Claudia Drury kept a record of the transgressions Lawrence V. Ray convinced Claudia to commit in journals, emails, and videos.
Damaging Mr. Ray’s vacuum. Consuming all of Ray’s food. Even poisoning his food with cyanide.
Ms. Drury says that it was all fake. But Mr. Ray demanded that she pay reparations. And although she was short on money, she said, Mr. Ray steered her toward a way of having “fun” — while earning cash to pay him.
“I became a prostitute,” Ms. Drury said during testimony that ended on Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, where Mr. Ray is being tried on 16 counts of charges that include tax evasion and extortion. “It was Larry’s suggestion.”
Her testimony, coming near the trial’s midpoint, is pivotal to the prosecution’s case, offering an inside account in support of some of the most serious charges against him, sex trafficking and violent crime in aid of racketeering.
Ms. Drury outlined new details over several days regarding how Mr. Ray, according prosecutors, moved into Sarah Lawrence College’s dormitory and spent years manipulating students he met there.
Ms. Drury, one of those students, described how Mr. Ray exploited her at a time when she felt “anchorless and anxious.”
Ms. Drury testified that he gained her trust by pretending he was a mentor. She claimed that he then became abusive and made her confess to the phony offenses, using her confessions as leverage to get payments.
After being the subject of an article in New York Magazine, Mr. Ray was taken into custody in 2020.
Ms. Drury described in her testimony how Mr. Ray had exerted power over her, and other students at Sarah Lawrence, a private liberal arts college in Westchester County (N.Y.), just north of New York City.
Ms. Drury told how Mr. Ray convinced her that she had committed crimes, manipulated her and groomed to abuse her. She testified that he first spoke of sex and then encouraged her to have sexual contact with others.
Finally, she worked as a prostitute for years, Ms. Drury testified. She solicited clients over the Internet and gave Mr. Ray approximately $2.5 million in earnings.
She also testified that Mr. Ray became furious when she confided in a client certain aspects of her personal life. She claimed that Ray threatened her with waterboarding at one point and placed a plastic bag on her head as she struggled for breath in a Manhattan Hotel.
“I was terrified,” she said. “I was trembling.”
Mr. Ray’s lawyers have suggested that a group of storytelling students, some of whom have had mental health problems, had created a “fantastic conspiracy” about him.
Under cross-examination, Ms. Drury acknowledged that she had a history of embellishing anecdotes and she said she had fabricated a detailed account of being accosted on the street by mysterious men with a message from Mr. Ray’s onetime friend, Bernard B. Kerik, a former New York police commissioner.
Ms. Drury entered Mr. Ray’s orbit after he appeared at the Sarah Lawrence dormitory where his daughter, Talia Ray, lived. He had just completed a state. New Jersey child custody dispute conviction can lead to a prison sentence.
Ms. Drury was entertained by Mr. Ray at the dormitory with stories of intrigue. She testified that she was told about Ray’s military service and his involvement in intrigue. Kerik was nominated to a top federal job, but he eventually pleaded guilty tax fraud and accepting free work from an employee suspected to be connected to the mob.
Mr. Ray had a “very magnetic and charismatic kind of personality,” Ms. Drury testified, adding that she believed that he had exposed a plot to “rip up the Constitution and hurt America.”
He described a philosophy he had helped create called “Quest for Potential” and compared himself to the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, Ms. Drury said. She began to look upon him as a “confidant” who could help improve her life.
Ms. Drury testified that even though he was giving counsel, he was also showing conspiratorial tendencies. She stated that Mr. Ray believed Mr. Kerik and other conspirators were out to harm him.
In summer 2011, she said, she and other students frequently stayed at Mr. Ray’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he provided so-called therapy sessions meant to make them “more developed people.”
Mr. Ray also brought up sex, Ms. Drury testified, talking about “swing clubs” and sometimes touching her sexually.
He urged her to have sex with a fellow student and with a salesman who visited the apartment, Ms. Drury testified, adding that according to Mr. Ray, “being very open and uninhibited” showed a “higher level of personal development and self-comfort and honesty.”
He began to make accusations at the same time.
He claimed that the students were damaging his property and hiding his possessions. Ms. Drury claimed that hours of interrogations followed with Mr. Ray questioning the students until he gave a confession. She claimed that Ray threatened the students and sometimes reacted violently.
Ms. Drury stated that she admitted to certain things she did not do because Mr. Ray insisted on it and partly because the other students were admitting to imagining infractions.
“It was very easy for me to be like, well, maybe I did damage that,” she testified. “Once I sort of started confessing to those things, each one was like further proof of all the others.”
Ms. Drury finally admitted to poisoning Mr. Ray. He can be heard asking her for details in a video he made and which was presented as evidence. She said she had put “mercury, cyanide and arsenic” in his food and on his toothbrush.
Mr. Ray said he could send her to prison, Ms. Drury testified, and made her read Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” So she would be able to see what lay ahead.
Also introduced as evidence was a recorded phone conversation between Mr. Ray and Ms. Drury from 2012. She told her mother she had fantasies about pushing her out of a window and strangling her dad and that she wanted her to go to a hospital.
Ms. Drury stated that Mr. Ray first suggested she hurt her parents. She also said that she had never consciously thought of doing so. While she was hospitalized, she added, he told her that her parents wanted to hurt her and “distort the truth.” She said her relationship with her parents worsened until she lost touch with them entirely.
“Larry would tell me essentially that they were trying to hang me out to dry,” she testified. “I became really paranoid toward them.”
In 2014, Ms. Drury testified, she began working at sex clubs at Mr. Ray’s suggestion. She added that he encouraged her sex with both a cabdriver and a stranger in Central Park. She also said he was “impressed” after she told him she had let a man run a knife over her body and strike her with a heavy object during sexual activities.
Ms. Drury said that she was afraid she would be sent to prison if Mr. Ray didn’t give her the money he claimed she owed as compensation for the harm she had done, particularly the poisonings. Mr. Ray told her that prostitution would be “fun” and a “sexual rush,” she said.
Ms. Drury claimed that she was a prostitute between 2015 and spring 2019. She lived in hotels and saw up to five men per day, seven days a semaine, and charged them up to $2,000 an hour. She testified that she gave the money to Mr. Ray and Isabella Pollok, a former Sarah Lawrence roommate who prosecutors say became Mr. Ray’s “trusted lieutenant” and who has been charged with conspiring with him to commit sex trafficking, extortion and racketeering.
“I felt immense pressure from Larry to get money,” Ms. Drury testified, adding that she also wanted to get “off my soul” that she had behaved toward him in an “unforgivable” way.
Ms. Drury stated that Mr. Ray visited her at a Midtown hotel, where she was staying, and asked her to take off all her clothes. Then, he handcuffed her into a chair. Over about seven hours, she said, he placed a pillow over her face, choked her with a collar and leash and covered her head with a plastic bag, at one point saying: “I am going to kill you.”
She testified that this was a turning-point.
“I was scared for my life,” she said. “I was increasingly anxious over whether he was actually who I thought he was.”
She stated that she had fled New York approximately six months after the encounter. She never spoke with or saw Mr. Ray again.
Source: NY Times
