In 2010, a man moved into his daughter’s college dorm after finishing a prison sentence for securities fraud. He was arrested 10 years later for exploiting his daughter’s friends in the dorm by threatening them with violence and enriching himself with millions of dollars by driving a woman into sex work.
Lawrence Ray, 62, was convicted Wednesday for crimes including racketeering, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking. The jury found him guilty of a “manipulative relationship with young people” after he moved into a dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 2010, the Associated Press reported.
Ray reportedly harassed, manipulated, and extorted the students he met at the New York college for a decade before he was arrested in 2020. According to U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, after meeting the college students, “he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to try to control and destroy their lives. He exploited them. He terrorized them. He tortured them. Let me be very clear. Larry Ray is a predator. An evil man who did evil things. Today’s verdict finally brings him to justice.”
The AP reported in early March that the prosecutor in the trial accused Ray of being a “mobster-like figure.”
According to the prosecutor, Ray “used ‘violence, fear, sex and manipulation’ to get sex, power and money.” Ray also convinced some of his daughter’s friends and fellow college students to stay at his apartment in Manhattan for the summer of 2011. Here, he manipulated them by claiming they poisoned him and harmed his property. The students went along with his demands that they repay him for the damage he accused them of causing.
In 2013, Ray forced some of the young people to work at his stepfather’s home in North Carolina. “In addition, RAY forced multiple victims to perform unpaid labor on a family member’s property in North Carolina. Through a course of psychological and physical abuse, RAY forced these victims to do extensive physical labor, sometimes in the middle of the night, for no pay,” the Department of Justice stated in a press release Wednesday.
The most shocking detail of Ray’s abuse came in 2018 when Ray forced a woman he had extorted to be tied to a chair naked where he placed a bag over her head and choked her, the AP reported.
A man, who at the time was dating Ray’s daughter, told jurors that Ray “seemed very attentive and intelligent and one of my roommates said she got a lot of value confiding in him.” According to the witness, Ray began physically abusing him by threatening him with a knife and putting him in a chokehold.
Another witness who testified claimed Ray manipulated her into believing she had poisoned him and therefore owed him reparations. She said she got into sex work so she could pay Ray $2.5 million. Yet another woman accused Ray of forcing her into having sex with strangers and filming it for him.
The AP reported that Ray did not testify and had to go to the hospital in an ambulance twice during the trial for “undisclosed illnesses.”
The New Jersey man will be sentenced on September 16 and faces 15 counts, which could result in him spending the rest of his life behind bars.
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Source: Dailywire
