“Having gained control of their minds and bodies, he forced them to do his bidding,” Judge Lewis Liman said Friday of cult leader Larry Ray. “He sought to take every bit of light from his victims’ lives.”
"He intentionally inflicted brutal and lifelong harm on innocent victims that he groomed and abused into submission,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Mollie Bracewell wrote in a sentencing letter advocating for a life sentence for alleged sex cult leader Larry Ray.
Larry Ray gained the trust of his daughter’s friends by regaling them with stories of his successful past and taking an interest in their lives. According to authorities, he then used his influence to torment most of them for years.
After Larry Ray started living in his daughter's dorm at Sarah Lawrence, he was able to form a predatory connection with some of the students he met there.
“When you look at people who have been in a cult, you certainly can’t separate them out in terms of their intelligence level or their sophistication,” Dr. Joni Johnston, a forensic psychologist and author of “Serial Killers: 101 Questions True Crime Fans Ask,” told Oxygen.com.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams described Larry Ray as an “evil man” who used “violence, threats and psychological abuse to try and control and destroy” the lives of his daughter’s friends.
