New York (AP) — Prosecutors cast a former convicted person on Thursday as a gangster-like person, forcing her daughter’s college friends to accumulate power, gender, and money to join the “family.” , Forced one woman into a sex work company. It’s profitable that she gave him $ 1 million a year.
However, lawyers in the opening statement of the trial told a jury trial in the Federal Court of Manhattan that Lawrence Ray had poisoned him and was surrounded by college “story tellers” who arranged to physically attack him. He said he was not committing a federal crime.
“We find Larry Ray innocent,” said lawyer Allegra Grasshauser.
Ray, who was once the best man at the wedding of Bernard Kerik, a former New York Police Department commissioner, has been imprisoned since his arrest in early 2020.
U.S. Federal Prosecutor’s Assistant Lindsey Keenan begins an opening statement explaining Ray’s horrific October 2018 attack on a woman who had sex work over $ 1 million that year alone. I did.
She said Ray and the woman who served as his “trustworthy lieutenant” found a woman who was “forced into prostitution” at the hotel. There Ray tortured her for hours to make sure she continued her sex work.
Prosecutors said Ray used “violence, fear, gender, manipulation” to earn gender, power, and money.
The abuse began in the fall of 2010 when Ray began living in a small townhouse dormitory on his daughter’s campus at Sarah Lawrence College, where she persuaded her daughter’s friend to stay in a Manhattan apartment the following summer. She said she had persuaded her.
There, Keenan said Ray learned their secrets and anxieties, exploited them, and “benefited their labor, their money, and even their bodies.”
“When he came to dominate their lives … he took over their lives,” she said.
According to prosecutors, the women were forced to do manual labor for Ray at their stepfather’s house in North Carolina in 2013 because he damaged some of his belongings and tried to poison him. After being convinced that he was borrowing money, he was forced to obey his orders.
She said the woman and at least one man responded to Ray’s request for the threat of revealing their secrets to friends and family, or on the Internet, and revealing embarrassing videotape moments.
“When shame and embarrassment weren’t enough, he relied on violence. The victims had no choice. They lived in fear of the defendant.”
The allegations against Ray received public attention in the 2020 publication. “The stolen children of Sarah Lawrence” Special feature of New York Magazine.
Grasshauser, an assistant federal defender, disputed the prosecutor’s portrayal.
She talked about “Hobnobu” with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev when her client was trying to reconnect with his daughter when he went to her dorm.
Soon, college students talked about their lives and decorated them with stories of drug dealers and other exploiters, she said.
“This wasn’t a criminal company. It was a group of storytellers,” Glasshausser said.
Grasshauser said some of the women had fought the problem of mental illness and scared him when he said he had poisoned him and urged prosecutors, the Environmental Protection Agency and journalists to seek help. She also said they set him up to be physically attacked.
She said the woman who became a sex worker “began to accompany” in 2015 when she couldn’t afford to pay the rent.
She said the jury watched the video recorded by her client and “sees some things that are hard to see.”
“I’m not saying Larry Ray is a saint. You don’t have to like him, but these weren’t crimes.”