Rosario’s story, along with several other of theSarah Lawrence cult victims, are now the focus of the new three-part Hulu docu-seriesStolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, coming out Feb. 9. The show explains howLawrence “Larry” Ray, ended up conning the students, bilking them out of over $1 million and coercing several of them into being sex trafficked.
The twisted story began when Ray was released from prison for securities fraud, and wound up sleeping on his daughter Talia’s couch. She was living in an on-campus apartment development at Sarah Lawrence, and it was supposed to be for a few days only.
Felicia Rosario for People Magazine.Mackenzie Stroh
Ray, 62, never left. Instead, he began charming Talia’s roommates and friends with delicious dinners and wild stories of traveling the globe, being in former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev’s inner circle and of being pals with New York City Police commissioner Bernard Kerik and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. As he entertained the students, he also began having long, late-night intimate talks with them about their lives, their problems, their past traumas — and pitching himself as a self-help guru who could make their lives better.
Lawrence Ray.U. S. Attorney’s Office
Soon, several of the students were completely devoted to Ray, grateful for the way he was purportedly “fixing” them. A year later, they all crammed into a one-bedroom apartment in the Upper East Side, where the real horror and abuse began — and where Rosario came into the picture.
For more on how Felicia Rosario escaped,subscribe now to PEOPLE, or pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands now.
“I met Larry because he was helping my brother Santos,” Rosario tellsPEOPLE exclusively. (Santos had briefly dated Ray’s daughter, Talia.) “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. He was like a friend of a friend of a friend — cool, trustworthy, reliable. It didn’t occur to me he would be the person he ended up being.”
Felicia Rosario.U. S. Attorney’s Office
Ray immediately began wooing Rosario, who found him attractive. “He could talk about anything,” she says. “He was just a very interesting and dynamic person. Like you wanted to hang out with him.”
Their relationship escalated quickly. She went back to L.A., but soon he was “love bombing” her, sending her gifts and flowers while at the same time depriving her of sleep as much as he could.
Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Sign up forPEOPLE’s free True Crime newsletterfor breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases.
“He’d keep me on the phone all night long,” she says.
The tiredness began to wear on her. He soon started telling her stories about how many people wanted him dead — career criminals and mobsters — and he started to tell her that they wanted her dead too, just for associating with him.
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 says. “In the series, you can even hear him gaslighting me.”
Not knowing what else to do, Rosario went to New York, where Ray was physically and mentally abusive to his followers.
He recorded their sexual interactions, which he then used to blackmail them, threatening to send to their parents and post online if they didn’t do what he said. He made the girls have sex with strangers, telling them it would help with their past traumas of being sexually abused.
Eventually, most of the students escaped Ray, but his complete control over Rosario and another former student,Isabella Pollock, would last a decade until a 2019New York Magazinearticle exposing the cult came out. Subsequently, the FBI arrested Ray on sex trafficking and other charges later that year.
With Ray not around to continue his cycle of abuses, Rosario slowly began to come out of the spell she was under and regain a semblance of her former self. She’d initially agreed to participate in the Hulu series in defense of Ray, but after his arrest, she realized how wrong and bad things had been for so long. After that, she went back to the producers to tell them she wanted to explain what really happened in the cult and tell her side of how she got sucked in.
“It became about just setting the record straight,” she says. “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.”
The new three-part Hulu docu-seriesStolenYouth: InsidetheCultatSarahLawrence, premieres Feb. 9.
source: people.com
