Father of Sarah Lawrence student coerced his daughter's college friends for sex and money, prosecutor says: "He took over their lives"
A prosecutor cast an ex-convict Thursday as a mobster-like figure who coerced his daughter's college friends to join his "family" as he accumulated power, sex and money, forcing one woman into a sex work enterprise so lucrative that she gave him $1 million in a single year.
A defense lawyer, though told the Manhattan federal court jury during the trial's opening statements that Lawrence Ray committed no federal crimes as he encircled himself with college-age "storytellers" who claimed to have poisoned him and arranged to have him physically attacked.
"You'll see that Larry Ray is not guilty," attorney Allegra Glashausser said.
Ray, who once served as the best man at a wedding of former New York City police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, has been incarcerated since his early 2020 arrest.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lindsey Keenan began her opening statement with a description of a gruesome October 2018 attack she said Ray carried out on a woman who gave Ray over a million dollars in sex work proceeds that year alone.
She said Ray and a woman who served as his "trusted lieutenant" found the woman they had "forced into a life of prostitution" at a hotel, where Ray tortured her for hours to make sure she'd continue her sex work.
The prosecutor said Ray used "violence, fear, sex and manipulation" to gain sex, power and money.
The abuse began in the fall of 2010 when Ray began living in his daughter's on-campus small townhouse dormitory dwelling at Sarah Lawrence College, where he persuaded his daughter's friends to stay the next summer at his Manhattan apartment, she said.
There, Keenan said, Ray learned their secrets and insecurities and exploited them, "profiting off their labor, their money and even their bodies."
"Once he gained control of their lives, ... he took over their lives," she said.
The women were forced to do manual labor for Ray in 2013 in North Carolina at his stepfather's home and obey his commands after he convinced them they owed him money for damaging some of his belongings or for trying to poison him, the prosecutor said.
Against threats to release their secrets and embarrassing videotaped moments to friends and family or on the internet, the women and at least one man complied with Ray's demands, she said.
"When shame and embarrassment were not enough, he relied on violence," Keenan said. "The victims had no choice. They lived in fear of the defendant."
The allegations against Ray attained public prominence with the 2020 publication of "The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence," a New York magazine feature.
Glashausser, an assistant federal defender, disputed the prosecutor's portrayal.
She said her client was seeking to reconnect with his daughter when he went to her dormitory and told stories about "hobnobbing" with Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet Union president, being best man at Kerik's wedding and having friends who were U.S. military generals.
Soon, the college students told stories about their own lives, embellishing them with tales of having drugged drug dealers and other exploits, she said.
"This was not a criminal enterprise," Glashausser said. "This was a group of storytellers."
Glashausser said some of the women battled mental illness issues and frightened Ray when they told him they had poisoned him, prompting him to seek help from prosecutors, the Environmental Protection Agency and journalists. She said they also set him up to be physically attacked.
She said the woman who became a sex worker "started escorting" in 2015 when she could not afford her rent.
She said jurors would see videos her client had recorded and "see some things that are hard to watch."
"I'm not saying that Larry Ray is a saint," Glashausser said. "You don't have to like him. But these things were not crimes."