A man who was convicted of multiple crimes, including sex trafficking and forced student labor at Sarah Lawrence College, has been sentenced to 60 years in prison.
A statement from the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York states that Lawrence Ray, the father of a student attending college in New York, subjected a group of college students and others to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse.
It started around 2010 after he moved into his daughter’s dormitory at school and continued for a decade. She used sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, physical violence, threats of criminal legal action and other tactics to control the victims, according to her statement.
“Larry Ray is a monster,” US Attorney Damian Williams said. “For years, he inflicted brutal, lifelong damage on innocent victims. Students who had their lives ahead of them. He groomed them and abused them into submission for his own gain. Through physical and psychological abuse, he took control of the minds and bodies of his victims and then extracted millions of dollars from them.”
The indictment against Ray and the evidence show that he coaxed his victims into making false confessions about the harm they allegedly did to him, his family and associates and used extortion to obtain payments through multiple methods.
Ray’s victims drained their parents’ savings, opened lines of credit, borrowed money from acquaintances, sold real estate, did unpaid work for him, and became prostitutes as a result of his manipulation.
The release states that Ray forced a female victim to engage in commercial sex acts to pay damages she did not owe and sexually harassed her. He also took sexually explicit photos and used them to force her to continue engaging in sexual acts.
Ray also forced three female victims to do extensive unpaid physical labor, sometimes in the middle of the night, as a result of the physical and psychological abuse.
Ray laundered the money he received from his shares through an Internet domain business and evaded taxes on them, according to the statement.
He was ultimately convicted of numerous charges in April, including racketeering conspiracy, violent crimes in furtherance of racketeering, extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor, tax evasion and money laundering.
Ray was also sentenced to life in supervised release in addition to the 60-year sentence. He was ordered to turn over more than $2.4 million, which is the amount he received from the sale of a GoDaddy purse and the North Carolina residence where the forced labor occurred.
