Sarah Lawrence Sex Cult’s ‘Lieutenant’ Faces Prison for Abetting Abuse

For years, Lawrence V. Ray manipulated and exploited a gaggle of younger individuals who had lived together with his daughter in a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence School. He didn’t do it alone, prosecutors say: Amongst them was an enforcer.

Isabella Pollok grew to become Mr. Ray’s “trusted lieutenant,” prosecutors have mentioned, serving to abuse her onetime roommates. Descriptions of how she performed a component in maintaining Mr. Ray’s followers compliant and terrified emerged final yr as former college students testified at his trial, which led to a 60-year sentence for extortion, intercourse trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and different fees.

Ms. Pollok ran the accounts and meted out self-discipline, prosecutors mentioned, pushing group members to serve and fund Mr. Ray throughout a decade and several other states. One former pupil testified that Ms. Pollok and Mr. Ray confirmed as much as a resort room the place she had been incomes cash for them by working as a prostitute. Ms. Pollok taunted her, the previous pupil, Claudia Drury, mentioned, and Mr. Ray assaulted her for so long as eight hours, putting a plastic bag over her head and threatening to kill her.

Now, Ms. Pollok, who pleaded responsible final fall to a single rely of conspiracy to launder cash, is scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday morning by Choose Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Courtroom in Manhattan. That can finish a case that started on the campus of an elite school in Westchester County with a progressive mental custom then devolved into squalid scenes of abuse and domination performed out in resort rooms and houses in New York Metropolis and past.

When Ms. Pollok pleaded responsible, she supplied no public clarification of why she had grow to be dedicated to Mr. Ray. Her attorneys since have argued that Ms. Pollok was “brainwashed” and that she had been too absolutely in Mr. Ray’s thrall to behave independently.

Amongst those that appear to have arrived at an analogous view was Ms. Drury, who wrote to the court docket that, though she nonetheless puzzled over Ms. Pollok’s habits, she believed that her former roommate had lacked company and deserved lenience.

Federal prosecutors have requested Choose Liman to impose a sentence of 5 years, writing that Ms. Pollok “held a privileged place” inside what they referred to as “the Ray household.” They added that she was “liable for managing Ray’s funds, imposing Ray’s guidelines” and making and sustaining recordings of false confessions he elicited from followers, then used as leverage to demand funds.

“Whereas amassing cash from her abused and trafficked school mates, the defendant was spending luxurious nights on the Pierre Resort on the Higher East Aspect and shopping for costly clothes, magnificence merchandise and high-end lingerie,” the prosecutors wrote.

Past that, they mentioned, Ms. Pollok had facilitated a few of Mr. Ray’s bodily assaults, at one level fetching a hammer that he used to strike a pupil and supplying the plastic bag that he positioned over Ms. Drury’s head.

Ms. Pollok’s attorneys wrote to Choose Liman that Ms. Pollok deserved “a non-jail sentence.” They mentioned that she had began at Sarah Lawrence as a “broken, lonely” freshman, turning into first an “awed protégé” of Mr. Ray after which a “damaged automaton.”

Ultimately, the attorneys wrote, Ms. Pollok got here to see his affect as malign and “made super progress towards her personal rehabilitation.”

The attorneys additionally acknowledged what different college students had suspected: that Mr. Ray had a sexual relationship with Ms. Pollok, beginning when she was a sophomore.

Ms. Pollok met Mr. Ray in 2010 after he completed a stint in state jail in New Jersey stemming from baby custody fees. He started spending nights at a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence, simply north of New York Metropolis, the place his daughter, Talia, was residing.

Mr. Ray introduced himself to her roommates as a cosmopolitan determine who needed to enhance their lives, main discussions about philosophy and providing counsel.

Ms. Drury testified that he spent nights “principally in Isabella’s room,” whereas telling different college students that he was serving to her with psychological issues. Ms. Drury thought it was “bizarre,” she added, and advised a professor that she was frightened.

After being pressured by Mr. Ray, Ms. Drury testified, she despatched a letter to that professor and to a dean, retracting her “fears and considerations about Larry being a nasty, harmful, manipulative and sexually deviant man” who was carrying on an “inappropriate sexual relationship” with Ms. Pollok.

Ms. Pollok was amongst a number of college students who spent the summer time after their sophomore yr residing with Mr. Ray in an condo in Manhattan. Mr. Ray started threatening and assaulting the scholars and subjecting them to prolonged interrogations, based on testimony in his trial, badgering them into admitting to a number of invented infractions.

That habits continued a few decade, based on testimony, as younger individuals together with Ms. Pollok went on to dwell with Mr. Ray in North Carolina and New Jersey.

Santos Rosario, who was the sufferer of the hammer blow, testified throughout Mr. Ray’s trial that Ms. Pollok stored a catalog of video confessions on her laptop and mentioned that he handed over hundreds of {dollars} as reimbursement for property he had falsely admitted damaging. He added that Mr. Ray directed him a number of instances to have intercourse with Ms. Pollok, saying that have made him really feel “like I wasn’t in command of my life.”

One in all Mr. Rosario’s sisters, Felicia Rosario, testified that Mr. Ray ordered her to have intercourse with strangers and typically advised Ms. Pollok to report these encounters, including: “He would ship Isabella with me to ensure that we truly received the video the best way he needed it.”

Ms. Drury testified that Ms. Pollok recurrently collected her prostitution proceeds. Generally she confirmed up with Mr. Ray at Manhattan accommodations the place Ms. Drury was assembly purchasers, she mentioned.

One night on the Gregory Resort in Midtown, she testified, Mr. Ray handcuffed her, bare, to a chair, interrogated her, positioned the plastic bag over her head and choked her with a leash and collar. Ms. Drury mentioned that Ms. Pollok mocked her and recorded her “mendacity to inform him what I assumed he needed to listen to” as Mr. Ray questioned her.

In her letter to the court docket, Ms. Drury wrote that she didn’t consider that Ms. Pollok had possessed “any true capability” to have an effect on Mr. Ray’s habits that evening and didn’t contemplate her to be a participant within the assault.

Ms. Drury wrote that Ms. Pollok “went to sleep and awoke” subsequent to Mr. Ray, spent virtually all day by his facet, and advised that she had no skill to withstand him and little selection in whom she grew to become below his tutelage.

“His presence is deeply corrosive to morality, empathy, decency and humanity,” Ms. Drury wrote. “I shudder to assume what I’d have executed or been like had been I in her place.”