Levin’s father was the first to point out the troubling nature of his relationship with this older adult. During a phone call with his parents, Levin said Ray was “helping me figure out things. How to manage my mind so that I can have clarity. It’s kind of Marine-like, the stuff he’s teaching us, like we’re going through a mini boot camp for the mind.” Ray made it clear he hadpowerful friends. There he was in photos with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, with President George H.W. Bush. There was a letter somewhere, they were told, thanking Larry for singlehandedly ending the war in Kosovo.

It is still an out-of-body experience for me watching myself getting beaten and body-slammed—I watch myself and I think, 'Wow, this is horrible what's happening to that woman! How could he do that to her!?' When all the while I am watching Larry beat me up—I feel like a completely different person from the poor woman in the footage." Felicia Rosario on Her Escape from RayI'm happy that I'm that way because Mr. Levin's account is a horrific one. Humiliation, psychological manipulation, physical abuse. A few months ago, Ray was found guilty on all charges brought against him. He will be sentenced this fall and could spend the rest of his life behind bars. I don't know if that will be enough to help the kids he abused but I hope that it will help them feel some justice and vindication.

If convicted, Ray, now 61, facesmore than 100 years behind bars. He's being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, his bail denied, and is due before U.S. Magistrate Judge Lewis Liman on Sept. 13. I mean that’s part of the challenge of memoir, of course, but this is an extreme example of that challenge. You dedicated the book, “to the friends I cannot reach.” Are you hoping you can reach them through this? Another norm in the apartment was the most trivial things becomingdaily chaos — crisis after manufactured crisis, saboteurs in their midst, beset by conspirators. When each crisis was resolved, Ray would marvel at all the trouble they had caused.Ray arrived with an entourage for his reunion with Talia: a former detective, a former Marine (who would also crash at Slonim Woods 9 for a time) and a ponytailed man in a suit, each of whom insisted on shaking hands with each of the sophomores present. When the indictment happened, it did feel at least partially an immense relief that something had come from this, that I had been believed not just by people but by maybe the justice system. It made me feel a little safer. Right, I guess so. I wish I had written another one, so I had something to compare it to. I certainly have developed an immense amount of admiration for anyone who does this, because it’s so strange and I don’t think I appreciated how strange it is to try to write down what’s happened to you until I was doing it. Slonim Woods 9 is a two-story townhouse, one of 11 “cooperative living units” where students have their own bedrooms — four upstairs, four downstairs — and share a living room and kitchen.

She added: "In the end, it is possible to heal from this kind of trauma and there is help. Zach provided that safe space in the documentary and I also had the support of my therapists, social workers, case workers and attorneys along the way. The process of trying to answer that question, to arrive at a clear definitive answer to who is this man, or even what are his intentions, was for me kind of a trap. If you spend your energy trying to figure out who your abuser is or if they're a good person, you're not leaving. The thing on the other side of the scale that outweighs everything is, he was the person who was hurting me and I didn't deserve that. Within just a year of moving in, Levin already wanted to leave, but he worried that Ray wasn’t bluffing and really did have powerful friends. There is a set of things if we're really just looking for red flags. We're talking about really familiar dynamics, but just taken to their most toxic extremes. What a cult is, it's many different things. It can be a group that's focused on a leader who's alive and that leader isn't accountable to a higher authority, but that can be what a political party is also, in its worst form. It could be just a group that's focused on bringing in new members, which sounds like a club, but if you push that too far, it's a cult. It could be a group that discourages dissent, but that could be the worst form of a government. Or it could claim an exalted status for itself and its leadership, which sounds like a religion, but again, taken to the extreme. Slonim Woods 9 is where Larry Ray moved as soon as he got out of jail in 2010, an on-campus townhouse where the father of a Sarah Lawrence sophomore somehow managed to live, unchallenged, with his daughter, Talia, and her roommates for most of aschool year.Levin follows the story to the Upper East Side apartment where, federal prosecutors say, Ray’s criminal enterprise took shape, where Ray held a knife to Levin's throat, and humiliated him psychologically and sexually. Ray, as previously mentioned, was in a relationship with both Rosario and Pollok, and the pair remained with him up until his arrest in February 2020. To put this group into a controlled environment, they moved to Ray’s one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. The only positive here was that they no longer had housing costs and Daniel would never have been able to afford a New York apartment. Ray led delusional counseling sessions and meetings with this group which achieved mental, sexual and physical abuse. People are so negative about the word ‘brainwashing.’ I don’t see what’s wrong with it. That is what I’m doing. I’m washing your brains. Larry Ray, alleged Sarah Lawrence cult leader