Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - He Started a Sex Cult - The Larry Ray story

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Larry Ray orchestrated a decade-long campaign of manipulation and abuse after moving into his daughter Talia's dorm at Sarah Lawrence College in 2010. Presenting himself as a mentor, he ingratiated himself with her roommates, eventually subjecting them to psychological, physical abuse.

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And one day, I guess he decides, ah, I'm going to start a cult. And so Larry gets out of prison, because I guess he had been in prison for a while for being a con artist, and he goes to stay with his daughter. This girl, Talia. Now, Talia is a college sophomore, and she lives on campus with some other students in a dormitory. And Larry just suddenly shows up to the dorms one day and he's like hanging out in the common area and crashing on the couch every night. And I guess Talia's friends are like, uh, that's a little weird, but okay. But whatever, I guess he's only supposed to stay a few days.

But bro, I guess just overstays his welcome and he starts living there in the building. And over time, he becomes friends with Talia's dorm mates. And they start trusting him and looking to him as this wise older man who they, can come to for advice. And of course they trust him. He tells them he's a life coach and he'll coach them on things like handling breakups and dealing with depression and stuff like that. And he'll tell them all about his wild adventures in the Marine Corps when he worked as an international spy on secret missions with the CIA, which is absolute bullshit. He never did any of that, but the students buy it. They think he is super cool. And they know that he just got out of prison, but Larry makes up

some nonsense excuse that he only got sent to prison because the elites and the government were trying to silence him. Yeah, okay, Larry. Regardless, he must be a really charming guy because it only takes a few months for these students to completely fall under his spell, and they'll basically do anything he asks. And so Larry has made this little group of college students into his personal cult. Now, to be clear, this is just a small group of students during this time, like four or five. Students outside this little circle who live in the dorm, some of them think Larry is creepy as fuck. Some of them even email the school warning them like, hey, there's this old creep living in the dorms. And in response, the school does nothing. Not sure why. But anyway,

the semester eventually ends. And now it's 2011. And that summer, Larry and a gang of about seven students, they end up moving into a one-bedroom apartment about 30 minutes away in Manhattan. And so there's eight people total living in this one-bedroom place. And two of the girls sleep in the bed with Larry, because of course they do, and I guess the rest of the students sleep in the living room. And there is where their cult activities really start taking shape. Like Larry does these really intense therapy sessions with the students and he records it, He also starts pushing them around and depriving them of sleep. He gives them drugs like Adderall to make them hyper paranoid.

And if the students challenge Larry or talk back to him, he threatens to show everyone the videos from his therapy sessions with them. So ultimately, they all fall in line. And of course, by this point, Larry is making the girls in the group smash with him. Because I guess that's just what cult leaders do. He also makes the students smash with each other. And he films it. And if they step out of line, he threatens to release the footage to the student's parents.

And this goes on all summer. And by the time fall semester starts, it's time for the students to go back to school. But only Talia, Larry's daughter, goes back to live in the dorm. The rest of them stay there in the one-bedroom apartment with Larry. And this is where things get really crazy. Because he increases his control over them. and he gets physically violent, and he somehow manipulates them

into making false confessions on video, like confessions about destroying Larry's stuff, confessions about committing crimes that never happened. Then he uses the videos of these false confessions to blackmail them. He convinces them that they need to pay him money to make up for everything they did wrong. Otherwise, he's going to take those taped confessions

straight to the police. And crazy enough, the students actually do pay him money because they think that if they don't, they're going to go to jail. Some of them withdraw tens of thousands of dollars from their parents' savings accounts, and they give it to him. One girl convinces her parents to sell their house to get out of debt with Larry. And if any of them start to push back too hard, Larry physically manhandles them until they fall in line.

One time, he gets so mad that he actually puts a plastic bag over one of the girls' heads, and he nearly suffocates her. Another time, he gets mad at one of the students and he puts pliers on the student's tongue. Do you think I'm playing with you? Huh? You're a wrong man. I'm a grown man. I don't like what you did.

I know. You hear me? Now, one more time, man, I want to split your tongue in hand. Do you understand me? And so, Larry keeps taking these payments off the students, the members of this little cult that he built, and he blackmails them to pay him back for crimes they didn't ever commit. And they're paying him and they're paying him all the money they're. can get their hands on. And pretty quickly, Larry has made over a million dollars off of these

students. A million dollars! Like what? Now eventually they get kicked out of their one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. And in 2013, Larry and some of the followers, they move from Manhattan all the way down to North Carolina temporarily, to a house that one of his family members owns. And here he becomes an even bigger asshole. He forces his followers. He forces his followers to do like manual labor, like working in the yard and like digging ditches, stuff like that. He also starts demanding that they contact outside family members to give them money that they then can give to him. Then in 2014, I guess they move back to Manhattan and he's still demanding money from them. One girl doesn't have the money to pay him that he claims she owes him, so he somehow forces her to work at a sex club.

and she ends up becoming a full-blown escort. And all the money she makes escorting goes to pay off her made-up debt with Larry. So in four years, off of just her being an escort and him taking her money, Larry makes $2.5 million. Oh, but it gets worse. This little college student cult he started

is so insane, and this is so stressful for these students involved, at different points in time, five of his followers tried to unalive themselves. And eventually one of them is unfortunately successful. Think about that. There are only like seven members total in this cult and five of them tried to unalive themselves.

So I don't know what's keeping these guys in this crazy situation, but it seems like they're never going to get out. Until. By 2018, things get so bad. It finally dawns on these students that if they don't get themselves out of this, they're probably going to die. And so one by one, most of the members start finding the strength to escape. And the one member who Larry pushed into being an escort? One of her clients gives her money and resources to escape to Philadelphia.

And there, she finally meets up with police and she tells them all about this crazy sex cult Larry's been running. A few months later, in 2020, police go to his apartment and bam, they arrest him. Here's his mugshot. And they charge him with sex trafficking and extortion and racketeering. And since he was dumb enough to record a lot of his own cult practices, he's eventually found guilty and he gets sentenced to 60 years in prison. Wow.