A 40-year-old survivor of a sex cult ran by a fantasist out of a New York college has described how she fell victim to Larry Ray, becoming so brainwashed she initially wanted to testify in his defense.
Felicia Rosario, now 40, is one of five men and women who succumbed to Ray’s warped beliefs, and whose testimony helped convict him on sex trafficking, racketeering and extortion charges. He was sentenced in January to 60 years in prison.
Rosario spoke out in a new Hulu documentary series, out on Thursday, and spoke to People magazine to promote the show.
‘It became about just setting the record straight,’ she said of her participation in the three-part documentary.
Felicia Rosario, now 40, is seen in the new Hulu documentary describing her 10-year ordeal at the hands of Larry Ray, 63
A visibly-distressed Rosario is seen with Ray in a still shown at his trial
‘And then as I got more back into my old me, the real me, the doctor hat came back on and I was like, you know what? This is important for other people to hear. This is important for other people to know.
‘And hopefully I can help other people get better, or get out of these situations that they might be in — or even help stop it from happening to begin with.’
Rosario met Ray via her brother, who had dated Ray’s daughter Talia.
Ray, recently released from prison on charges of securities fraud, in 2010 began sleeping on Talia’s couch at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers – an arrangement that was meant to be temporary, but became permanent.
‘I met Larry because he was helping my brother Santos,’ Rosario told People.
‘He was happier and doing better. And then he was helping my sister Yalitza, and she was happier. I’d also met Talia when she was dating my brother and I loved her. So I had a lot of other people vouching for him.’
Rosario, who was studying forensic psychiatry in Los Angeles, aiming to become a doctor, said she had no reason to be suspicious of Ray.
‘He was like a friend of a friend of a friend — cool, trustworthy, reliable,’ she said.
‘It didn’t occur to me he would be the person he ended up being.’
‘He could talk about anything,’ she says. ‘He was just a very interesting and dynamic person. Like you wanted to hang out with him.’
She said she returned to LA after a visit, and they remained in contact.
‘He could talk about anything,’ she told the magazine.
‘He was just a very interesting and dynamic person. Like you wanted to hang out with him.’
Rosario and Ray are seen together in a photo from the Hulu series
Ray is seen on January 20 at sentencing, where he was told he would spend the next 60 years – the rest of his life – behind the bars
Rosario said the situation escalated rapidly: he bombarded her with flowers and gifts, but kept her awake on the phone all night.
‘Little by little, he took over my mind,’ she said.
‘I don’t even know how he did it. He made me feel like there truly were people after me, people coming to hurt me, and that people had hurt me in my past.’
Ray convinced Rosario that he was the only one who could protect her, and she believed him.
‘He broke me. He made me fall apart,’ she said.
‘In the series, you can even hear him gaslighting me.’
Ray moved to an Upper East Side apartment, with another girlfriend, and the abuse escalated.
Rosario told Ray’s trial how he set her challenges, and asked her to have sex with strangers and record it for him.
Rosario told the jury she was ‘completely and utterly dependent on Larry in every way’
In another profoundly disturbing clip, introduced in evidence, Ray can be seen body-slamming Rosario to the floor as she wails and struggles under the weight of his knee which he places on her back to subdue her
A disheveled and at times incoherent Rosario is heard speaking in a childlike voice as she begs Ray to be allowed to remain inside the house
She also told how he would ask her to go to the mall, not wearing underwear with a short skirt and shop for shoes, and to flash the shoe salesman when he assisted her.
‘He made these demands basically every weekend.
‘Eventually he was so insistent, threatening to break up with me and leave me that I started to comply,’ Rosario said.
Rosario said she first had sex with a stranger for Ray in the summer of 2012, by which time she had left the west coast and moved in with Ray at his Upper East Side apartment.
She told the court that she, Ray, and Isabella Pollok shared a bed – and that all three slept naked together.
Rosario said she ‘wasn’t happy’ but that Ray convinced her he was doing this to ‘help’ Pollok, just as he was ‘helping’ the other students overcome their mental and emotional issues.
In time, she said, Ray demanded that she perform sex acts on both him and Pollok.
‘He called it the BPD Camp’, Rosario said, explaining it stood for borderline personality disorder or, ‘Bad Parenting Disorder’, as Ray called it.
The court saw disturbing video in which Ray filmed Rosario apparently asleep and with a black eye.
She can be seen wearing her graduation cap, a repeated humiliation tactic of Ray when, she testified, he would make her wear it and mock her as stupid and a failure.
Pictured: Larry Ray outside his stepfather’s home in Pinehurst, North Carolina
Ray’s alleged campaign of control is said to have escalated during the summer of 2013, when Drury and several others travelled to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to help with yardwork at Ray’s stepfather’s property (pictured)
In audio played in court, Ray can be heard instructing another student to ‘buy a pacifier’ for Rosario because she is acting ‘like a child’ and ‘subhuman.’
On another occasion, Rosario told jurors he had Pollok buy diapers and put them on her, forcing her to sit on the floor and watch cartoons while wearing only them and a T-shirt.
Ray allegedly turned his tactics on Rosario to extort money from her for alleged wrongdoings – at one point she ‘confessed’ to stealing $160,000 from him.
She asked friends and family for money, ran up credit card debt, and emptied her ‘very small’ 401K to ‘repay’ him, she said.
Rosario’s mental and physical decline was disturbingly evident in a 2013 video of her at Ray’s stepfather’s property in Pinehurst, North Carolina shown in court
While living with Ray and his so-called ‘lieutenant’ Isabella Pollok, Rosario Pollok let herself become unkempt and ‘unattractive’ so that he would not send her out on sexual challenges
Rosario also told how Ray punched her in the face, head, and stomach, kicked her legs, tied her with zip ties, and covered her mouth with duct tape in a campaign to erode her sense of self and reality.
Ultimately, she became convinced that her own siblings had poisoned her – a feeling she described as ‘heartbreaking’ and a conviction that destroyed their once close relationship.
She said that she herself was ‘terrified’, ‘paranoid’, and ‘overwhelmed’, certain that Ray would make good on threats to send her to jail if she did not comply with his demands.
Her stress was such that she once attempted suicide, Rosario said.
Ultimately, she told the court, Ray stopped demanding she sleep with strangers and record it in 2017.
By then, living with Ray and Pollok, she explained that she had let herself become unkempt, with knotted hair, and dull clothes and was ‘unattractive’ and ‘uninteresting.’
‘He wasn’t going to get anything if he sent me out the way I was,’ she testified.
When Ray was arrested in February 2019, she initially wanted to defend him.
But as the filming for the documentary started, she told producers she had changed her mind.
Lawrence ‘Larry’ Ray will spend the rest of his life in prison after being sentenced today to 60 years
Larry Ray in court today, depicted in a court sketch from inside the federal courthouse
His crimes were first exposed in 2019 by New York Magazine’s The Cut. Some of the group remained loyal to him even then, after being cut off from their families by Ray.
Today, some gave witness impact statements to tell how Ray destroyed their lives.
‘His evil withered us. I feel profoundly violated in a way that I cannot fully communicate,’ Claudia Drury, now 31, said.
The only sympathy Ray reserves is for himself. Today, he told the judge how the last three years had been ‘hard’ on him.
‘I’ve had COVID twice, and I’m in pain all the time. I lost my father, my step-father, and my step-mother all in one week.
‘They are gone. I didn’t get to say goodbye,’ he said.
The judge spared no mercy. He sought to take any light from his victims’ lives.
‘It was sadism. Pure and simple,’ said U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman, who added Ray used his ‘evil genius’ to control the kids.
Among those who took the stand during his trial were victims who’d escaped him.
A woman who referred to herself as Sarah Lawrence ‘cult leader’ Larry Ray’s ‘wife’ and lived with him and his co-accused, ‘lieutenant’ Isabella Pollok, has told jurors how her ‘romantic’ relationship descended into abuse and sexual humiliation that destroyed her medical career and left her feeling ‘subhuman.’
Felicia Rosario, 39, took the stand at the start of week three of the high-profile trial Monday, telling jurors how she was introduced to Ray through her brother, Santos, who was a student at the elite liberal college with 62-year-old Ray’s daughter, Talia.
Rosario described how she found Ray ‘charming’ when the young woman, then a 29-year-old medical graduate of Harvard and Columbia and on track to gain her medical license, first met him in the fall of 2011.
Rosario was living with Ray and Pollok in a home in Piscataway, New Jersey, when Ray was arrested in February 2020.
She said she called him, ‘honeybun,’ and both she and Pollok considered themselves his ‘wife.’
Ray’s daughter Talia (left) has been named as a co-conspirator along with Ray’s so-called ‘lieutenant’ and co-accused Isabella Pollok, (right) the judge ruled last week
Pictured: Victims Claudia Drury (left) Dan Levin (right) in evidence photos submitted to the court
Ray ultimately ingratiated himself with his daughter Talia’s friends, Santos Rosario (left) Daniel Levin, Felicia Rosario (right) and Isabella Pollok
Rosario told a now familiar tale of Ray’s pattern of charm that swiftly gave way to coercion, sexual humiliation, and physical and psychological abuse.
A second-year resident in Los Angeles, Rosario saw Ray only a handful of times on the east coast before he declared himself ‘in love’ with her and began setting sexual challenges.
In testimony that echoed that of alleged cult member Claudia Drury, 31,
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