Review by Paul La Rosa

Some stories are hard to believe, and this is one of them. News of the so-called “Sara Lawrence sex cult” already has received a lot of press and that’s a good thing because, otherwise, a reader might suspect Daniel Barban Levin’s account is exaggerated. Facts say otherwise, and the life that Levin lived as a brainwashed insider in the cult is spine-chilling.

At the start of the book, Levin faces a tall order. He must explain how and why a group of intelligent college students, male and female, would allow a middle-aged, portly former con to live with them in their student dorm. Even more unbelievable is the power Larry Ray ultimate wields over every aspect of their lives.

Eventually, Lawrence “Larry” Ray has so much control that he exploits his daughter’s female friends for sex.
How does Larry Ray do it? As Hemingway wrote, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

Daniel Levin is very much your typical college kid from a suburb of New Jersey who writes poetry and decides to go to Sarah Lawrence, formerly an all-female school, partly because he hears that poetry there is akin to being on the football team at a Big Ten college.

Levin falls in with a group of fellow students who, like a lot of young adults, is filled with self-doubt. As he writes: “I believed there was some quintessential person, a confident, impressive version of myself chained up inside, trapped by my fear, who said with ease the things that I imagined myself saying when I was lying awake at night.”

Nothing out of the ordinary there except that one of Levin’s housemates include a woman named Talia whose father is about to get out of prison. Talia tells everyone her father Larry was set up by her mother, his ex-wife, and Bernard Kerik, the former NYC police commissioner who later spent time in prison himself.

But Talia says there is a different truth about her father that she is happy to tell: “Larry, we’d learned, was an incredible human being. He’d been a marine, and then spent years working for the Defense Intelligence Agency. He’d been a liaison for Mikhail Gorbachev when he visited the United States. He’d helped negotiate the end of the Kosovo War, and had a letter to prove it. . . .”

Talia is a total believer in her dad and, because he has nowhere else to go, she asks her roommates if he can move in. They agree and Larry takes them by storm, using his bombastic yet convincing personality to make them believe he’s the only one who can help bring out their true inner selves.

Levin is skeptical until one day at Starbucks when Larry corners Levin and does his Svengali thing. He plays on Larry’s inner fears, delving deeper and deeper into Levin’s relationship with his parents until suddenly, day has turned to night. Levin feels good and wants more of what Larry is selling. So do a handful of Talia’s friends and, before long, they’ve moved out of the dorm and into an apartment in Manhattan.

The apartment becomes a dump and it soon becomes clear to the reader that Larry Ray is nutty as a fruitcake. He often spends his entire day “working” in the only bathroom in the apartment. No one else is allowed in there when Larry is doing his thing, and no one is quite sure what that thing is except he always has envelopes of cash and a limousine ready to take them anywhere. That alone makes him very impressive to this rag-tag group of wide-eyed college students.

All of Larry’s charges, the four or five students who live in the apartment, must sit and wait for Larry to do anything—go to the bathroom, begin to prepare dinner, go out shopping. The students are broke and depend on Larry for everything.

The lowlight of the story comes when Larry encourages Levin to have sex with one of his female roommates. While Levin and the woman are engaged in the bedroom, Larry enters and the scene becomes a threesome, much to Levin’s disgust, not that he does anything about it.

Although the author knows that something is very wrong about the life he’s living (his own father tells him that it sounds like he’s in a cult), he can’t seem to break away because he values Larry’s opinion so highly. He comes to believe that Larry is the only one who can save him. There are more than a few cringeworthy scenes, including one where Larry sets out to prove to Levin that he is not gay. Soon, Levin is wearing a dress and holding a dildo.

It’s classic cult leader behavior but Levin takes a very long time to admit that to himself. Half the book, the reader is desperate for Levin to wake up to Larry’s outrageous behavior. It’s the driving force behind the book and the reason to keep reading. Levin does a masterful job portraying Larry as the cult manipulator he is, piece by piece. The idea that Levin was able to put his thoughts down on paper and write this “Alice through the Looking Glass” tale is the redemption the reader was hoping for.

Dangerous Vulnerability

Sarah Lawrence is small liberal arts school located near Yonkers, New York. It has been known as a prestigious college and only admitted men in 1968.

This is a memoir, written by Daniel Levin, a student who came under the spell of Larry Ray. Larry is the father of Talia, who told her roommates that her father was coming to live with her in the communal house called Slonim Woods 9.. He had been in prison and they needed time together. No one objected to this odd intrusion and in moved Larry Ray. Our author was a student and part of this group and seemed both ambivalent and under the spell of Mr. Ray. Ray appeared to target the young men’s sexual weaknesses or lack of confidence and play on it until it became untenable. He did the same with some of the young women.

To put this group into a controlled environment, they moved to Ray’s one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. The only positive here was that they no longer had housing costs and Daniel would never have been able to afford a New York apartment. Ray led delusional counseling sessions and meetings with this group which achieved mental, sexual and physical abuse.

Ray was an ex-convict preying on his daughters’ roommates. He referred to his important position in our government and/or army called the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. He used this position to impress these college students. Why didn’t someone look him up at the beginning?

The book was difficult to read, not only because of the cult-like subject matter but it was told in a stream of consciousness. The author did not really explain situations in chronological order. The writing encompassed one incident after another without much connection to previous incidents. The shaming and revolting punishments, under the guise of awareness of oneself, were often abject torture. Embarrassment seemed to be Ray’s claim to fame. Daniel liked poetry and could write poetry. I believe he escaped into this talent to find solace.

When Sarah Lawrence learned of this “sex cult,” the college expressed shock. They didn’t even know how Ray, a guest, could be allowed to stay in the dorm, Slonim Woods 9. Reading the book took concentration as one incident could roll into another unrelated one. The entire depiction and awareness became gruesome and cruel. Reading about abuse is not pleasant and this book was often disjointed, incoherent and muddled. It may have mirrored the travesty.

My gratitude to NetGalley and Crown, a division of Penguin Random House ,for providing this pre-published book. All opinions expressed are my own.

This was a difficult book to read, but not because it is a bad book because its not. It was difficult because you are living through what Daniel lived through during his time with Larry. People always wonder how someone could get caught up in something like this so to read the manipulation and brainwashing in detail was disturbing. I feel terrible for everyone that was in this situation and I hope they are all out and safe.