News 12's Senior Reporter Tara Rosenblum delves into the mind of Lawrence Ray, the so-called Sarah Lawrence sex cult leader who moved into his daughter's dorm and abused her roommates and friends.

The conversations with Ray were the first time he spoke publicly since a judge sentenced him to 60 years in prison for sex trafficking, extortion, conspiracy and other charges in April 2022.

During the hours of interviews, Ray discusses what led up to the heinous crimes at Sarah Lawrence College, shares revelations involving his own faith, childhood sexual abuse, his broken marriage, a recent prison assault, connections to government leaders and the reasons he videotaped his interactions with his victims.

Ray insists that everything people have seen, heard and read about him is untrue - and he wants to set the record straight.

"Nobody listens and nobody knows the whole story as well as I do," he says. "Some of it, I think, will shock you.”

It all began in July, when Ray replied to a letter from Rosenblum agreeing to participate in an in-person interview.

Federal authorities wouldn’t allow it, citing safety concerns. This began hours of recorded phone conversations with his permission - each lasting 15 minutes due to prison rules.

The first phone call took place on Sept. 9, just days after his arrival at a high security federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility has housed notorious death row inmates like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Ray says he had to be moved from a Kentucky prison after being assaulted by a fellow inmate.

"Apparently a guard spread the rumor...that I was a child molester with little children, which was not true, of course...I got attacked," he says.

Two things remained clear in his conversations with Rosenblum: Ray's absolute certainty of his own innocence and his obsession with former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik, who he blames for his imprisonment.

Ray and Kerik met in 1995 and became so close that Kerik made Ray the best man at his wedding.

Kerik’s name would also come up in every conversation Rosenblum had with him over two months.

Their relationship eventually unraveled, and at one point, Ray was even an FBI informant in the federal tax evasion case that landed Kerik a three-year prison sentence.

Ray claims Kerik exacted revenge by employing his daughter’s dormmates and their families in a vast conspiracy to poison them.

It's an allegation that came up 76 times during his conversations with Rosenblum.

Ray promised medical documents as proof. While they never did materialize, News 12 did track down a letter from his former attorney that references a medical discharge from a New York City hospital on Aug. 25, 2014 for mercury poisoning. However, his lawyer wouldn’t release the full document - and neither would Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

In the fall of 2010, Ray was released from prison after serving three years for child custody violation charges.

A few days later, police say his oldest daughter, Talia, welcomed him to stay on campus at Sarah Lawrence College with her and her roommates.

Talia lived in the Slonim Woods dormitory with a group of friends that included Isabella Pollok, Santos Rosario, Claudia Drury and Daniel Levin.

They were all bright sophomores, but each hid their own vulnerabilities that seemed to open the door for Ray to become a trusted life coach.

Ray especially connected with Pollok. She was attending Sarah Lawrence on a full academic scholarship, but was struggling to escape what she has described as an abusive childhood in Texas.

Things took a sinister turn at the end of sophomore year when some of the students decided to move in with Ray at a one-bedroom apartment on East 93rd Street in Manhattan.

The group of students that now included Rosario's two sisters - Yalitza and Felicia - say they were subjected to punishing interrogations, psychological torture, sleep deprivation and even sexual humiliation.

In a bizarre twist, Ray himself created the evidence that would help convict him - by videotaping all the interactions.

"I just wanted...to make a record of what was really going on," he said.

Through a public records request, News 12 obtained and watched hours of his videos.

One incident shows an interrogation that appeared to turn to torture, and involves Ray forcing pliers into Levin’s mouth.

Ray insists people shouldn't believe what they think they see.

"Can you imagine somebody really sticking their tongue out at somebody who was angry at them with a plier," he says. "It's not going to happen...it was pretend."

Court documents show that Ray studied and collected articles on mind control - an allegation he denies.

In another video, taken months later after he had moved to North Carolina with Drury, Pollok, Rosario and Felicia, he appears to throw Felicia to the ground.

Ray has an explanation for that, too, saying he did not throw her to the floor and that the video was edited.

When Santos's sister met Ray, she was a Harvard graduate - months away from finishing a medical residency in California. She also seemed to come under his spell, referring to him as her common law husband.

Ray also had another reason for these recordings. He captured confessions from each person in his orbit. In Levin and Rosario’s case, they falsely admitted to damaging property and drained their families bank accounts to pay Ray back.

Then there’s Drury. She came to Sarah Lawrence as an aspiring attorney via Los Angeles. Prosecutors say Ray sexually groomed and abused her into submission over a period of years, ultimately forcing her to confess to an elaborate poisoning scheme.

Drury says she resorted to prostitution at his suggestion to settle the score - paying Ray an estimated $2.5 million over four years.

Ray denies Drury's abuse allegations or that he directed her to pursue sex work to pay off the debts.

"That's a lie," says Ray. "In Claudia's words, she wanted to help us. We told her 'We don't want you to help, Claudia. We just want to know what we're poisoned with.' She said, 'No, I did all this to you guys. I want to pay you guys. I want to make repairs. I want to repair the damage I did."

Ray also denies directing Drury to pursue a career in sex work.

"When she told us what she was doing, I tried very, very strongly to advise her not to, and then I tried to get her back into a course at Columbia. I told her she should continue school and find a career," says Ray.

Things took a bad turn one night in 2018 at the Gregory Hotel in Manhattan - that's when prosecutors say the violence culminated with a night of extreme torture and humiliation.

Drury told a jury that Ray tied her naked to a chair, covered her head with a plastic bag and threatened to waterboard her - before choking her to the point of passing out with a leash and collar.

All lies, according to to Ray.

"Claudia testified that I threatened to kill her, harm her, hurt her. I never never ever tried to hurt Claudia," he says. "Claudia did not want to end up in trouble for poisoning people, that's for sure, so Claudia is very motivated to lie."

In Part 2 of The Larry Ray Tapes, News 12 takes a deep dive into events from Larry Ray's childhood.

Ray says he had a normal childhood in Brooklyn – playing baseball with his friends and dreaming of being an astronaut.

He says his parents were divorced when he was very young and remembers not being close to his mother.

"There was a point where, I think, two years – I didn’t even hear from her, and I lived with my father and his parents," he says.

Ray also reluctantly revealed information involving alleged childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his maternal grandfather when he was only 5 years old.

"There were some abuse but it was short-lived," he said. "It was an incidental issue."

Ray's attorneys say his grandmother also physically and emotionally abused him while in her care, as his mother struggled with her mental health and bounced him around homes across Brooklyn, White Plains and New Jersey.

Ray claims he also had to contend with undiagnosed attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

He graduated high school and chose to enlist in the Air Force instead of going to college. News 12 obtained his military records, which revealed he served just 19 days.

"I had a high frequency hearing loss, and they didn't pick it up when I went for the initial physical," he says.

Ray then landed himself a job on Wall Street through the 1980s despite not having a college degree.

He says it was in the 1990s where he made his mark as a self-described contract operative for the U.S. government. He credits himself with negotiating peace deals on behalf of the U.S. government and befriending powerful government officials.

"I handled Mikhail Gorbachev for years," he says. "I did all the translation between Reagan and Gorbachev for all the nuclear arm reduction treaties and stuff."

Ray also says he had a crucial role in the cease-fire agreement in Kosovo.

"I'm the one that actually did the agreement. That's why I was sent to NATO headquarters to begin with," he says.

News 12 looked into those claims. While U.S. officials many years ago credited him with assisting in ending the conflict, they say he was one of many who contributed.

His peacekeeping skills were not enough to save his marriage to the mother of his two daughters, Talia and Ava. His marriage ultimately ended in an ugly divorce with allegations of affairs, abuse and arrests.

It wasn’t long after Ray was released that he landed at the front door of his daughter’s dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College.

"You don't get it by force or control," he says. "You have to be willing to be patient, listen to them.”

He vehemently denies psychologically conditioning the students, which many found hard to believe.

"I listened to them. I was there to listen to them. Sometimes it was difficult to keep listening to them," he says.

Listening wasn't why police raided his home in New Jersey and took him into custody in February 2020.

He was arrested on charges of sex trafficking, extortion and more.

Two years later, a jury convicted him in less five hours of liberation on 15 felony counts in a bombshell monthlong trial.

“I am absolutely innocent,” Larry Ray continually told Rosenblum. "It never happened. I never did any of that to anybody. The sex trafficking or anything else."

Even during his trial, he was true to form - continuing the drama in the courtroom, with two medical mysteries that brought the headline-grabbing case to a standstill.

“I had a seizure," he began. “It had to come from the poisoning, because I've never had those problems in my life until after the mercury poisoning.”

A jury did not believe he was a victim.

It took them less than one day to convict him on 15 felony counts in the spring of 2022 - 12 years from when he first appeared inside the Sarah Lawrence dorm.

He says he is now appealing his felony convictions, and his lawyers claim the evidence of sex trafficking and forced labor was insufficient.

“If there is justice and if there is any truth to the system, I absolutely should win the appeal, but...a lot of lawyers aren't so quick to just defend you thoroughly. They're also afraid of the politics locally in their own arena,” he says.

Ray says he does not owe an apology to anyone involved in this case and has no regrets about the events that ensued.

News 12 reached out to his victims. None of them wanted to speak on camera. Several of them teamed up to sue Sarah Lawrence College for negligence, claiming school leaders knew about his presence on campus and should have done more to protect them. A judge dismissed their suit back in September.

Bernie Kerik released the following statement:

“I would stake my life on it. What I've been telling you is the truth," he says.

Larry Ray is scheduled to be released March 29, 2071.