When 20-year-old Talia Ray told her college roommates that her father needed to stay in their dorm for a while, they welcomed him with open arms.
They had no idea they were about to fall victim to an "evil genius" who planned to ensnare them in a cult that would take years to escape.
WARNING: Readers might find some details in this story distressing.
In September 2010, Larry Ray left the New Jersey prison where he'd been incarcerated for violating a child custody agreement and moved straight into the dorm at Sarah Lawrence College.
The elite private university just outside New York City required everyone to register guests before letting them stay over.
But students at the school, which encourages "academic risk-taking", spurns exams and grades, and counts Yoko Ono and Carrie Fisher among its graduates, weren't exactly sticklers for the rules.
From the moment he set up an inflatable mattress on Talia's floor, Ray started to cast his spell on her six roommates.
Talia adored her father, telling her friends that he'd been framed and wrongfully convicted for trying to save her from an abusive mother.
He made them lavish dinners, dispensed life advice and regaled them with wild stories about his past as a CIA operative.
"He met a group of friends who had their whole lives ahead of them," said Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
"For the next decade, he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to try to control and destroy their lives. He exploited them. He terrorised them. He tortured them."
Ray was last month sentenced to 60 years in jail, which will likely see him spend the rest of his life behind bars.
But one of the seven roommates is now days away from learning her own fate.
Police initially treated Isabella Pollok as one of Ray's victims.
But they later charged the 31-year-old with conspiracy to launder money.
They say Pollok left her friends' ranks to become Ray's "trusted lieutenant", helping him to sexually and psychologically terrorise them during their decade-long nightmare.
'I'm washing your brains'
There's an old saying that if you put a frog in boiling water, it'll leap right out. If you slowly increase the temperature, the frog won't realise it's in danger until it's too late.
At first, the students living in the two-storey dorm known as Slonim Woods 9 luxuriated in the warm atmosphere Ray created in their home.
Most of the group were just 19 or 20, still navigating the transition from home life to college, and Ray was a father figure who took care of them.
He'd led such an interesting life. He said he'd rubbed shoulders with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. He even claimed to have been sent on a mission to recover stolen US missiles from the black market.
He also provided a shoulder to cry on.
One by one, he would take the dorm residents into Talia's room where he would get them to share their secrets and offer them advice.
Daniel Levin, who was just 19 and confused about his sexuality, said Ray promised to help him figure out what he wanted in life.
Isabella Pollok told a judge that she was raised in a chaotic household rife with drug abuse.
Ray, she said, talked her out of a plan to take her own life.
"At that point in time, he did save my life," she wrote in a letter to a judge last year.
The students barely noticed as Ray gradually increased the emotional heat in the house.
Soon he was asking Levin to strip naked so he could inspect his body, while he began a sexual relationship with Pollok.
All six of his daughter's friends, Ray declared, were victims of what he called "Bad Parenting Disorder" and needed his guidance to become sexually liberated and fulfil their "quest for potential".
After nearly a year living in their dorm, Ray announced he was moving out.
He'd rented an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and he invited Talia and her friends to come live with him for free.
"All I wanted was to be like him. To never be unhappy or unsure about anything, ever again," Levin wrote in his memoir.
But when he told his father that he'd moved in with Ray so that he could continue to access his endless wisdom, his dad became panicked.
"It sounds kind of like a cult, Dan. It sounds like you're brainwashed or something," Levin recalled of their phone conversation.
Levin, who now kept no secrets from Ray, told him about his father's concerns.
"People are so negative about the word 'brainwashing'. I don't see what's wrong with it. That is what I'm doing," he said.
"I'm washing your brains."
A Manhattan nightmare
With Ray's four female and three male followers now ensconced in his Manhattan apartment, the con man's mask started to slip.
He began forcing all seven students into intense, tear-filled group therapy sessions that ran well into the early hours of the morning. Often he recorded everything they said.
He alienated them from friends and family, insisting his young followers were "broken and in need of fixing".
Then Ray began to lose his temper.
He would explode over the slightest infraction, like when he found a scratch on one of the cooking pans.
"You scraped it on purpose, as hard as you could?" Ray screamed at Levin, according to his memoir.
"What were you thinking about? Mummy and daddy?"
By the time the sexual abuse started, many in the group wanted out.
But Ray had spent so long convincing them that he was a former US marine with powerful friends that they were terrified of what he'd do.
When Ray demanded one of his female followers engage in sex work, she complied. She made $US2.5 million ($3.6m) over four years, all of which she was coerced into giving to Ray.
The woman told the court that Ray had brainwashed her into believing she had poisoned other members of the group, and her earnings should be handed over as compensation.
"He threatened to put me in jail numerous times," the woman said.
"He threatened to kill me on a memorable occasion. He threatened to cut my face. He threatened to have me abducted and dropped in the Middle East. He threatened to blackmail people I knew."
During a "long night of torture" at a New York hotel, the woman said Ray and his "lieutenant" Isabella Pollok tried to suffocate her with a plastic bag.
In 2013, after two years under Ray's control, Levin finally had enough and found the strength to flee the apartment.
He returned to the Sarah Lawrence campus and cut off all contact with Ray and his followers.
"I was constantly terrified I would see them from a distance or that I would open a door and there they would be, on the other side," he wrote in his memoir.
But as several of the young students under Ray's control managed to break free, he had a plan to bring in new followers to abuse and exploit.
How Sarah Lawrence graduates helped break up the cult
One of Ray's male followers introduced him to his two sisters, believing he might be a positive influence in their lives.
Soon they too were living in the one-bedroom apartment in New York.
One of the young women was on the verge of completing her studies to become a doctor, but she gave it all up at Ray's behest.
Both sisters were subjected to years of psychological and physical abuse. They were coerced into sex with strangers, recordings of which Ray kept to use as leverage against them.
In 2013, he took his disciples to North Carolina, where he forced them to fix up his stepfather's house.
His manipulation was two-fold: He got free manual labour out of his followers, and he then claimed they'd broken his landscaping equipment. Their only choice was to beg their parents for money so they could pay Ray back.
The families of Ray's followers were distraught as their children slipped further from their lives.
Several parents went to police but were told that since their children were over 18, there was nothing they could do.
Some tried interventions that failed. Other parents' marriages broke down over the stress of it all.
But in the end, it was another group of Sarah Lawrence students who would kickstart a chain of events that finally broke up the cult.
In 2018, a Sarah Lawrence graduate came across a disturbing video online featuring one of Ray's followers.
In it, she tearfully confessed to poisoning her friends. Ray published it on a website to torment her.
Deeply concerned, the man reached out to a fellow Sarah Lawrence graduate, journalist Ezra Marcus.
He investigated the cult for months before publishing his exposé The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence in New York magazine in 2019.
The article caused a firestorm of outrage.
Sarah Lawrence denied any knowledge of Ray's presence on its campus in 2010 and 2011 — something several families insist is false.
New York police also opened an investigation.
Ten months after the story was published, Ray was arrested on 15 charges of racketeering, extortion, violent assault, sex trafficking, forced labour, money laundering and tax evasion.
At the time of his arrest, he was living with two female followers in New Jersey, both of whom referred to themselves as his spiritual "wives".
'He used them for his evil needs'
Even as the defendant in his court case, Ray continued to try to manipulate everyone around him.
During two key witness testimonies, he thrashed his body about, claiming to be in the grip of a mysterious medical episode.
He glared at his victims as they testified to the court in horrifying detail everything their supposed father figure did to them.
"I will for the rest of my life be on the ground, the kitchen tile digging into my knees, sobbing while Lawrence Ray brandishes a knife over me," Levin said to the court as he cried.
"Some will call me or my friends stupid or weak or naive because of what Larry did to us. Look at all of us: intelligent, capable young people full of promise and hope and possibility."
It emerged in court that while some of Ray's stories, like being an elite CIA operative, were lies, others, like his ties to Rudy Giuliani and Mikhail Gorbachev, turned out to be true.
In the 90s, Ray was friends with Giulani's police commissioner Bernard Kerik, and set up introductions for the mayor with the ex-Soviet leader as well as Hollywood star Robert De Niro.
Ray's real name was Lawrence Grecco and he had deep connections to the mob and a long history of violence against women.
Before he was sentenced, he was asked if he had anything to say to the court.
Instead of apologising to his victims, he expressed sympathy only for himself.
"Being in jail has been horrible. I've had COVID twice, and I'm in pain all the time. I lost my father, my stepfather, and my stepmother all in one week," he said.
He did not mention his daughter, Talia, who appears to have cut ties with his cult before his arrest.
Prosecutors named her as a potential co-conspirator in her father's scheme, but she was never indicted.
His "lieutenant" Isabella Pollok has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to launder her friend's earnings from coerced sex work.
She will be sentenced on February 22 and faces five years behind bars.
In a letter to the sentencing judge, Pollok has described herself as Ray's "awed protégé" and "broken automaton".
"I trusted Lawrence more than I trusted myself and in doing so, I betrayed my own sense of right and wrong," she wrote.
"I know I committed serious crimes and I fully accept responsibility for my actions. I am still a work in progress … I'm now asking for a second chance."
When Judge Lewis J Liman sentenced Ray to what will effectively be a life sentence, he said the 63-year-old should never have access to young people again.
"He had the evil genius to take people who were young … and he broke them … and then he used them for his evil needs," Judge Liman said.
"He sought to take every bit of light from his victims' lives."
