NEW YORK — Convicted sex cult leader Lawrence Ray was sentenced to 60 years in prison in Manhattan federal court Friday for terrorizing Sarah Lawrence college students and forcing them into prostitution.
The 63-year-old was convicted in April of mentally and physically abusing a small group of students at the prestigious Westchester County school between 2010 and 2020.
Describing Ray as “evil,” U.S. District Judge Lewis Liman said Ray’s crimes were “distinctive” and “particularly horrible.” He said he wanted to make sure Ray spent the rest of his years in prison and “is never released.”
“He degraded them sexually to the point where they lost any sense of self worth,” the judge said. “He extorted them, he forced them to engage in labor, and he sex trafficked one of them all for his profit and sadistic and persevere sexual pleasure.”
“It was sadism. Pure and simple,” the judge said.
“There is no reason to believe Mr. Ray will age out of criminal behavior,” said Limon. “He committed these crimes with force, but he also committed the crimes with his wits — by convincing his victims they were less than human.”
Liman commended Ray’s victims and said the government would not have been able to build a case without them.
“He never believed his victims would testify against him. He went to great lengths to make sure they never would.”
Before the sentence was handed down, three of Ray’s victims asked the judge to send their tormentor to prison for as long as possible.
“His evil has withered us,” victim Claudia Drury said in a letter read aloud by her lawyer in court.
Ray forced some members of what he called “The Ray Family” to have sex, make videos of themselves having sex and record false confessions about how they had wronged him.
He met many of his victims through his daughter, Talia Ray, when she was a sophomore at the small liberal arts college, prosecutors said.
Ray then used those confessions as blackmail material if they ever considered leaving his orbit, trial testimony showed.
When Drury took the stand in March, she described a night of brutal abuse in October 2018 when Ray handcuffed her naked to a chair over a perceived betrayal and suffocated her with a plastic bag. She said the cult leader subjected her to as much as eight hours of interrogation in a room at the Gregory Hotel in Manhattan.
Throughout the night, Ray poured cold water over Drury and put her in front of an air conditioner on full blast, smothered her with a pillow, choked her with a collar and leash, and even cut her hair, she testified during the trial.
Ray, who served as best man at former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik’s 1998 wedding, had a falling out with Kerik after he testified against the ex-top cop in a federal tax fraud case.
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