The Untold Story of the Cult at Sarah Lawrence College - Pt 1 with Daniel Levin - Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramani

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's a shocking and horrific story that began at the
prestigious Sarah Lawrence College. Bright students manipulated and coerced into
a sadistic cult led by Larry Ray, the evil father
of one of their classmates. Ray's decade long reign of
terror was finally exposed when New York magazine broke the

(00:22):
outrageous story. The crimes were so heinous he was recently
sentenced to sixty years in prison. Daniel Levin is a
survivor of this brutal, abusive, dehumanizing cult that started when
his roommate said her father was going to stay with
them for a bit. Before he knew it, Daniel and

(00:45):
his fellow students were being extorted, tortured, physically and sexually abused,
and it was all on camera. In this powerful two
part edition of Navigating Narcissism, we will hear untold stories
when two brave survivors with very different experiences speak out,

(01:06):
How on earth did this cult begin at a top
ranked university, How was Ray able to trick and trap
these smart young people, and most importantly, how did his
vicious behavior impact their lives? From Red Table Talk podcasts
and iHeartMedia. I'm doctor Rominy, and this is Navigating Narcissism.

(01:29):
This podcast should not be used as a substitute for
medical or mental health advice. Individuals are advised to seek
independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare
professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue,
or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This

(01:52):
episode discusses abuse and suicide, which may be triggering to
some people. The views and opinion expressed are solely those
of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not represent the opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia,
or their employees. Daniel, I'm so happy you could join

(02:17):
me here on Navigating Narcissism for so many reasons. There's
been so much coverage about the Sarah Lawrence scandal and
what happened with Larry Ray. There's salacious interest in the details.
The other part of the story that I don't think
anyone ever talks about, but which I believe is most compelling,
is what happens to anyone who survives something like this.
We tend to end the stories where the scandal ends,

(02:40):
with little regard for what happens to the people who
are harmed, like yourself. That's what today's about. So I
thank you so much for coming in and talking.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Great. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's true that
is a part of the story that usually goes untold,
and I'm happy to talk about it.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Yeah, it always goes untold, and I think, especially when
the story as big and captured the public's interest for
the sort of lurid and frightening details, we lose that.
So if we could start at the beginning, just so
people listening understand how you came to meet Larry Ray
and how this unfolded.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Initially, So I went to Sarah Lawrence College from two
thousand and nine to twenty thirteen, you know, like most
college students. I was eighteen going into my freshman year,
and my first roommate, Santos Rosario, started dating someone named Talia,
and going into our sophomore year, we had sort of

(03:36):
a group of friends who decided that we would all
you could sort of pitch yourselves to live in a
slightly better housing situation at Sarah Lawrence, which we did.
So we ended up in sophomore year in this kind
of nice house slunum nine. There were eight of us,
and Talia was one of them. And part way through
sophomore year, she said that her dad, who Talia had

(03:59):
always talked about. Her whole life was dedicated to her
dad and the injustices that he had gone through, and
he was in prison wrongly. He was this former marine,
he had worked in intelligence, all this stuff. So part
way through sophomore year, we're all living together and she
says that her dad's getting out of prison and he
kind of needs a place to land, and would we
be okay if he kind of comes and like stays

(04:21):
for a bit, which I realized in retrospect sounds crazy,
But living there at the time, no one wants to
be the one to tell your friend she can't see
her dad. And there's no way I could have really
imagined what letting him live in our dorm would mean.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
No, I mean, I don't think you would. And I
think that one of the real dangers when we see
a story like this portrayed in the media is the
first thought is, how could you have let this happen?
And you should have said, I mean, it's so easy
to tell these stories backwards. It's almost impossible to tell
them forwards, because from a probability standpoint, Daniel, if somebody
had said, my parent has gone through a rough patch,

(04:58):
maybe even prison, but they've told you the story that, hey,
there's all wrongful, this, that, and the other was a
white collar crime. Can they crash for a minute? Most
of the time that might have actually had an okay conclusion,
like they then they find an apartment and they move out.
So I do think that there's such a risk in
how these stories are told in documentaries and all that.
Like I would have known better. I'd always tell people

(05:20):
slow your role. I'm not so sure that you would have.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
As far as the likelihood of you know, what happened
with Larry, it seems to me like we always live
in the balance between trust and boundaries, you know, and
that's what Larry leveraged, and I think probably many people
like him leverage trust, right and credibility. You know, I
had no reason not to trust his daughter. The things

(05:43):
that she said about him were out landish, but you know,
didn't seem like they were going to impact my life
all that much until they did.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
It's that leveraging of trust, the manipulation of trust, and
then weaponizing it and using it against someone is again,
and it's the ultimate manipulation, and it's very hard to
live your life forever girded against manipulation, at least of
all when you're eighteen nineteen years old. So what was
your initial impression of Larry when you finally met him?

Speaker 2 (06:12):
Yeah, great question. The difference between how I saw him
when I first encountered him versus what he became in
my mind over the course of knowing him is so different,
you know, so it's hard to go back to that
initial impression. But this is like a relatively short, kind
of rotund, bald shaved head guy who's kind of got
this like tough guy Staaten Island demeanor. When he first

(06:34):
came in, he seemed kind of silly, you know, and
the way that he talked, he sort of he talked
at this incredible pace, and it was incessant and there
was never a pause. The way a regular conversation between
two people, you know, there's a moment to breathe and
maybe moments where people insert themselves and they're able to
kind of go back and forth. You could never go

(06:55):
back and forth with Larry ever, So he just generally
was overwhelming. Was kind of my impression and also kind
of boring and a little weird. He just would go
on and on and on. So mostly I just tried
to avoid him because I knew once you got within
ten feet of his orbit, you were like stuck there
for way longer than you had time.

Speaker 1 (07:16):
So first impression of him wasn't all that great, Like
it was this person who had what we call pressured speech.
You're talking, you can't get a word in edgewise, and
so it's not like you were bold over which is
interesting to me because this show is called Navigating Narcissism, Right,
ninety five percent of stories, I have to be very careful,
Like people are telling me stories of parents and people

(07:38):
important to them, and then there's a betrayal or a
spouse or something like that. Listen, in this case, he's
in prison. This is more psychopathy. He's being a psychopath
than narcissistic, okay, which a psychopathy is not a diagnosis.
Narcissism is not a diagnosis. And the reason I'm bringing
this point up is that when we look at these
personality styles of psychopathy of narcissism, they what I call

(08:00):
the three c's. They're charming, they're charismatic, they're confident. It
did seem though, despite his appearance and his demeanor, there
was still something that drew people in. Can you give
some insight into that as somebody who was in his presence, he.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Had this way of trapping you in a conversation, and
you might be kind of resistant at first because it
would feel like, you know, this guy is going on
and on. But somehow, through the process of wearing you
down and the kind of logic traps that he would
get you in in a conversation, the authoritativeness with which
he spoke about things, you would find yourself kind of

(08:38):
confused and somehow a little vulnerable and trusting him a
little more than you trusted yourself inside of that conversation,
and he would build and build and build that And then,
in combination with having your friends kind of vouch for
him because they have fallen for it, it all compounds
until suddenly you find yourself in a much way worse

(09:00):
situation than you ever thought you would be in.

Speaker 1 (09:02):
I'm so glad you brought up that idea about how
he spoke authoritatively, because I do think that healthy people,
people who are not narcissistic, psychopathic, we're circumspect. We hed say, listen,
I'm an expert in this, but you know I don't
know everything, and da da da, right, versus somebody who
comes in and is just sort of this is it.

(09:23):
That sort of authoritativeness in some ways, many people almost
freeze and fawn in the face of that, and especially
folks who are as young as you are. I do bring
it back to your youth, because at the age you
were at this person is older. Something about being a
student already puts you sort of enthrall of people who
are professors and teachers. There's something that dynamic is sort
of how you're going through your days more than if

(09:44):
you were working in a job where there was more
of a ladder of people. And he comes in and
he does that. But the other piece, you talk about
this idea that other people are signing off, and whether
we call it groupthink or conformity or I can't be
the only one who's wrong, there are volumes of social
psychology literature that would hold to the idea that for

(10:05):
you to pull back and speak out and say no, no, no,
when everyone's saying no, this is great, that actually would
really go against a grain. It would be contrary to
anything we would expect.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
What I found, you know, once I started being public
about this story, is that generally what people want is
to reduce something to the simplest possible conclusions so that
they can sort of internalize it, process it, and move on.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
I also think though, that this idea that there was
this vulnerability, so there's something wrong with you. Quite frankly,
I think what renders someone anyone in the world vulnerable
to the likes of a Larry Ray are actually the
most human and pro social elements of us, including empathy, sympathy, compassion,

(10:53):
wanting to be part of a group. Those are actually
really healthy elements of a person. So trying to reduce
someone there's something wrong with you and there's something wrong
with someone else who lived at sloanem nine instead of
they actually brought normal human qualities to this. By doing that,
what we're able to do is convince ourselves I wouldn't
have fallen for that that thing is not wrong with me.

(11:15):
That to me is sort of an invalidating, abusive element
that can happen in a lot of storytelling, which is
like we're trying to clear up.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I love that, Yeah, I mean I moved by that, obviously,
because it's nice to be human and to be humanized,
and you know, kind of telling this story. When I
was writing my book and when I was making the documentary,
I had kind of a list in my mind where
I was like, I know that people are going to
want to say either that the victims were somehow especially

(11:44):
vulnerable because of something that was wrong with them, the
parents did something wrong, the school did something wrong, and
so those were sort of the outs and pieces of
all of those can be true, you know, fine, but
I didn't want people to just sort of take the
off ram of like, well, it's just because of the school,
and so if the school hadn't done that, it wouldn't
have happened, which isn't the whole story, you know.

Speaker 1 (12:05):
In order to make sure that the retelling of Daniel's
experience was as authentic as possible, he wrote a memoir
entitle slonum Woods nine and executive produced the Hulu docuseriies
Stolen Youth.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
So trying to figure out how to just keep it
complicated as much as I could.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
But that's really smart thing you just said, is I
wanted to keep it complicated. When do we ever hear
that in life that somebody wants to keep it complicated.
I almost want to take a second with that, because
I think you actually just put word to what I've
been trying to do my entire career. And why it's
so frustrating for me is that this is complicated in
the sense that so wired into us and so baked
into us of what did the institutions do wrong? What

(12:46):
did the people do wrong? What did your parents do wrong?
Without putting the very white house spotlight and the only
place it belonged is the perpetrator. I think though, to
do that means that that, just like that transforms the
world into a terrifying place.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yes, it's so scary if we say the only answer
is that this guy is this kind of monster moving
among us, and you have to just look out for
people like that. That's unlivable, you know, the ideas this
could happen to anyone any time. I think that, you know,
there's a conversation to be had about the circumstances that

(13:25):
allow a man like that to do what he did,
you know, And that's the really really complicated conversation that
I don't really know how to have. I don't think
that there was anything fundamentally wrong with how my parents
raised me or communicated with me. But there were real
gaps and failures in that relationship which allowed openings for him.

(13:47):
Not failures that are more extreme necessarily than anyone else's,
but it's there. There were real wonderful things about Sarah
Lawrence and the freedom that it afforded the students, but
also real failures and the relationship between the authority of
the school and the student body, you know, and each

(14:07):
of us. The people who ended up being abused by
Larry Ray had different intersecting vulnerabilities and you know, resiliencies
and different things that he managed to work into or
around and to take advantage of us. So I think
that it's possible to look at all of those things

(14:28):
and look at the ways that, you know, in a
world where parenting looked different or the way we talk
about parenting was different, it might protect us better against
someone like this.

Speaker 1 (14:38):
Right, You're right, all of those things are happening simultaneously.
I often talk about this idea even if multiple truths.
Our parents were good, our parents also weren't good, because
no parent is perfect. We were going through some things,
we had some strengths, we had some weaknesses. We were
an environment that was good that wasn't great. This is
the stack of pancakes. These are the multiple truths and
they don't fit together well. And in fact, the fact

(15:00):
that they don't fit together well is also what can
sometimes render us vulnerable because it does create those little cracks.
What is interesting is that very rarely on this show,
I think maybe one, maybe two other times in the
whole two seasons of this show have we faced up
to actual psychopathic s. It's of people when somebody's full

(15:21):
time job, like a psychopaths, is to find the cracks
and other human beings and that's what they focus on.
It's like a predatory virus that is just its only job, morning, noon,
and night is to find the weaknesses to infect the host.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, that's what was so scary about Larry. This was
a person who would devote not even his waking like
literally like twenty four hours a day to just harming
other people. And it's amazing what a person can achieve
if they just devote all their time and energy to
hurting other people. And yeah, I think that people don't
really realize. You can't conceive of what that's like.

Speaker 1 (15:57):
No, you can't, and thank you for pointing that out.
I think I think that's the problem is I do
think that there's certain human phenomena we can't get our
heads around. But you were in actual direct contact with
this This was your life, this was your home, and
initially you actually went from sort of avoiding him and
kind of thinking, like you said, he was a little weird,
he was a little off, but then there was a

(16:18):
transition to trusting him. Can you walk us through that
process for you?

Speaker 2 (16:22):
For sure. The first person after Talia who he got
to was Isabella, who was Talia's best friend. So Santo's
Italian Isabella were kind of a trio from the beginning
of school. They were all close. Isabella was from Texas,
she was far away from home, was kind of a loner,
and Talia was like her first best friend. And when

(16:45):
Larry moved into our dorm, he became kind of Isabella's
dad too, and there was this kind of family feeling
and he was looking out for Isabella. And then I
would hear that Isabella was having some kind of crisis,
but something was going on with her and Larry was
helping her, and then Santos was closer to them, and

(17:09):
it was like this group was forming. And then my
friend Claudia also started talking to Larry, and she definitely
had like noticeable mental health stuff going on. To Santos,
you know, had had his own mental health struggles, which
I didn't know about as his friend. He hadn't really
been open about them, but I you know, you could
feel that he had certain like sadness or something that

(17:31):
he was struggling with. And suddenly after he was talking
to Larry, he was you know, exercising and he was
seemed to be feeling good and had this kind of
glow about him, and so it was noticeable that something
had shifted, but it didn't feel like there was any
reason to be concerned. Just looked like this man who

(17:52):
was very motivated and maybe a little bit more into
kind of a stereotypical idea of like masculinity was sort
of pushing that onto Santos. And so there was this cascade,
you know, where everyone seemed to go from living our
kind of chaotic, kind of messy college liberal arts life

(18:13):
where we were like not doing a whole lot of
school work and smoking cigarettes and you know, playing video games,
to now they're way more polished and clean and like
doing their work and really regimented, and so it seemed
like on paper there was all these positivesage impacts. And

(18:33):
then I had been dating Raven at the time. It
was my first long term relationship, and that relationships started
to get not great for either of us and was
really difficult, and I sort of tried to end it,
and I had Santos and Claudia suggesting, like, well, why
don't you talk to Larry. He can kind of give
you advice on your relationship. He can maybe help you

(18:56):
figure out how to find a place to live in
New York, because I just didn't understand how to do that,
And so I finally gave in. What was the harm
of getting a cup of coffee with this guy?

Speaker 1 (19:05):
What happened to that cup of coffee that you went
from a little bit sort of cagy around this person
to growing to trust him.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
What's important to understand is how when Larry and I
met for coffee, the two of us were coming to
this meeting with such completely different levels of preparation for
what it was going to be. You're two different agendas, yes, exactly.
So I show up thinking I'm just getting a cup
of coffee for you know what, forty five minutes with
my friend's kind of weird dad, and maybe he'll give

(19:35):
me some kind of advice or something. And for him,
he's done this before, he will do it again after me.
He's going to show up, and he knows that he's
going to try to work me and love bamb me
right and manipulate me and control the conversation so that
I will be pulled further and further in. It's this

(19:58):
sort of predator p situation that's exactly right. But I
didn't know any of that. So what I thought would
just be sort of a short coffee became this conversation
that is so hard to explain. He got me to
start talking about the things that I felt insecure about,
my anxieties and angsts, and my mom was sick my

(20:21):
whole childhood. That suddenly it was this vulnerable conversation, and
I was talking about my relationship but also my insecurity
around romance and relating to other people, and my body
and sex, and then we're talking about sexuality, and then
I'm talking about, you know, well, I've questioned my sexuality

(20:42):
and he's digging into that, and so it's just becoming
more and more open and raw, and the conversation is
stretching on and on, but it sort of didn't realize
how much time was passing until I realized the sun
is going down. So we sat in that Starbucks talking
for hours, and by the end of the conversation, he

(21:05):
had convinced me that I should break up with my girlfriend,
and that I didn't have to feel that I owed
her anything. I should just like send a message in it.
We left the Starbucks and we're walking down the street.
He offered that I could come and stay in the apartment,
like crash around the couch and Santos and Claudia you
were hanging out there or whatever, and so that seemed

(21:26):
like a, you know, low commitment kind of way to
have some place to stay in New York while I
found what I thought would be my more sort of
permanent living situation. And we rounded the corner and there
was a stretch limousine idoling there and the door opened
and all of my friends were inside, Talia, Isabella, Santos,

(21:48):
and Claudia. And what I didn't quite put together then
but would realize later because I was constantly in this position,
was that they had been sitting in the limousine waiting,
idling on the corner for the many, many hours, the
whole time that conversation was happening, because Larry had stepped
out of the limousine to go talk to me, and
then they just waited until he came back with me.

(22:11):
That was the beginning of me joining that group and
the end of that period of my life.

Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah, I mean, and you're using the language of these relationships,
the love bombing, the manipulation. It's something we sort of
called the narcissistic or psychopathic intel gathering. Every single conversation
for them is transactional. It's about getting intel, right. They're
sort of pickpocketing your soul, Like how many pieces can
I pull off this person put in my pocket that
I'm going to weaponize later. That's every interaction for this person.

(22:39):
You wouldn't have known that going in. It's a tough
way to live, Daniel, to go through life thinking that's
everyone's game.

Speaker 2 (22:46):
Yeah, it doesn't seem possible. Additionally, I didn't realize that
he was using every conversation with everyone to gather information
about everyone else. Yes, so he also had all this
information about me that I hadn't hold him, but I
might have shared here or there with friends, and he
wasn't directly coming out and pretending that he magically knew things.
But he was a little bit like making guesses or

(23:10):
seeming to somehow be so intuitive that he would sort
of open by talking about someone was sick in my
family growing up, or something as seems like my background,
you know. So he would use this information to make
it seem like he had some sort of intuitive ability
that he didn't have. Correct.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
But there was a uniqueness of timing and where that
coffee shop conversation took place, because you are at a critical
juncture of a relationship. You were coming into your own
in an identity. So when somebody wants to see and
hear you, and it's someone who's not in your peer group,
it really can feel like the sun is shining on you.
Why do you think that he wanted you to break
up with her because that was the guidance he was giving.

(23:46):
Do you think it was just purely to isolate you,
or that he sensed that he wasn't getting through to
her and it was a way to eliminate her from
the structure.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
I think it was all of those things. It was
alienation yea. Right. She was someone who was not just
a connection to the real world for me, but also
someone who was really opposed to Larry, and so as
long as I was connected to her, I was not
available to him. And also the relationship had become pretty

(24:16):
toxic at that time. You know, as an eighteen year old,
I was going through a lot, but it wasn't great.
What Larry did was upfront provide some kind of apparent value,
you know. And so the fact that he like got
me out, so to speak, of that relationship, which had
really been making my life feel which was pretty bad

(24:36):
at the time, felt like he was helping me. Yeah,
you know, and it was a concrete form of help.
And so I could look at that and say, well,
what he did today feels pretty bad, but he helped
me with that thing. I can't deny that, you know.
So here we are.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
But he also gave you permission to do the thing
you wanted to do. Yeah, right, you had already made
a choice, and what he was doing was sort of
doubling down on that, which made it seem like he
was g you advice, but really you would make the choice,
So it was easy to separate the two. But at
this point, though you've been giving this offerage to sleep
on this couch of an apartment where your friends live,
did you then transition to being there more and living there?

(25:12):
And what happened once you did that?

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Yeah? So I was living out of a backpack, sleeping
on the couch in that apartment, you know, which for me,
it was like summer in college didn't feel like that
big of a deal in my mind. It was like,
how do people pay for apartments? You know? I got
a job working at a nice cream shop downtown and
it just didn't the math didn't quite work out. And

(25:34):
then like who would be my roommate? And it was
like Santos, But Santos is spending all his time at
this apartment, you know. So the prospect of living my
like summer in New York started to fade away in
favor of spending time in this apartment where all my
friends at the time were hanging out every day and
I had a free couch to sleep on and Larry

(25:56):
was cooking meals every night. And started to feel like
a very familiar kind of parental situation. And so it's
just like you just kind of fall back into it
because it's convenient.

Speaker 1 (26:08):
Basically, we will be right back with this conversation. And
so you did. Then what happened once you started living there,
because it wasn't quite as simple as a couch to
crash on.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
No, no, So you know there was a trade off, right,
which was that I got free meals and I got
a free couch to sleep on, and in return, I
had to be subjected to these Larry conversations that I'd
been avoiding the whole time. What he worked on that
whole summer was destabilizing us. So it would be as

(26:46):
simple as like he would slice a grape vertically and
have you close your eyes and taste half of a
grape sliced vertically, and then he would slice it horizontally
and have you taste it the same way. And he
would say, don't you notice how that's different? And that
sounds so odd, But you would be in this situation
where you really wanted to be like, yeah, you're right,

(27:07):
there is something different, and just this tiny little thing
was one of many other things where you started to
trust his claims about your own sensory perceptions and experiences
more than your own. He would play songs and talk
about sort of the feelings that you were having from

(27:28):
the song, and you would want to agree with him
because it was almost like cool to go along with
the thing that he's claiming is happening. And your friend
right next to you is saying like, yeah, totally, I
do I hear that in the song or whatever, and
you would just build on this, and then we're talking
about government and about the you know, the history of
American imperialism. So more and more it just started to

(27:51):
feel like the apartment was the whole world and kind
of the place where things were real and outside everything
else is like not real or chaos.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
It's so interesting you put it that way, because you know,
part of it is also time served right when there's
no other competing stimulus. That's how families can indoctrinate people
into stuff, right, But because you go to school and
other places, there's a balance. But when there was no alternate,
there was this pressure to yield, right, all kinds of
research on suggestibility and to get the social pressure to

(28:21):
yield to that and all of that, and so those
are real things. I don't think he was that smart,
to be honest with you, I really really don't think
it's a smart man, but I think that he was
so singularly motivated by power and control and dominance, and
he just had this little, weird, manipulative bag of tricks.
I mean, I'm even thinking of like even myself, as
you were saying that, I remember being at a wine

(28:41):
tasting once, or like don't you taste the chocolate raspberry
and oak tree? And I'm like no, And I felt
pressure to go along, but I turned to the person
next to myself, I don't taste any of those things.
But what you have to do then is like I'm
a philistine. I'm not sophisticated. So there had to be
some explanatory models. But that explanation sometimes doesn't feel good, Like, oh,

(29:02):
maybe I'm not so special or food smart that I
can tell that this great is cut two different ways.
So I think that somewhere the explanation has to go,
and so to relent to it when everyone else was
saying that it's a very very powerful sort of experience.
So you're living in this apartment and slowly but surely
you're losing this touch with reality.

Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, and it started to become kind of a boot camp,
you know. So he's playing a playlist of the same
one hundred songs every morning, you know that I'm waking
up to and he has only the boys doing some
kind of like workout routine. And then the summer ends
and I had gotten into a study abroad program, okay,

(29:45):
in England, So I left and went to England. And
I feel like this is a part of the story
that's hard to explain and gets kind of skipped over
for its complexity. But you know, I had distance from
the group. It was across the Atlantic Ocean in school.

(30:05):
But I remember feeling this like deep fear that I
couldn't quite let myself explain. But it just felt so
bad when I would think about Larry and when I
would think about going back home, and I mean, there's
like it's became abusive before that, and there was the sex,
and things started to get really bad, and then I left,

(30:28):
and so all of that was in my mind, but
I had no way to make sense of any of it,
and I just wanted to shut it all out. England
became its own bubble away from this other bubble, and
I cut myself off from everyone and I just couldn't deal.
And then you know, I had to go home. For
winter break, and I tried to figure out a way

(30:52):
to just go to my parents and not make it
seem like I was somehow avoiding Larry, but I couldn't
figure out a way around that, and so he convinced
me to come back and stay in the apartment for
that winter break. And things had become so much more extreme,
and that winter break was like horrible, and there was
all kinds of abuse.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
When you were in the UK, were you completely out
of touch with everybody?

Speaker 2 (31:17):
No. I just tried to avoid thinking about any of
this as much as I could, and then you know,
Larry would reach out and I'd kind of dodge his calls.
It was almost like I was trying to break up
with him but didn't know how, and so it was
kind of trying to ghost him or something and felt
bad about that. And then I would send a message,
you know, explaining how I'd been having these negative thoughts

(31:38):
against him and that that was so ungrateful because he'd
done all these things for me, and you know, this
was all stuff that he'd really beaten into us. So
even in England, he had a very long reach.

Speaker 1 (31:52):
And do you feel comfortable talking about the situations involving
sexual abuse, because sexual abuse in the situation is such
a form of coercion, right, It's advantaging a vulnerability, it's exploitative,
it creates a sense of shame and that you people
are further under someone's control. None of it's consensual. And
so how was that playing out?

Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, yeah, totally. One of the things that made it
so hard for me to make sense of this afterwards
is I just really didn't think about men consenting, you know,
which I think is like an important part of the conversation. Yeah. So,
really it started off the bat I was staying in
the apartment. I think it might have been like even
the first week, Isabella was sleeping in the bedroom with

(32:34):
Talia and Larry. You know, so there's a room where
just they are, Okay, so that's yeah. I don't know
how I accepted that, frankly, but I did. And early
on she came out of the bedroom. For context, I
had known the whole time we knew each other in

(32:54):
college that Isabella kind of had a crush on me,
and I just wasn't really into it, and so I
just kind of steered clear of any of that. You know,
it's just whatever, And she came out of the bedroom
and approached me, and I was in like pajama. She
like pulled my briefs down and started performing oral sex
on me, which I had not signed up for and

(33:16):
didn't want to be happening. But in my head, you know,
I'd had this conversation with Larry prior about my sexuality
and masculinity and about like maybe me having a certain
kind of prudishness, like that's how he kind of led
me to interpret these things and that you know, a
man should be like sexual and she did all these things.
Is very like classic, refined, toxic masculinity that he was

(33:40):
sort of trying to inject into me. I think even
without someone like Larry in the situation like that, it's
very hard to reverse the flow of what's happening, you know.
And so I felt like I froze, you know, I
kind of a little bit went out of my body
in this dark room and was just letting what was
happening happen. Because I also knew that if I said

(34:01):
no or I didn't do it, then this would get
back to Larry and would somehow become a whole conversation
or something. And it almost felt like I just had
to be chill so that I could keep living for
free in this place, you know. And so that to
me was kind of this first instance of you know,

(34:22):
I do think he sent Isabella out to do that,
so he's like abusing her, I think, using her as
kind of a tool to abuse me and confuse me further.
What that led to same summer is he sort of
proposed a sort of sexual education for me between him

(34:42):
and me and Isabella. There would be this like private
kind of almost course for me to get like better,
because I was struggling with my sexuality and I felt
nervous and uncomfortable with sex, and so he was going
to kind of be like a professor for the two

(35:03):
of us who turned out to get involved, you know.
And really what it became was it was pretty clear
that he was enacting his sexual desires on Isabella and
that I was somehow kind of being used to enable
that or something under the guise of like him helping me.

(35:24):
It was really really confusing.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
I don't even know with psychopathic people, if we're talking
about sexual desire or where other than it's just one
more place to use power to maybe have a moment
of pleasure. I mean why Dolphin said that. You know,
psychopathic people are motivated solely by power, profit, and pleasure,
pick one on any given day or any given moment.
But in capitalizing on this narrative he was creating around

(35:48):
your sexuality, then he was creating one more place to
be able to control and overpower you to do the
same thing to Isabella. All of it was this course
of control, you know, using sex as that weapon.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because all of
the things that he was doing did seem less about
any kind of sexual pleasure and more about control. I mean,
he was sending people out to have sex with each other.
He was like putting me in a dress in front
of my friends and having me like go out and
do things just purely for shame and control. There were

(36:24):
a lot of things where he was getting me to
participate in my own sexual abuse in front of my friends.

Speaker 1 (36:32):
You know, well, it's really participating in your own degradation.
But you could cut him out of the shot, and
it looks like you're doing this on your own right.
So what that does is it puts him above reproach. Well,
you're doing it. I don't see anyone with a gun
against your head. And that is the reason people like
Larry Ray and anyone like him get away with what

(36:53):
they do because laws are not designed to account for
dynamics like coercion and exploitation. They see someone who's being
an agent in their own life, and that's not the
case at all, Tony. Coercion is the psychological gun at
somebody's head totally.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
And to ask people to embrace the idea that you
could not have full control over your own choices, it's
a lot to ask. It makes it so hard to
explain what happened, and then when it comes to sex,
it's a real journey to get to a place where
you can say to yourself, I didn't want that to happen, right.

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Well, the fact is that anyone out there listening to this,
watching this who's been in a relationship with a narcissistic
or psychopathic person will understand. And while their stories didn't
end up on TV in a documentary and don't have
that sort of the arking notes of your story, that
sense of how could anyone understand this? It feels as

(37:54):
though nothing I was doing made sense. It actually fully
makes sense from that point of view, And so keep
that in mind. It almost feels like, especially in a
psychopathic relationship, which is what it was with Larry Ray,
there is no consent to anything. You've been so deeply manipulated,
you're fully in the service of another that there's no
consent around sex, there's no consent around interaction. There's just

(38:16):
no consent. That's how those relationships work. A lot of
people there argue that the sexual encounters people have with
malignantly narcissistic or psychopathic people is never consensual because it
often happens, almost always happens under this cloak of manipulation
or trying to keep a relationship from ending, or trying
to give in to the other person. So you're not abused.

(38:38):
That's not consent, you know. Unfortunately, to the world it
looks like it, which really complicates the healing of somebody
who's going through an experience like that. But as you're
going through this, Daniel, what were you going through mentally,
because there's so much happening to you, What was your
psychological experience of this?

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, So for a long time, when I reflect on this,
I thought that my internal experience was the whole time,
I didn't buy into it, and I felt scared and
uncomfortable internally all the time the same amount, and was
just looking for a way to get out. And then
looking back on it and some of the writing I
did at the time, and some of the evidence and

(39:19):
that sort of thing, the video that exists, I think
that there were a lot of different layers of thought
happening for me internally at the same time. And I
wanted so badly for this to be a good situation.
I wanted it to be what it had been sold
to me as, which was this was a good and
special man who was helping me and my friends, and

(39:42):
we were all becoming better people and we're going to
do good things. And I also felt simultaneously a deep discomfort,
and trying to reconcile those two things was where so
much pain came from. So what I told myself, what
Larry was encouraging, was that I was uncomfortable because there

(40:04):
was something wrong with me, you know, because of my
pre existing issues whatever, and that's what he was helping
me with, you know. So my resistance to him was
in fact a symptom of my own problems, and I
had to just get with the program and then I
would feel better. It's like, something's always been wrong with
me and I've always felt this bad, and with Larry,

(40:25):
I'll finally feel good again. Right.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Well, it's a double gaslight, right He is denying reality.
He's telling you there's something wrong with you, and then
he's telling you I'm the one who has the answer
for what's wrong with you.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Right, So that.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Double gaslighting is a multiplier and it's very difficult to
crawl out from under it because what he's done is
you've got someone kicked down to the ground and now
you've got a boot at their throat kind of thing.
So there's not many places they can move. But now
you're telling them and I can help you get out
of this position, and they're like, oh great, you saved
to me, and so he said up that savior relationship totally.

(41:03):
It's one of the most perilous dynamics. And you see
this in imprisonment settings hostage settings. The thing that was
worse for all of you. A person who is literally
being held hostage is very aware I'm being in prison.
You were being held hostage, but there was actually a
door you could walk out of, but you couldn't. It's

(41:25):
almost a philosophical dilemma. Right, because you could walk through it.
You couldn't walk through it, you couldn't leave. You were
being held hostage. But to the world you look like
a person who got a push set up in an
apartment where you could stay and go in and out
at will, at least for the person being held hostage.
The pieces of the story terrifying as they are, they
fit together. In your case, none of them fit together

(41:46):
when they didn't fit. That's the stuff that drives you mad.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Yeah, agreed, That's been the driving motivation behind telling this story.
And I think what's so valuable about podcasts, like Navigating
Narcissism is seen so many action movies where someone's telled hostage.
It's a pre existing schema in people's minds, so they
know how to think about it and talk about it
very smart. Daniel, Yeah, And so I'm hoping that, you know,

(42:11):
as we see more and more of these stories, people
start to learn the shape of them and they recognize them.
And just as the conversation and the social attitudes changed
the same way that they did, you know, around domestic
violence and like not until the seventies, right, and even
then it wasn't like really all the way where it
should be, but at least people start to think, like,

(42:32):
this is what this is and it's not okay.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Correct, correct, you're right. I mean I think domestic my
own is a great example. We're still not where we
need to be, but up until the nineteen seventies, there
wasn't even a name for it. Here we are in
twenty twenty three. Terms like coercive control and gas lighting
are now more part of the public conversation. There is
a recognition. But all of that said, people still look

(42:54):
at the story put out there and stolen use in
your book, just your entire experience, and still look at
it with a huh. And we have to lift the
huh because to do so invalidates your experience, and it
can really put the brakes on healing from something like
what you've gone through, because it was enough to be

(43:15):
terrorized and traumatized and abused, but then to have that
experience invalidated, it's a retraumatization and like I said, it
really can stop healing from unfolding. One of the parts
of your documentary, and I will be honest, it was
one of the parts I found most upsetting. And it's
almost in some way surreal to have you in front
of me. You know, I've never had this experience. It

(43:38):
was heartbreaking. I paused, you know, it was just a
little bit too much. It was like one of those
pulled the blanket over my head. I can't watch this.
It was a video recording that was in the documentary
that was incredibly graphic abuse, torture. I would say with pliers,
and I hear you were the one who pushed for
this to be in the documentary, because of course any
of us watching this would say, this is so cool

(43:58):
to you to have this feature, But can you talk
about that?

Speaker 2 (44:01):
So the first thing I want to say, which isn't
a direct answer to that, is I can imagine how
surreal it would be to sit across from me having
seen that footage. So surreal to watch it yourself and
see yourself on screen and see this whole experience covered,
and then to close your laptop and just be in
your life. Now, very weird experience to be documented. Yeah,

(44:24):
and I say that I don't mean to be like callous,
but when I hear from people who have trouble watching
the content, I of course I need to be empathetic
and understand how challenging that is, and there is a
little part of me which I like to think is
my self advocate. That's kind of like, well, sorry, like
it was hard for me, yeah, like to be there,

(44:45):
and I didn't have a choice to pause, you know, And.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Thank you for saying that, because I really appreciate you
framing it that way.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
You didn't have a chance to boss. But yeah, So
to address the question.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
This is a moment that's going to stay with me
for a long time. I did close my eyes seeing
a young man be violently tortured and abused with something
I could not watch. Daniel made the important point that
he couldn't hit pause. Everybody seems to be fascinated by
true crime, but as viewers of these stories, we can

(45:19):
hit pause and choose to protect ourselves from the worst
of it. This was a rare case when some of
the worst of it was recorded and right there for
us to see.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
So that footage came out in trial. I didn't know
it existed until pretty close to when the documentary was
being finished. There was a lot of footage that I
was shown when I was working with the US district
attorneys helping them build their case. Once I learned that
footage existed. It was one of the most validating things

(45:55):
that had ever happened in my life because this did
happen to me. And let me tell you, there's nothing
like sitting in a room surrounded by lawyers and law
enforcement people and hitting play on a ninety minute sex
tape of yourself that you didn't know existed. Yeah, they
do you the favor of not watching the screen while
you watch it, but the sound is still on for everyone.

(46:15):
So sorry. Anyway, I left before anyone else. I lived
with this in secret for years and there was no evidence,
there was no video, there was nothing I could turn to,
so if I wanted to tell someone about it or
explain it, it was just me staking my flag in
the truth. Yeah, and there was nothing that I could
point to and say, but it's real, I promise. I

(46:37):
know it sounds so crazy, but this is what happened.
And so that video came out and I was thinking
about how these true crime documentaries somehow manage even though
they feel kind of blood and guts, they don't make
us feel that visceral, empathetic pain, and in fact somehow

(47:01):
kind of desensitize us and dehumanize the victim. So we
feel this odd distance and it becomes like fiction. They're
like characters. Yeah, I wanted people to feel how you know,
if we're gonna engage with watching stories about like the
most horrible things that have ever happened to people, then

(47:21):
we have to take on the responsibility of, like we're
watching the most horrible things that have ever happened to people.
It's not gonna be like a fun ride, right. I
hear that.

Speaker 1 (47:31):
I'm so sorry all of that happened to you. I
really am, and I and I'm so grateful you're sitting
in front of me here, Okay, you know, I really
am that experience. There was so much footage you're saying,
ninety minutes of sex, this footage of you, you know,
being tortured. Why did he video everything? What was that about?

Speaker 2 (47:54):
I would be curious for your take on this dealing
with like narcissism, because I recorded every single phone call
and when he was arrested, I mean, the terabytes upon
terabytes of recordings that they seized is unfathomable. He used
those recordings as blackmail. Part of why I didn't speak
at first, and part of why it was a debate

(48:16):
to talk to the reporters to tell the story at
all was because I had the sound seared into my
mind of the camera shutter on his phone, that sound
effect on those old flip phones when you take a photo.
While I was in Address, he'd put me in and
he was telling me to try to swallow a dildo

(48:37):
that was in my mouth. You know. It was like horrible.
But that photo, you know, as you're saying, he's cut
out of the frame, so it's like a photo of
just me and Address with a dildo in my mouth,
you know, with no context. So that's him documenting. But
my fear was he could send that photo to anyone,
and how would I explain that I'm trying to live
a life where that's not part of my existence. So

(48:59):
I think think blackmail was a big part of it.
And then there's also the question of I don't know
how much someone like him who's kind of a con
artist and there's a psychopath and this kind of delusional
like how much he believes his own story, because it
did also seem like he genuinely thought that he was

(49:21):
recording people confessing that they had harmed him. So that's
what these interrogations often were, was him pushing us to
confess that we had done something to mess up his
life or to harct his things, his apartment, whatever. And
it seemed like he did genuinely believe, like I have

(49:41):
this evidence because he made a website where he put
Claudia's a video of her admitting supposedly these things online
and he would send these videos or written confessions to
other people as if trying to self advocate.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
I think that that was the most stunning part of it,
because you know, Daniel, you said there was a certain validation,
seeing that almost all cases when people are victimized or traumatized,
there's no evidence, it's just what is in your memory,
and your memory had been so adult by this experience
because of what he was doing to everyone. So that

(50:20):
moment of validation, as horrifically painful as it must have
been to watch that, there's also a moment of yes, liberation,
this did happen. This is remembering that right. It could
have broken you out of part of this gaslight cycle
that you were so embedded in. I have to say,
when I recognize like he made all this video is

(50:41):
there's an impunity to him. There's no consequence. He's never
faced yes, he'd done short prisonstance, but for what he
had done repeatedly and managed to find the loopholes over
and over and over again. This was a guy who
didn't believe there were consequences. When there were consequences, he
launched in some conspiratorial rant. You know, he's always always masterful,

(51:05):
like I am being victimized. I'm being victimized. That was
his delusional narrative, I am forever a victim. But that
sense of impunity when you throw in there, the delusional
grandiosity we see in psychopathy and malignant narcissism that need
to be seen in a certain way to construct this narrative,
and in a sick way, they felt like the trophies
of a serial killer. It had that sense of I

(51:28):
did this. There was zero sense of remorse, and that
absolute lack of remorse is what nudges us out of
narcissism territory fully into psychopathy, because narcissistic people feel remorse
for their wrongdoings. They feel shame, they don't want to
be caught, they don't like what it does to their
public image. To this day, he remains immersed in the
sense he did no wrong. I was stunned by that

(51:50):
the amount of footage, because I did a double take
at first, and I said, where did this come from?
I'm like, Okay, this dude shot this. But he knew
what he was doing because the fact of the matter, Daniel,
he got his daughter out of there so she wouldn't
bear witness to any of this. I think that this
idea that there was this he was so like, he
was crazed, he was so calculated, he was so conniving.

(52:13):
This was thought through.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
Yeah. I mean another example of that is I think
that he intentionally chose people who are just over eighteen,
you know, so we were still vulnerable and you know,
defining ourselves and all of that, but technically, legally, you know,
there's nothing that can be done. I can provide just
a bit of that background, which a lot of people

(52:36):
I think don't really have. Larry was victimizing people his
whole life, right, you can look at things going back
into the eighties, or he's sort of in this like
club scene in New Jersey. He's a club owner, and
he was like, he was doing pretty horrible things to adults.
And then you know, he gets married and I think
that his wife was a victim of his had two

(53:00):
daughters together, and then his next victims were his daughters,
right Yeah, And there's audio footage that is heartbreaking where
you know, you can hear him manipulating his daughter's gaslighting them.
He's manipulating his youngest daughter Ava and using Talia even
then as this kind of like lieutenant to get to

(53:23):
the youngest daughter and convincing them that their mother had
been abusing them so that he could get custodies essentially, so,
I think he was in some ways really accustomed to
coercing young people and had seemed to have just done
that with Talia in a way that was really total.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
One thing that was also striking was all of you
living in that apartment who were in that orbit were
convinced things happened that didn't yeh that I mean, I
mean writing down affidavits paying for the I mean, really
convinced things happen that did not happen, and he used

(54:07):
dozens of different techniques to solidify that. That to me
was such an extraordinary level of manipulation. One bizarre and
terrifying tactic that Larry used throughout his reign was coercing
his young followers to confess to breaking or destroying his things.
He would then have them write out itemized costs for

(54:30):
the damages they were forced to pay. Larry also dismantled
the student's memories, making them believe they had repressed various
traumas from their childhoods, when in fact the events had
never happened. This would have terrible ongoing impacts, as they
would then be more likely to doubt their memories of

(54:52):
the actual abuse they experienced.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, I want to break down the idea of what
it even means to be convinced of something, because from
the outside, it looks like a person who really believes
that they ruin this thing. And even when I'm in
that situation, you know, I'm looking at a friend of
mine who is confessing to something and it looks like
they fully believe it. So I believe that they believe it,

(55:17):
and so I believe I should believe it because everyone
else is saying it. And so you have this simultaneous
thing where you kind of think, yeah, maybe it is possible,
or I don't remember doing this thing that everyone's saying
I did. And then also I know that if I
push back and say it didn't happen, I'll be harmed.
So it's just the path of least resistance is set

(55:38):
up for you. And it's amazing what someone can achieve
as far as manipulating people when you play on the
idea of repressed memory, which is what Larry did. It's
been so disorienting afterwards because immediately after I left, I
just decided that Larry's whole set of ideas around repressed

(55:58):
memory was not really along, was just for manipulation. And then,
as an example, the video you're talking about of me
being tortured with the pliers. I saw that video and
had absolutely zero memory at all of that happening. I
remember all kinds of other abuse that happened, I have
zero memory of that. And I understand though, you know

(56:20):
brain chemistry and we log things in different ways. It's
just a lot easier to live in a world where
I just think Larry made up the idea that we
cannot remember things. But of course, again, like everything else
is just like it's more complicated, and that's a way
that the brain works that someone can harness if they
want to gaslight you.

Speaker 1 (56:37):
I mean, you just said something so powerful, Daniel, because
you know this, You're absolutely right, You've brought up something
so important based on your story. This whole concept of
repressed memories an incredibly controversial area in the whole field
of psychology. We do know that trauma impacts how memory
is encoded and how it can be recalled, which is

(56:59):
why that, for example, especially sexual assault survivors will have
a recollection many, many, many years later. And then the
first pushback is, well, why didn't you say something at
the time, And we know the whole cascade of reasons
they couldn't, but part of it was there's a real
blocking out of the memory. Anyone listening to this who
cares about repressed memory listen to this, because you just

(57:22):
said it. You said I had no memory of that happening.
So if asked and you were giving the whole history
of what happened, you wouldn't have brought up that event, right,
And so you're almost saying that even if someone asked me,
sat down and said what happened, they wouldn't have drawn

(57:43):
that memory out of you.

Speaker 2 (57:44):
Oh, I sat down with the US district attorneys, all
these people whose job it is to put together these
stories and to pull memories out of people. Wonderful, really
great people who I trusted It wasn't that I was
hiding anything or holding anything back. And we talked for
over a year, you know, having a conversation after conversation,

(58:05):
and they had this video, you know, and were I think,
I'm sure hoping that I might say something about this
thing that happened, but it just never I never got
to it because I just had zero memory of this.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
But then the video existed. And there's a whole cadre
of people in psychology and their whole thing is there's
no such thing as repressed memory, And just in that
one sequence you're showing us, Yeah, sure there is, because
this happened. That's you on the video very clearly. Those
things were happening. This was not a created adulterated video

(58:41):
in any way. It was in the hands of law enforcement.
They play it. And then after the video was played,
How did your memory get repopulated? How did that affect
you from a sort of an integration and memory perspective.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question because it's not as
if I now have those memories. Interesting, I have the
memory of watching the video, and I can contextualize the video.
It's not like it's out of the blue. It makes
sense to me, it's I think that I sort of
file it away in place of the other memories I

(59:15):
have where there's no video. You know, there's all this
other similar abuse that was happening, and so I think, well,
this video exists, that's kind of evidence of that. Part
of what is difficult for me to confront is that
you know, that happened to be recorded, and the fact
that I have no memory of it potentially implies that

(59:37):
there was more abuse that I don't remember, you know,
And so then it's like, how much time did I lose?
And there's not a whole lot that I can do
with that. But yeah, it's not like the memory is
just locked away in there. I just think that I
never formed the memories as it was happening. And I
think if you watch it, you do see someone who's
just fully trying to survive.

Speaker 1 (59:58):
That's it, Yeah, exactly what it was. My conversation will
continue after this break. How soon after these things happen,
and these the things we are seeing recorded on video,
you know, being humiliated in front of others, being tortured,

(01:00:19):
how soon after that did you get out? Because you
did get out.

Speaker 2 (01:00:23):
Yeah, so the abuse I think was escalating for me
towards the end, and for what it's worth, part of
how Larry kind of set this up was there was
kind of a hierarchy and there would always be someone
who was the scapegoat for the group, someone who was
always being harmed and being blamed for everything. They were
the cause of all the problems, and you never wanted

(01:00:44):
to be that person, and it created this power dynamic
where you were inclined to maybe kind of almost like
snitch on each other, you know, and then you feel
complicit in all of this. But so towards the end,
you know, I had gone in and out of being
in that role, but then I was like really in
that role at the bottom of the pyramid, and the
abuse was getting worse and worse, and in retrospect, part

(01:01:08):
of me almost wonders if Larry was using me to
test how far he could go or something. Early on,
and it reached a point that was so extreme that
I think a kind of survival instinct kicked in, but
even that is oversimplifying. It was a moment of crisis
where I had a kind of suicidal ideation start to

(01:01:31):
enter my mental landscape, and it did feel like either
I'm going to die or I'm going to leave, And
it was kind of confusing. It was either like, this
guy's going to kill me, or I'm going to get
out and getting out might mean killing myself, or I
could almost just begin to conceive of the idea of

(01:01:53):
getting out meaning literally walking out the door. And then
my thinking about the situation and started to shift where
he just was hurting me so much that I don't
know how to explain it. I just started to almost disassociate,
I guess, and think like, how can I get out

(01:02:13):
of here in a way that will cause me the
least long term harm? And I started to get really
strategic about it. If I'm honest, you know, I did
a little reality testing where he was torturing me in
front of my friends and trying to get me to
admit something, and I consciously decided, you know what, if
I tell a story that's not true, that's good enough

(01:02:33):
that he goes along with it, Because if he goes
along with it, then that means either he can't tell
what's true and what's false, or he is willing to
go along with a story he knows that it's false
in order to prop up his power. So it's like
either way, you know, unless he calls me out for
it being fake, which like I'm already being beat up,
so you know who cares. And I did that and

(01:02:55):
told the whole story, and he went along with it,
and I was like, okay, so something's not real here,
and I thought, you know, I don't want to let
him get in the way of me finishing school because
that will have long term, permanent impacts to my life.
And so my goal became getting back into school and
out of the apartment without him realizing that I had

(01:03:18):
like quote unquote turned against him, which is kind of
how he treated everyone who didn't go along with what
he wanted. So, you know, somehow it was like I
got housing on campus, and I kind of participated in
his storytelling around the abuse that I had kind of

(01:03:39):
graduated his program, and now I was going to live
on campus. So it didn't diminish his power at all.
It was like his choice that I would go and
live elsewhere, and then I did, and after a little
while I stopped answering his phone calls, and then I
lived in fear for many.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
That separating and cutting off from someone like this there
was you know, the horrific fear in the moment because
something real was happening to you, But then there's the
fear of if you separate, will this person come find
you and harm you. There was no good way forward.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
No and no way to wrap my head around what
had happened, you know, the same way that people hear
a story like this and have trouble understanding it, Like
so did I and I went through it. So it
took me a long time to think the word cult
even applied, you know, and it's just what didn't occur
to me. It just just like this guy was really bad,

(01:04:35):
treated me badly, and that's like as much as I
could think about it. And then I saw this checklist
that was like all the qualities of a cult, and
it's like those do all happen to apply? And then
it took me even longer to think about what had
happened to me as sexual abuse or as like no
unconsensual Yeah, so yeah, it's really hard to figure out
how to live with this. And then I didn't integrate

(01:04:56):
the experience, I would say, until I started being public
about it, which was really uncomfortable but kind of seemed
to be the only way to bridge the gap between
this whole part of my past and my regular life.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
I'm so sorry you went through this. Did it help
you to have that framework of thinking of it as
a cult or did it make no difference?

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
It was really helpful. It was like a diagnosis or something,
you know, having a name to put to it just
made it a little bit easier to think, Okay, it's
like I'm a cult victim. Now I can look to
see if there are like cult support groups, or I
have something I can say to a therapist, you know.
And being able to say that, as much as there's
stigma around you know, what a cult is, being able

(01:05:38):
to just explain efficiently saved me from a lot of
confusion at the outset.

Speaker 1 (01:05:45):
After you move back to Sarah Lawrence, what was your
process of not just living but healing like at that point?

Speaker 2 (01:05:55):
It was slow. First. I tried to make myself as
unavailable as possible in case Larry or anyone involved called
me or saw me and was saying, you know, you
should come back to the apartment. I just wanted to
be able to be busy all the time so that
I could say, sorry, I no, I have to like
go to this class right now, or maybe also using
those things to avoid reflecting on what had happened. I

(01:06:17):
started dating someone, and you know, to her and to myself,
I just kind of was saying, like, yeah, that living
situation was weird and bad, and she didn't really fully
understand until one day we were walking down the street
we were in Manhattan, and I said something off handedly
about how Larry would hit me, and in my mind

(01:06:38):
it had been so normalized that I just was like
I thought, I was just relaying information, and I was
walking and talking, and then realized she wasn't standing next
to me anymore because she was just crying, you know,
standing there, and it kind of was like seeing someone
feel the feelings that you haven't allowed yourself to feel,
you know. And so that in a lot of ways
was the beginning of me understanding like, oh, this is not,

(01:07:04):
for lack of a better word, normal, you know, and
I maybe need to reflect a little bit more on
that time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
You did graduate, which to me is also amazing. It
sounds like though in some ways it was its own
form of trauma response. You finished school. What happened?

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
So I moved into the city successfully finally for the
first time on my own. Yeah, so at first I
was there, I got a job for the Department of Education.
You know. I started to make new friends right at
the end of school in that last semester and kind
of accepted that there was this grand canyon in the

(01:07:42):
middle of my life where I had lost all these
people and I could never talk to them again to
be safe, I was just gonna move on. And I
also still felt that deep fear and discomfort in the
pit of my stomach and didn't know what to call
it or pin it on, and it felt mixed up
with the mental health stuff that I had been struggling

(01:08:05):
with before I met Larry and had never really processed
in therapy. And in New York, I saw a therapist
for the first time, and I thought, going in, you know,
I would just tell her the whole thing. And I
had never done that before, and I didn't realize how
it was not going to be possible to do that

(01:08:26):
in a short period of time. But I had the
full body trauma response. I just had never let myself
get that close, and my throat closed up and was
sweating and just like couldn't really do it, but managed
to get enough out that, you know, I could watch
her face and see it was like her jaw was
on the floor, which didn't help me feel sane, you know.

(01:08:48):
But then after that went on, you know, I had
other therapists later who were much better, and then my
therapist now is amazing and has been so so helpful
and so that you know, therapy is its own journey.
But after New York, I got offered a job taking
care of Robert Frost's house in the White Mountains in

(01:09:09):
New Hampshire. So I moved up to New Hampshire. And
part of that I think was getting away. And then
I applied for grad school for writing, and then got
into a funded MFA fellowship in California, and I got
further away. And then when I was graduating from my MFA,
I got a call from a reporter who was working

(01:09:29):
on this story about he thought this girl at Sarah
Lawrence had been poisoning people, and there was this video
online where she's confessing to it. And do I know
anything about it.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
It's extraordinary because it was a process, but you kept
on going through it and taking that courageous leap of
going into therapy because trauma therapy is tough, right, The
meat of the work is really feeling safe in the
world again, and whole in your body again, capable of
making safe and secure attachments to other people again, and

(01:10:03):
trusting yourself and trusting the world again. There's a story
that happened there, but now your body's responding to that.
You don't need to live in the story. You can
live in the response and push back through that. And
you did that, and it sounds like you've also found
a really creative place to land with it through being
a writer and thinking about story. And then New York
Magazine came and found you. That must have been extraordinary

(01:10:25):
to have someone reach out and say, the people are
being poisoned at Sarah Lawrence, what did you say to them?

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
Yeah, that point was about six years from having left,
and I had fantasized about raiding that apartment, like I
was like swat or something, getting all my friends out
and like burning it down. And I tried to just
look at it through the lens of my own state
of mind at the time, and I knew that if
anyone had physically extracted me from the situation at certain points,

(01:10:54):
I think that would have done more harm than good
in some ways, and I would have almost dug in more,
and I couldn't think of any way to safely do that.
But the reporter thought that they were telling a story
about a girl at Sarah Lawrence who had poisoned people
and wasn't really sure what to make of the video,
but thought maybe she was on drugs or something. And

(01:11:16):
so it just felt like the onus was on me.
No matter how scared I was, you know about retaliation
or something. Larry's still out in the world doing what
he was doing, completely free to come after me if
he wanted. But I couldn't let everyone think that Larry's
version of reality that he was forcing on my friends

(01:11:38):
through abuse and torture was in fact factual and let
him be like validated by some story that was published.
So it felt like it was my responsibility to set
the story straight, to at least make it as easy
as possible for my friends to leave if they ever
wanted to, at least they would exit into a world
that correctly understood what they've been going through. Yeah, so,

(01:12:00):
you know, I started to basically told the reporder like,
I have a lot to explain to you about the
you know, context around what that video is and what's
going on, and Claudia did not poison anyone, and we
ended up talking for many many sessions of many many hours,
kind of building their story, and then the story came out,

(01:12:21):
and it felt like this became a kind of battle
of credibility. If this story wasn't taken seriously, and if
it wasn't seen by a whole lot of people, and
Larry wanted to attack me or ruin my life, I
would be vulnerable. I wanted them to have something that
they could look at that would be everywhere where they

(01:12:43):
would say, oh, no, this guy's an abuser, you know.
And so it felt like this real risk where I
was going against him, you know, for the first time,
and if he wanted to attack me, he could. But
once the story came out, it was a protector, you know.
It was this shell because if anyone googled Larry Ray,
they saw that. If anyone googled my name, they saw that.

(01:13:04):
So it made me feel safer in some ways than
I ever had, because I just I lived with the
possibility that he could be around every corner before that.
But it also told the story in a way that
was designed to elicit a certain type of response. Was

(01:13:25):
a pretty salacious story. And it got a lot of attention,
and then there was a lot of interest in adapting
the story, and I didn't know that, you know, by
writing the story, New York Magazine suddenly kind of had
the rights to what had happened to us, and so
that became sort of the struggle of the next couple
of years, as figuring out how to put control over

(01:13:49):
how the story was told back in the hands of
the actual survivors of the experience.

Speaker 1 (01:13:54):
Do you feel like you've been able to do that?

Speaker 2 (01:13:56):
Yeah, I mean I wrote this book, and I never
expected to write memoir about being abused, you know, I
write poems. But it meant getting the rights back to
the story. Our whole experience was having control taken away
from us, and then very powerful people were trying to
control our lives again. That worked, and then I got

(01:14:18):
lucky and managed to find a director who had like
integrity and cared about telling this story in a way
that was sensitive and compassionate but also meaningful. And the
documentary seems to have helped a lot of people. You know,
knew that that would be an effect of it, but

(01:14:39):
I have been continually surprised by the really like concrete
impacts that has had for a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (01:14:45):
Absolutely, for people to have come through these relationally traumatic
experiences in all their forms and be able to share
their stories is really remarkable for people to see. Were
there impacts of that New York Maga story beyond just
New York Magazines? Ultimately, I mean, this thing got shut down.
How did all of that come together?

Speaker 2 (01:15:07):
After the New York magazine article came out? You know,
get a call from an FBI agent and she wanted
to talk about the story and what had happened. It's
maybe a good indication of how these things still hang
on to your brain after this kind of abuse. Because
my first thought was that she was someone acting on

(01:15:28):
Larry's behalf, pretending to be an FBI agent. That's understandable,
but she wasn't. And we had a conversation and I
told her, you know, we talked for a long time
and kind of went through what had happened, and I
told her all kinds of things, and she took those
notes from that conversation back to her office and used

(01:15:51):
that conversation to form the basis of an investigation, which
you know, they decided to open. Ultimately, they decided they
had enough to justify by arresting him and then indicting him,
and then we began the process of the whole trial.
And all of this was happening at the same time
that I was contracted to write and then publish this book,

(01:16:12):
which itself became evidence, you know, and so was being
line read by FBI agents and prosecutors and all these
lawyers and stuff. It's been a lot to triangulate between
all of these different powerful entities. But the goal the
whole time was very clear, just to make my friends

(01:16:34):
as safe as I possibly could. And that's been kind
of my guiding light through the whole thing. And now
we're here in Larry's in prison for sixty years, and
you know, we've managed to not be exploited by the
media in a way that a lot of people who
go through this kind of thing are.

Speaker 1 (01:16:54):
As a trauma survivor, It's not lost on me that
your singular focus is to help your survivors feel safe.
The way you've shared it today to me is extraordinary
because it is a terrorizing, chilling experience. I've been talking
about your history, how you healed, and you know what
happened to you after this all happened. But how are

(01:17:15):
you doing today?

Speaker 2 (01:17:16):
My life is really good. It's really really good. It
is really weird to have not just gone through something
like this, but then to have gone through talking about
it on the news and having this documentary be out there.
And yeah, it's just a really surreal experience that there's
not much of a roadmap for. But you know, here

(01:17:38):
I am, and I get to live in a really
beautiful place, and I have friends who I love, and
a partner who's amazing, and a therapist who's amazing. I
think that I've had this impulse in my healing that's
both to like create safety for other survivors and also
I can't help but want to like fix everything and

(01:18:00):
knit everyone back together and make it as if it
never happened, which is not possible. But I am back
in touch with everyone and we talk regularly, and after
years of thinking that I would never talk to these
people ever again, I have those relationships back, which is amazing.
Not to boil it down to the simplest thing, but

(01:18:21):
sometimes I do think about the fact that I can
open the door and walk outside. Yea, you know, that's everything, man.
I don't think it's the simplest thing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
It's an amazing thing because there once was a door
you couldn't walk out, So understand the profundity of being
able to walk out and bring your full self out
into the world without having to look around corners. You
have probably an exquisite understanding of the beauty of what
life can be, maybe more than any other person. What
has helped you most in this process of healing and

(01:18:51):
growth and frankly thriving.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
The heart of my experience with this psychopathic abuser right
was that he made me not believe myself, And the
process of healing for me has been a process of
believing myself and learning who I am, and then standing

(01:19:14):
behind that and really planting my flag in my own
reality and experience and being open to all of the
complexity and chaos and messiness of life. At the end
of the day, it's that I believe me.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
That's so amazing, And I think every survivor needs to
hear that, because regardless of the context of the situation,
that's what survivors grapple with most. They lost all belief
in themselves while they were in these situations, and the
stumbling block to healing is to end self blame and

(01:19:50):
to fully believe themselves and to recognize that they are
fully in the world.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
Yeah, it's hard because sometimes we do have to question
our own thoughts and feelings about things, and that's fine,
but yeah, figuring out how to trust yourself has been
kind of the foundation of me being able to rebuild
the rest of my identity and sense of self after
it was dismantled.

Speaker 1 (01:20:14):
Well, I think it's the foundation of all healings. So
thank you for sharing that. This is such a powerful conversation.
And it was one thing to read your words and
see the series you were involved in making. It's quite
another to hear it right from you. It's transformative. So
thank you, and you know, next week we'll be talking
with Felicia, who was, you know, one of your fellow

(01:20:35):
survivors who I'm sure all of you had different experiences
of it, And I think the one of the most
important things to remember is anytime there has been this experience,
this traumatizing experience that happens to a group, that our
temptation is to paint it with the same brush, and
all of you had very different experiences, and everyone listening
needs to know that whatever they've gone through their process

(01:20:56):
of healing may look different, but there are some universals,
and you really brought us back to some of those universals.
I can't thank you enough. I know this cannot be
easy to talk about for bringing your vulnerability here today
and so openly, so I'm extraordinarily grateful to you.

Speaker 2 (01:21:09):
So thank you, thank you so much. This is such
a great conversation.

Speaker 1 (01:21:11):
Thank you, thank you. Here are my takeaways from my
conversation with Daniel. First, Daniel's experience and the entire experience
of everyone harmed by Larry Ray, is something most people
watch and think could never happen to them. There is
a danger in believing anyone is immune. It's easy to

(01:21:32):
clearly see a story when it's over. Understanding the subtle
predations of a manipulative and exploitative person can hopefully keep
all of us a little safer. In our next takeaway,
Daniel did say that one aspect of Larry Ray that
he found quite disarming was his authoritative confidence that Ray

(01:21:54):
would spout off anything with such conviction that it made
it seem plausible when that is combined with a perceived legitimacy.
Because a person is acquainted with others in your network,
and that other people are seemingly accepting of this authoritative
person's behavior. It makes it less likely that people may

(01:22:16):
trust their instincts in these situations. Then, throw on top
of that how young everyone in that house was. Breaking
out of social conformity isn't easy, and a good tip
to remember is that people who actually do know their
stuff tend to be a little less authoritative and more circumspect.

(01:22:37):
For our next takeaway, the experience of not only Daniel,
but others preyed upon by Larry Ray reflected a slow
and systematic indoctrination and eroding of perception. Daniel shared the
experience of the grapes and the suggestion that they should
taste different. This systematic process did not happen right away,

(01:23:01):
and this extreme a process is something we are more
likely to see in a relationship with a psychopath, but
not with someone narcissistic. These relationships only work because a
person is slowly and methodically pulled away from their perceptions
and experiences. In this next takeaway, isolation is an insidious

(01:23:24):
dynamic in any form of abusive relationship, and shame was
used as a tool of isolation. Whether this was bi
sexual shaming, or a collection of videos and images. This
process of shaming can often get people imprisoned by the
abuser because they are afraid of the consequences of breaking free.

(01:23:46):
This is a terrifying dynamic and the effects of this
can last long after a person finally does get away
from one of these relationships. Daniel shaired that therapy was
an important part of this process for him, and it
is essential to be able to work through these dynamics

(01:24:07):
and find safe spaces of connection and relationship. Next, Daniel
shared a particularly terrible dynamic that occurred in this relationship
and is something we would observe in coercively controlling relationships.
Larry Ray fashioned himself as someone who could fix anything
that was affecting the young people he preyed on through

(01:24:30):
advice and pseudotherapy. But what he was doing was working
both sides of this equation. He was breaking Daniel and
everyone else down and then presenting himself as the only solution.
This sort of double gaslight is a deeply exploitative dynamic

(01:24:51):
that can keep people stuck in these traumatic systems for years.
In our next takeaway, there are roles we witness people
being placed in when they are in toxic situations, and
the most dangerous role of all is to be the scapegoat.
Toxic family systems have scapegoats, as do toxic organizations, and

(01:25:13):
that role can be fluid, creating a sense of dread
and compliance in people within the system who must always
live in fear about whether they were going to be
the next scapegoat. Malignant narcissists and psychopathic abusers use menace
and dread to maintain absolute control within a system. Daniel

(01:25:34):
found himself in that role for a while, and in
the name of survival and safety, a person may say
what they need to remove themselves from that role when
that is the circumstance. The concept of free will, consent,
and choice has evaporated, and for our last takeaway, Daniel
was changed by his experience, but he is also healing

(01:25:58):
and in a good place in his life. Hearing how
these processes play out is crucial for all survivors to heal.
It looks different every time in every person, and survivors'
experiences may have shared patterns, but ultimately are very different.
Once again, we see that it is therapy social supports

(01:26:21):
meaningful and purposeful activities reconnect with some of the other
survivors and the awareness of small, wondrous, albeit ordinary experiences
in Daniel's case, that he can open the door and
walk outside. But above all else, Daniel shared what healing
really is, which is believing himself. This is a key

(01:26:44):
reminder that survivors can take themselves back from these relationships
and situations.

All Episodes

The Untold Story of the Cult at Sarah Lawrence College - Pt 1 with Daniel Levin

Episode Transcript

Host

Dr. Ramini Durvasula

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Untold Story of the Cult at Sarah Lawrence College - Pt 1 with Daniel Levin