Man accused of brainwashing college students forced some to work in NC, feds say
The man accused of brainwashing and abusing students at Sarah Lawrence College in New York brought some of his victims to North Carolina and forced them to do physical labor, federal prosecutors say.
A new indictment, unsealed in the Southern District of New York, accuses Lawrence Ray of moving into a dorm at the college and manipulating his teenage and young adult victims, extorting $1 million from them and their parents. Prosecutors say he forced one woman into prostitution.
Ray brought three victims to Pinehurst, North Carolina, where the women were forced to install an irrigation system and do other labor for free on property owned by Ray’s relative, prosecutors say.
The indictment alleges Ray controlled the women by denying them food and putting a lock on the refrigerator. He also forced the women “to work in the middle of the night and to sleep outside in the summer heat,” court filings allege.
Ray assaulted the women at the house north of Fayetteville, prosecutors say, slapping and shoving them. He also threatened to report the women to police for supposed wrongdoing, even driving two to the police station at separate times.
Authorities launched an investigation into Ray, now 60, after New York Magazine published a detailed story last year accusing him of manipulating the college students over a decade starting in 2010.
Almost 10 months after the article came out, federal prosecutors charged Ray “with multiple offenses, including extortion, sex trafficking, and forced labor.”
“For nearly a decade, Lawrence Ray exploited and abused young women and men emotionally, physically, and sexually for his own financial gain. College is supposed to be a time of self-discovery and new-found independence. But as alleged, Lawrence Ray exploited that vulnerable time in his victims’ lives through a course of conduct that shocks the conscience,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement.
“Through his manipulative interrogation sessions, Ray made his victims confess to alleged wrongdoing and then compelled them to repay Ray alleged damages owed to him, through payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars, or worse, forced labor and sex trafficking,” Berman said.
Federal prosecutors say Ray, who also went by the name Lawrence Grecco, manipulated the students with sleep deprivation, violence, verbal abuse, sexual humiliation and threats of criminal action to separate them from their families.
Ray convinced his victims to make false confessions that they owed him money for causing damages to him or other people, or getting them to say on video that they tried to poison him and and his family, prosecutors say.
Ray also convinced his victims that they owed him money for debts or damaging his property, the indictment alleges. He made them pay by “draining their parents’ savings, opening credit lines, soliciting contributions from acquaintances, selling real estate ownership, and at Ray’s direction, performing unpaid labor for Ray and earning money through prostitution.”
