She was our friend and a roommate," Levin said. "We would be the villains if we, our sort of bougie private school, Sarah Lawrence selves, said: 'No, no, no. You've gone through this horrible trauma. You lived in homeless shelters just to stand by your dad. You paid your way and got yourself into the school and now he's finally out. But you figure something else out.'" The apartment was the center of Levin's life, a one-bedroom apartment where he slept on the couch and Talia and Isabella and Ray shared the single bed in the single bedroom. It became important to me to tell my story so people see the effect someone like Larry can have on a person's life, but also to see the challenges and the struggles faced by the survivors in recovering from such abuse."

DBLEveryone’s life is a story they tell themselves: who you are, what you want, what has happened to you. I encountered a man who was better than me at telling that story, who was such a compelling storyteller that I began to believe his version of my identity, my desires, and my memories more than my own. My version was, to be fair, not very robust at the time. Writing this book wasn’t just about setting the record straight or telling my story as I experienced it—it was about claiming that my account matters. That what I experienced and how I felt about it—my perspective—is valid, and my perspective is valid. It was the question that dominated all discussion of the Sarah Lawrence sex cult as soon as charges were filed three years ago: How could a dad live on campus, unnoticed? We talked to alumni and students to learn more. What they told us revealed that Larry Ray couldn't have found a campus better suited to hiding in plain sight. Inside the government's case against Larry Ray When Larry Ray was charged on Feb. 11, 2020, the first question many people asked — including Sarah Lawrence President Cristle Collins Judd, in a college-wide letter — was: How could the college not know a father was living on campus for nearly a year?He reflected: "I gave victim impact statement at the sentencing, and that was something I sat with and thought about for a long time, and to give that inquiry in front of him was really scary but really an experience that made me hopeful in some ways, so I hesitate to try to rehash that statement because I feel like it was very well crafted. It has now been two years since this story first published. It had an immediate impact when it was published. It became a criminal investigation, a case that is still going on. What was the reaction directly to you after this came out? Larry would wake them up before dawn for boot-camp-style exercises, telling them they needed to "get on top of our s--t," Daniel says in the three-part series.

While the New York Magazine article drew national attention to the “stolen kids of Sarah Lawrence,” the docuseries follows the survivors in the aftermath of the investigation into and prosecution of Ray. After years of brainwashing, Claudia, Santos, Yalitza, and Felicia all testified against Ray at his trial. It's very common in abusive relationships in cults like this, or in any kind of a cultic relationship, for someone to do what's called love bombing, where they show up and then they make you feel fantastic, they make you feel relieved. All of your things that you were worried about, your questions — in my case about my masculinity, about my body, about my sexuality, about how to be a good person. This person was saying, "You don't have to ask those questions anymore or feel that you're shouting them into a void, because I will answer them." I also happened to grow up in a place where therapy wasn't really a thing that we would do, so I didn't feel that I had some nonjudgmental third party to go to, to ask these questions. He made himself that person.I see you, Danny,” Ray told him one time. “I know when you say something against me, when you doubt me, when you fear me. I see it. I see your fear.”

The man who abused me was such a talented storyteller that he could convince you that something that wasn't real was real. Writing was not only about telling my story as I remember it and believe it. I spent a year writing this, and every day of writing it I had to make the claim that my account matters and is valid. I'm staking my flag in my own credibility, and I'm saying I trust myself. Then also even further, it's kind of an attempt to trust other people, just to give people my story and hope that they will believe me. During the six-hour-long conversation, Ray told Levin he was a master manipulator who once worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and had apparently helped negotiate the end of the Kosovo War in 1999.I think that if she reached out to me I would be curious to have that conversation. But it's really hard for me to imagine what her experience is, and I feel a lot of compassion for someone who has lived with Larry Ray since she was a baby, I can't imagine that." Levin’s new book, “Slonim Woods 9” (Crown/Random House, Sept. 7), rewinds events to 2010and takes readers inside the Sarah Lawrence dorm-townhouse of that name, from the perspective of someone who says he now wakes up every day trying to survive the psychological, physical and sexual abuse he suffered more than a decade ago.