In the fall of 2010, a group of sophomores at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts school 12 miles north of New York City, moved into a campus building called Slonim Woods 9. It was a laid-back college house – dirty kitchen, a lot of hanging out and being high, a half-thought plan to dump sand in one room and make a beach. So it was weird when one of the roommates, Talia Ray, invited her dad, Lawrence “Larry” Ray, to crash on their couch after he was released from prison on vague charges, but not, as several explain in a new Hulu docuseries, that weird. Ray made steak dinners, regaled his daughter’s friends with tales of his time in the marines and psy-ops for the CIA, promised to help some maximize their potential. It was off-putting to some, entrancing to others.
Over the course of several months, Ray seemed to gain control over several of the housemates – first his daughter Talia’s friend Isabella Pollok, then Talia’s boyfriend Santos Rosario, then another, then another. “Everyone thought Talia’s dad was weird, but then one by one he would get them alone, and suddenly he’s the greatest thing to happen to them,” says Raven Juarez, whose best friend and boyfriend both fell under Ray’s spell and cut off contact with her, in Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence. “I had a lot of theories, but none of them were are horrible as what was actually to come.”
