Sarah Lawrence father sentenced to 60 years in prison

A man who was convicted of multiple offenses including sex trafficking and forced labor of students at Sarah Lawrence College has been sentenced to 60 years in prison. 

A release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York states that Lawrence Ray, the father of a student attending the college in New York, subjected a group of college students and others to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse. 

He began around 2010 after moving into his daughter’s dorm room at the school and continued for a decade. He used sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, physical violence, threats of criminal legal action and other tactics to control his victims, according to the release. 

“Larry Ray is a monster,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. “For years, he inflicted brutal and lifelong harm 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 over his victims’ minds and bodies and then extracted millions of dollars from them.” 

The indictment against Ray and evidence shows he got his victims to give false confessions to harms they purportedly did to him, his family and his associates and used extortion to get payments through multiple methods. 

Ray’s victims drained their parents’ savings, opened credit lines, asked for money from acquaintances, sold real estate ownership, performed unpaid labor for him and engaged in prostitution as a result of his manipulation. 

The release states Ray forced one female victim to engage in commercial sex acts to pay for damages she did not owe and sexually groomed her. He also took sexually explicit photos and used them to force her to continue to engage in sexual acts. 

Ray also forced three female victims to perform extensive unpaid physical labor, sometimes in the middle of the night, as a result of physical and psychological abuse. 

Ray laundered the money he received from his actions through an internet domain business and evaded taxes on them, according to the release. 

He was ultimately convicted of numerous charges in April, including racketeering conspiracy, violent crime in the aid of racketeering, extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor, tax evasion and money laundering. 

Ray was also sentenced to a life sentence of supervised release in addition to the 60-year sentence. He was ordered to give up more than $2.4 million, which is the amount he received from the sale of a GoDaddy portfolio and the North Carolina residence where the forced labor occurred.