Ray is the father of Talia Ray, one of the students in question, and was already an ex-con at the time. He pleaded guilty to securities fraud early on and was sentenced to five years of probation.
As The Cut’s investigation recounts, he then spent six months in prison after refusing a court order granting him custody of his two children. Ray was arrested again in 2006, according to the magazine, after a domestic violence incident with his then-girlfriend. Both were violations of his probation, which led to additional prison time.
But shortly after his release in 2010, Ray moved into his daughter’s dorm on campus and took control of the roommates’ home lives, manipulating teenagers who later called themselves “directionless” and ” fragile” in conversations with The Cut.
Several of Talia’s former roommates told The Cut that Ray emotionally, physically and sexually abused them for years, corroborated by friends and family members.
Their accounts of Ray’s tactics align with a typical cult structure, including sexual coercion, threats of violence, humiliation, and sleep deprivation coupled with individual “therapy sessions”—during which Ray convinced teenagers that they were schizophrenic, for example, or survivors of child abuse, without any medical training. Those who spoke to The Cut said Ray methodically severed their ties to reality and their connections to loved ones.
Ray also convinced the group of children to pay him money – about $1 million over the years, according to his federal indictment viewed by Business Insider – for fabricated property damage and insignificant errors, which he described as intentional acts of sabotage. Sources who had known Ray earlier in his life described him to The Cut as an extremely paranoid “psychotic crook” despite his close ties to law enforcement and his previous work as a federal informant.
Ray’s convoluted story captivated the nation, inspiring last year’s Hulu docuseries “Stolen Youth” and the new Lifetime movie, “Devil on Campus,” premiering Sunday. Here’s where he is now.
Ray was arrested, convicted on all counts and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
During The Cut’s reporting process, Talia was still in constant contact with Ray. Two of his former roommates, both young women, lived with him in New Jersey.
Other victims had disappeared, either by intentionally escaping Ray’s influence or because his actions had started a downward spiral. One of Talia’s former roommates, Santos Rosario, had recently been seen at a homeless shelter at the time of the investigation.
After “The Stolen Children of Sarah Lawrence” was published in April 2019, a joint FBI and NYPD task force began investigating the allegations. Less than a year later, Ray was arrested.
Ray (born Lawrence Grecco) was charged with sex trafficking, forced labor, conspiracy, racketeering, tax evasion and exploitation.
Prosecutors said Ray exploited the group of undergraduates for personal and financial gain. They also said he forced one of the students, Claudia Drury, into prostitution. (Ray admitted to The Cut that he took the money Drury earned from sex work, describing it as restitution.)
“For the better part of a decade, Ray continued to mentally and physically torture his victims,” FBI investigator William F. Sweeney Jr. said at a news conference, according to the New York Times.
During his three-week trial, several of Ray’s victims testified about his use of violence, blackmail and manipulation, as well as the lasting impact of his actions, including suicide attempts, disorder food and episodes of homelessness.
Ray was convicted of all 15 criminal counts by a federal jury in Lower Manhattan.
In early 2023, Judge Lewis Liman sentenced Ray, then 63, to 60 years in prison.
“He sought to take all the light out of his victims’ lives,” Liman said in court, according to New York Magazine. “It was sadism, pure and simple.”
Later that year, several cult survivors filed a lawsuit against Sarah Lawrence, claiming the school failed to protect them.
“They let us down so much,” Drury told the New York Times. “There was a predator living in our dorm and he didn’t do anything.”
businessinsider
