the young people from their parents, convincing them that they were “ ‘broken’ and in need of fixing,” the indictment said.

He forced one young woman into prostitution, taking the money that she made from selling sex, the indictment said. He threatened others with knives and coerced them into working without pay on a property his family owned in North Carolina.

On Tuesday, Danielle Sassoon, an assistant U.S. attorney, said that during the investigation of Ray, federal officials conducted 17 interviews with witnesses, though she did not say who the witnesses were. Sassoon also said that prosecutors had obtained emails and financial records from Ray and executed search warrants on one of his homes and a storage facility he used.

Among the most sensitive evidence collected, Sassoon noted, were the sexually explicit videos collected from the young woman forced into prostitution, which were found on some of the nearly 40 electronic devices seized in a search of Ray’s home. Other videos showed Ray “berating” some of his followers, Sassoon said.

Federal authorities also discovered several journals during the search of the home. Sassoon told Judge Lewis J. Liman that Ray would often direct his victims to write “sensitive and incriminating things” and then use the material against them.

The accusations seemed especially stunning because of where the incidents are said to have occurred: on the leafy Sarah Lawrence campus, where red brick buildings frame wide lawns and a wisteria arbor dominates the grounds.

In a statement released Wednesday evening, Cristle Collins Judd, the president of Sarah Lawrence, addressed the question of how the college failed to realize that Ray had been living on campus. She said perhaps because the student housing in question was a town house with its own entrance, other students did not realize he was there.

“What we do know is that no reports about this parent’s presence on campus during that semester, formal or informal, were lodged by students sharing that small living space, by their student neighbors or by anyone else,” she said, adding that the crimes Ray is charged with committing did not occur at Sarah Lawrence, although he met the victims at the college.

Perhaps even stranger than the college setting was Ray’s own history. He had friendships with mobsters, politicians and high-ranking military officers. He was the best man at the wedding of Kerik, who rose to the top of the New York Police Department before being indicted on state and federal charges — in a case that Ray helped the authorities make.

In 1997, Ray arranged a City Hall meeting for Mayor Rudy Giuliani with the former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. He has even made claims, largely credited, that he worked for a U.S. intelligence agency in Kosovo.

Ray remained in custody Wednesday and is expected back in court on Feb. 26.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .