Isabella Pollok, left, leaves federal court in New York on September 7, 2022. Photo / Jefferson Siegel, The New York Times
For years, Lawrence Ray manipulated and exploited a group of young people who had lived with his daughter in a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He didn’t do it alone, prosecutors say: among them was an enforcer.
Isabella Pollok became Ray’s “trusted lieutenant”, prosecutors have said, helping abuse her one-time roommates. Descriptions of how she played a part in keeping Ray’s followers compliant and terrified emerged last year as former students testified at his trial, which led to a 60-year sentence for extortion, sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and other charges.
Pollok ran the accounts and meted out discipline, prosecutors said, pushing group members to serve and fund Ray across a decade and several states. One former student testified that Pollok and Ray showed up at a hotel room where she had been earning money for them by working as a prostitute. Pollok taunted her, the former student, Claudia Drury, said, and Ray assaulted her for as long as eight hours, placing a plastic bag over her head and threatening to kill her.
Now Pollok, who pleaded guilty last year to a single count of conspiracy to launder money, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday morning (Thursday morning NZT) by Judge Lewis J. Liman of US District Court in Manhattan. That will end a case that began on the campus of an elite college in Westchester County with a progressive intellectual tradition then devolved into squalid scenes of abuse and domination played out in hotel rooms and homes in New York City and beyond.
When Pollok pleaded guilty, she offered no public explanation of why she had become devoted to Ray. Her lawyers since have argued that Pollok was “brainwashed” and that she had been too fully in Ray’s thrall to act independently.
Among those who seem to have arrived at a similar view was Drury, who wrote to the court that, although she still puzzled over Pollok’s behaviour, she believed that her former roommate had lacked agency and deserved lenience.
Federal prosecutors have asked Liman to impose a sentence of five years, writing that Pollok “held a privileged position” within what they called “the Ray family”. They added that she was “responsible for managing Ray’s finances, enforcing Ray’s rules” and making and maintaining recordings of false confessions he elicited from followers, then used as leverage to demand payments.
“While collecting money from her abused and trafficked college friends, the defendant was spending luxurious nights at the Pierre Hotel on the upper East Side and buying expensive clothing, beauty products and high-end lingerie,” the prosecutors wrote.
Beyond that, they said, Pollok had facilitated some of Ray’s physical attacks, at one point fetching a hammer that he used to strike a student and supplying the plastic bag that he placed over Drury’s head.
Pollok’s lawyers wrote to Liman that Pollok deserved “a non-jail sentence”. They said that she had started at Sarah Lawrence as a “damaged, lonely” freshman, becoming first an “awed protégeé” of Ray and then a “broken automaton”.
Eventually, the lawyers wrote, Pollok came to see his influence as malign and “made tremendous progress toward her own rehabilitation”.
The lawyers also acknowledged what other students had suspected: that Ray had a sexual relationship with Pollok, starting when she was a sophomore.
Pollok met Ray in 2010 after he finished a stint in state prison in New Jersey stemming from child custody charges. He began spending nights at a dormitory at Sarah Lawrence, just north of New York City, where his daughter, Talia, was living.
Ray presented himself to her roommates as a worldly figure who wanted to improve their lives, leading discussions about philosophy and offering counsel.
Drury testified that he spent nights “mostly in Isabella’s room”, while telling other students that he was helping her with psychological problems. Drury thought it was “weird”, she added, and told a professor that she was worried.
After being pressured by Ray, Drury testified, she sent a letter to that professor and to a dean, retracting her “fears and concerns about Larry being a bad, dangerous, manipulative and sexually deviant man” who was carrying on an “inappropriate sexual relationship” with Pollok.
Pollok was among several students who spent the summer after their sophomore year living with Ray in an apartment in Manhattan. Ray began threatening and assaulting the students and subjecting them to lengthy interrogations, according to testimony in his trial, badgering them into admitting to a host of invented infractions.
That behaviour continued for about a decade, according to testimony, as young people including Pollok went on to live with Ray in North Carolina and New Jersey.
Santos Rosario, who was the victim of the hammer blow, testified during Ray’s trial that Pollok kept a catalogue of video confessions on her computer and said that he handed over thousands of dollars as reimbursement for property he had falsely admitted damaging. He added that Ray directed him several times to have sex with Pollok, saying that experience made him feel “like I wasn’t in control of my life”.
One of Rosario’s sisters, Felicia Rosario, testified that Ray ordered her to have sex with strangers and sometimes told Pollok to record those encounters, adding: “He would send Isabella with me to make sure that we actually got the video the way he wanted it.”
Drury testified that Pollok regularly collected her prostitution proceeds. Sometimes she showed up with Ray at Manhattan hotels where Drury was meeting clients, she said.
One evening at the Gregory Hotel in Midtown, she testified, Ray handcuffed her, naked, to a chair, interrogated her, placed the plastic bag over her head and choked her with a leash and collar. Drury said that Pollok mocked her and recorded her “lying to tell him what I thought he wanted to hear” as Ray questioned her.
In her letter to the court, Drury wrote that she did not believe that Pollok had possessed “any true capacity” to affect Ray’s behaviour that night and did not consider her to be a participant in the assault.
Drury wrote that Pollok “went to sleep and woke up” next to Ray, spent practically all day by his side, and suggested that she had no ability to resist him and little choice in whom she became under his tutelage.
“His presence is deeply corrosive to morality, empathy, decency and humanity,” Drury wrote. “I shudder to think what I would have done or been like were I in her position.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Colin Moynihan
Photographs by: Jefferson Siegel
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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