The lawyer, Allegra Glashausser mentioned that the scholars had been “a bunch of storytellers,” a few of whom had suffered from psychological sickness earlier than assembly Mr. Ray. They constructed upon and embellished his tales, she mentioned, finally making a “improbable conspiracy” that absorbed Mr. Ray.

“You’re going to listen to some outlandish issues,” Ms. Glashausser advised the jurors, including that to completely perceive what had transpired, “you’re going to should undergo the wanting glass, by the magic mirror.”

A narrative printed in New York journal in 2019, “The Stolen Children of Sarah Lawrence,” described Mr. Ray’s cult-leader ways. An investigation adopted, and he was arrested in 2020. Since then, he has been in custody, attending courtroom proceedings whereas flanked by United States Marshals.

Mr. Ray now faces a complete of 16 counts, together with a number of linked to pressured labor, cash laundering and tax evasion and conspiracy and one among violent crime in support of racketeering.

There’s little doubt that Mr. Ray’s life, earlier than he moved to the Sarah Lawrence campus in Westchester County, had been uncommon. It included an episode through which he organized a gathering between Rudolph W. Giuliani, then the mayor of New York Metropolis, and Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev, and claims that he labored at one level in Kosovo for a United States intelligence company.

He was pleasant within the Nineteen Nineties with Bernard Kerik, the previous New York Metropolis police commissioner, who helped him safe a job with Interstate Industrial Company, a development firm reputed to have ties to organized crime.

Mr. Ray was charged in 2000 by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn with collaborating in a scheme through which mobsters and stockbrokers had been accused of swindling traders out of $40 million. Across the identical time, Mr. Ray cooperated with prosecutors investigating Mr. Kerik, who ended up pleading responsible to state and federal prices stemming from their connections to Interstate.