One unfortunate day of 2010, the two-story dorm of student Talia Ray morphed from a natural, residential stay at Sarah Lawrence College into a morbid hell for Talia’s seven female and male roommates. For Larry Ray, father of Talia, this hell was his creation: a place to rule over for a grueling eight years, inflicting ineffable amounts of abuse and trauma through manipulation, coercion, and exploitation.
The story, extensively covered in New York Magazine’s “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” is a harrowing one whose plot seems too unrealistic to be true. Upon being released from prison in 2010, Talia allowed Larry to “temporarily crash” at her college dorm, at his request. Talia had held her father in an extremely high regard prior, and those close to her had already heard enough convincing stories of Larry to paint him as an amazing father and human being in their heads. Thus, agreeing to let him bunk in the dorm was no skin off their backs.
From the day that Larry occupied the dorm, he began to slowly take over the lives of its inhabitants. In the beginning, the students saw Larry as a savior: someone who could give them informed, beneficial advice, someone who they could trust, someone who could free them from the plights and troubles of adolescent, college life. This was Larry’s opportunity to psychologically manipulate Talia’s roommates through unethical conditioning and counseling, veiled under a guise of “helping them get through life.”
Throughout the entire ordeal, Larry crumbled the lives of the dorm’s inhabitants: he implanted radical ideas into their heads and convinced them that they had committed crimes which they did not. Consequently, one young woman was forced into prostitution in the face of Larry’s blackmail; others were simply threatened physically or coerced to comply with Larry’s bidding; all of them, indelibly scarred. The families of his victims all reported that “their children [had] virtually cut ties with them.”
Larry Ray was arrested on the morning of February 11 in Piscataway, New Jersey, and he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Darlon Riviere - Staff Writer