A former Sarah Lawrence student who was allegedly forced into prostitution by her roommate’s father testified about emotional and physical abuse at the hands of the accused sex cult leader, including that he threatened to have her kidnapped.
“He threatened to kill me on a memorable occasion,” Claudia Drury, 31, said during Lawrence Ray’s sex-crimes trial in Manhattan federal court on Friday. “He threatened to cut my face. He threatened to have me abducted and dropped in the Middle East. He threatened to blackmail people I knew. He threatened to beat up my father.”
Those shocking allegations of abuse, however, paled in comparison to the horror Drury said she endured after Ray forced her into sex work to pay the 62-year-old back for allegedly “damaging” him, “wasting his time,” damaging his property, and even supposedly poisoning him. None of those things were true, but Drury said on Friday that she funneled Ray $2.5 million over a four-year stint as a prostitute in connection with nonexistent wrongdoing against him.
ADVERTISEMENT
Drury is the second witness to testify in Ray’s case—and just one of several former college students who lived in a Sarah Lawrence dorm room the then-50-year-old moved into shortly after his 2010 release from a New Jersey prison. Ray then proceeded to launch what amounted to a sex cult for nearly a decade under the guise of “therapy sessions” as a “father figure,” prosecutors say.
Ray has pleaded not guilty to several charges, including sex trafficking, extortion, and racketeering conspiracy, for allegedly physically, sexually, and psychologically abusing the college students—and laundering $1 million from Drury after forcing her into sex work. Eventually, prosecutors said, the abuse spanned his Manhattan apartment, North Carolina, and other locations.
Ray’s alleged extortion and sex-trafficking scheme were first detailed in a New York Magazine expose in April 2019.
Like her ex-roommate Santos Rosario, who testified on the stand for three days, Drury detailed how Ray showed up at the group’s two-story dorm room and stayed “days in a row,” sometimes hosting dinners where he would discuss his personal philosophy and tell stories about his past.
He soon had a powerful hold on the students, they say.
Drury, who met Ray when she was a 19-year-old sophomore, said the father told the group “that he knew generals and how he’d taken down [ex-New York Police Commissioner Bernie] Kerik and stopped a plot to take over the country. A lot of different things.”
Eventually, Drury said, Ray subjected the former students to psychological and sexual humiliation, verbal abuse, physical violence, and threatened legal action to ensure silence and loyalty.
“He slapped me in the face so hard I fell over, pulled my hair, strangled me, suffocated me, hit me,” Drury said Friday.
Assistant United States Attorney Lindsay Keenan said during opening statements that Ray even used a plastic bag to choke Drury inside a Manhattan hotel room in a harrowing act of violence. During the hours of “torture” in the hotel room, Ray also allegedly “smothered her with a pillow” and “choked her with a leash.”
“He told her to behave. He told her to keep making money,” Keenan said.
In a disturbing video shown to jurors earlier this week—before court was adjourned for two days after defense lawyers said Ray suffered a seizure—Ray is seen berating Drury in his apartment. During the interrogation, a crying Drury admits to hurting Ray’s “website business” as he threatened to post the video confession online.
“Everybody out there in Facebook land, do you know Claudia as a truthful person or a liar? Well, Claudia, what [do] you think?” Ray says in the video shown to jurors as Drury cried into her sweater. “Look at you. How you feel sorry for yourself. Look, you did something wrong. You know what’s shocking, astounding, and disgusting? You do something wrong to someone else, you victimize somebody, and then you sit there and cry about it.”
Lawyers for Ray have argued throughout the trial that all the evidence in the case against Ray is just the result of a group of “storytellers” who believed their own tales of their own alleged misconduct—and who, in turn, made Ray believe, too.
But Drury’s story paints a terrifying picture of criminality by a man described by prosecutors as a master manipulator and abuse kingpin.
“I became a prostitute. It was Larry’s suggestion, originally,” Drury told jurors.
