Larry Ray (Sarah Lawrence sex-trafficking case)

Lawrence 'Larry' Ray spent 1992–2010 alternately a federal informant (Bonanno crime family case) and a federal inmate. In summer 2010, freshly released from prison, he moved into the off-campus Sarah Lawrence College apartment of his daughter Talia and her undergraduate roommates and began a decade-long pattern of coercive control. The pattern (extensively documented in the May 2019 New York Magazine investigation 'The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence' by Ezra Marcus and James D. Walsh, and in the resulting federal trial transcripts) included: extracting hours-long videotaped 'confessions' from each victim under sleep-deprivation conditions; convincing each that they had been 'poisoning him' and owed restitution; extorting tuition refunds, parental loans, and (in one case) 5+ years of sex-trafficking earnings; and isolating victims from family. Federal indictment in February 2020 followed. The April 2022 Manhattan jury convicted Ray on all 15 counts including sex trafficking (18 USC § 1591), extortion, money laundering, and racketeering conspiracy. Judge Lewis Liman sentenced him in January 2023 to 60 years federal prison plus $20M restitution. The case is now a teaching case in federal coercive-control prosecution alongside NXIVM and OneTaste, and Hulu's 2023 'Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence' docuseries is the canonical visual record.