Couldn’t find anything on this on the Movies & TV forum, three part doc is oh Hulu. Ep 1 a little slow, but picks up, Ep 2 disturbing as hell. Actual audio and video from the freak is used, he’s such a narcissist, he provided them to the filmmakers. It’s just preposterous to think this could happen.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/02/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence-sex-cult
From the article:
In 2005, five years before he moved into his daughter’s dorm at Sarah Lawrence College and took a cult-like hold over her young friends, Larry Ray received a psychological evaluation. It was conducted as part of a custody trial with Ray’s ex-wife, and the judgment was alarming.
“It is literally impossible to evaluate Mr. Ray in the usual clinical manner,” concluded the evaluator. “His personality dynamics are so configured that he is able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what [he] does.”
The report, which is uncovered in Hulu’s new three-part docuseries Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, goes on to call Ray a “calculating, manipulative, and hostile man who masks his hostility, presenting instead a boyish, charming façade.”
The summary proved prophetic in 2010, when Ray began posing as a mentor to his daughter’s college-age friends and brainwashing them. He systematically isolated them from their families and friends, pressured them into degrading and sometimes sexual scenarios, controlled what they ate and to whom they spoke, and ultimately exploited them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In Stolen Youth, a group of Ray’s followers sit down with Oscar-nominated filmmaker Zach Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer) to retrace their traumatic journey with Ray—revealing how, bit by bit, they fell under Ray’s bizarre spell.
“I think in cult situations, there can be judgment of the victim—how could you fall for that?” Heinzerling tells Vanity Fair.“There’s no acknowledgement of the complicated nature of that experience.” The survivors were willing to open up on camera to bridge that knowledge gap, says the filmmaker—“to explain what happened, what it was like to be 19 and introduced to your girlfriend’s dad or your friend’s dad. And how, over a slow, methodical progression, it metastasized into something horrible.”
More in the link.