Survivor of Sarah Lawrence sex cult tells her story: ‘He took over my mind’
Felicia Rosario, a survivor of the Sarah Lawrence College “sex cult,” detailed her story of survival in multiple interviews on Thursday, describing the convicted Lawrence “Larry” Ray, as a skilled manipulator who “took over” her mind.
“Little by little, he took over my mind,” she told People Magazine, describing Ray, the man behind a multi-million dollar sex cult scandal that involved a group of students at the school. “I don’t even know how he did it. He made me feel like there truly were people after me, people coming to hurt me, and that people had hurt me in my past.”
She also told the magazine that Ray rewrote their childhoods and convinced them of things that were completely untrue.
“He did this with everyone. He rewrote everyone’s childhood, and he said all kinds of horrible things happened to me. He had me saying that my dad had prostituted me, and that I was sexually abused by him. All sorts of horrible things that just were not true,” she said.
Ray, who was convicted of carrying out a multimillion-dollar sex trafficking operation and forced labor scheme, was sentenced to 60 years in prison in January.
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle asked Rosario during an interview on “Morning Joe” how a grown woman could let herself “slide into being a captive.”
“That’s a great question. It is a question that I’m still asking myself. How this happened? Because – yeah. It is – looking back now I would still say – I would still ask what you are asking. How could it be? But Larry’s so skilled. You know? Like how could he – how could Bernard Kerik [former New York City Police commissioner] let him be best man at his wedding? How could Gorbachev let himself be led around America by Larry?” she said.
Rosario said Ray knew a lot of very influential people in various different places.
INSIDE LARRY RAY’S SARAH LAWRENCE SEX SCANDAL
“Lawyers. Police officers. Like all kinds of people in the military. So, you know, it is – if he is able to get in with people like that and then he decides to target me, what chance did I have, really? I won’t know better than a former head of the KGB or former police commissioner,” she said.
Zach Heinzerling, the director and executive producer of “Stolen Youth,” a Hulu series about the cult at Sarah Lawrence, described Ray as a “chameleon” during their MSNBC interview. The Hulu documentary tells the story of how a group of college kids were manipulated by him.
“It is really a series of individual personal relationships. Larry was a chameleon. He would find someone, do research on them. Understand what their vulnerabilities were. How to approach the situation. For some a father figure, others a therapist. In Felicia’s case it was more of a boyfriend relationship. So I think the idea of a cult, we think there’s this person at the top and a dogma attractive to all and here you have a situation where Larry is using multiple tactics, gaslighting, pure manipulation, things we think about are more akin to a domestic abuse situation. And for each individual they had a process of getting involved with Larry and then their own process of getting out. An important thing to think about is this is a story of survival and a story of human resiliency. It is why Felicia is here today and why we think its an important story,” he said.
The twisted story began when Ray was let out of prison after serving time for securities fraud and his daughter, Talia, who attended Sarah Lawrence College, had asked her roommates in 2010 if Ray could stay with them. He ended up sleeping on his daughter’s couch and started to integrate himself in their lives.
Rosario told the hosts of “Morning Joe” that she got involved with Ray because her brother, Santos, was one of Talia’s roommates.
