“Monster”, “evil genius”: American justice on Friday sentenced a man aged sixty to 60 years in prison for sexually exploiting his daughter’s student friends at a small university near New York, reports AFP.

In the spring, Lawrence Ray was found guilty on 15 counts, including the creation of a “system of sexual exploitation”, sex trafficking, assault and violence, forced prostitution of young women and obtaining millions of dollars by these actions.

“Larry Ray is a monster,” Manhattan federal prosecutor Damian Williams was quoted as saying in a statement by prosecutors announcing the 63-year-old man’s 60-year prison sentence.

Starting in 2010, “over the years (…) he took over the minds and bodies of his victims and extracted millions of dollars from them,” the judge said.

“Sadism. Just (…) an evil genius,” added Judge Lewis Leeman, quoted by the New York court press as present at the announcement of the sentence.

Ray’s diabolical scheme intrigued investigators: since 2010, the man has been living in a dormitory room at Sarah Lawrence College, a small liberal arts institution in the suburbs of northern New York.

Lawrence Ray, alias “Lawrence Grecco,” acted as a father or godfather to several students over the course of months, gradually gaining their trust.

The psychological coercion was then intensified by manipulation, harassment, humiliation, verbal and physical threats, and assaults, according to the testimony of civil parties at his trial in March and April 2022.

He was also guilty of extorting money for six years, sometimes taking money from the parents of his victims, whom he forced to work and engage in prostitution.

In April 2019, New York magazine The Cut revealed in a lengthy investigation that at least one Sarah Lawrence College administrator had known about Lawrence Ray’s exploits since 2011, after parents alerted the school to his presence on the small, isolated campus in upstate New York. -York.

Rhea’s co-defendant, Isabella Pollock, is expected to be sentenced in February.

How Lawrence Ray acted

Ray introduced himself as “father” and several roommates moved into an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The one-room apartment became a house of horrors, the indictment says, The Guardian reports.

Ray engaged in fake “therapy” sessions with students, persuading them to reveal deeply “intimate” details of their lives. He later “alienated” several of his victims from their parents and convinced some that they were mentally ill and needed his help to recover, according to the indictment.

After gaining the trust of these students, Ray began “interrogation sessions” that involved mostly physical and verbal abuse. During these sessions, he made false accusations against students, including claims of property damage and, in one absurd instance, allegations that the victim tried to poison him.

On one occasion, Ray held a knife to the throat of a male victim until he admitted he was wrong, and grabbed another male victim by the throat, knocking him unconscious.

Ray forced the three female victims to work on a family farm in North Carolina, denying them access to food — forcing them to work “in the middle of the night” and sleep outside, prosecutors said in court documents.

Four years after Ray entered the lives of these students, he told the female victim that she would have to go into prostitution to pay for the alleged property damage.

The victim, Claudia Drury, did this from approximately 2014 to 2018.