A “monster”, an “evil genius”: the American justice sentenced Friday to 60 years in prison a sexagenarian guilty of sexual exploitation of student friends of his daughter in a small university near New York.
Lawrence Ray made headlines during his trial last spring when he was found guilty of 15 counts including setting up a sexual “system of exploitation”, sex trafficking, assault and violence, forced prostitution young women and getting millions of dollars in dirty money out of them.
“Larry Ray is a monster,” exclaimed Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams, quoted in a statement from the prosecution announcing the 60-year prison sentence against the 63-year-old man.
From 2010, “for years (…) he seized the consciences and bodies of his victims and drew millions of dollars from them”, thundered the magistrate.
“Sadism. Purely and simply (…) An evil genius”, added Judge Lewis Liman quoted by the New York judicial press present at the statement of the conviction which is worth for this sexagenarian a life sentence.
It was Ray’s diabolical scheme that has long intrigued investigators: From 2010, the man broke into his own daughter’s studio or dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College, a small higher education in the humanities of the upscale northern suburbs of New York.
Installed with his daughter, Lawrence Ray, alias “Lawrence Grecco”, has for months acted as a father or protective godfather for several students by gradually gaining their confidence.
Then the psychological hold tightened through manipulation, deprivation, harassment, humiliation, verbal and physical threats, assaults, according to the testimony of the civil parties at his trial in March and April 2022.
The 60-year-old was also guilty of extortion, sometimes of money from the parents of his victims, whom he also forced into work and prostitution.
In April 2019, a long investigation by a New York magazine, The Cutrevealed that at least one administrator at Sarah Lawrence College was aware of Lawrence Ray’s misdeeds as early as 2011 after parents alerted the institution to his presence on the small isolated campus north of the New York megalopolis, in Bronxville, near the city of Yonkers.
A co-accused of Ray, Isabella Pollok, is expected to be sentenced in February.