Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence

• Directed by Zachary Heinzerling
• February 9, 2023
• Hulu

This three-part docuseries explores Larry Ray and the cult he started at Sarah Lawrence College.

I watch a great many crime docuseries. Mostly ones involving murders. They act as background noise while I do other things like iron of work on posts. They’re interesting enough to catch some of my attention, but very few are enough for me to be engrossed in. Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence is one of the very few.

This story is just so messed up in a way that boggles the mind. And it sounds completely made up yet it all really happened. This is even brought up at one point in the series. Friends of the unwitting cult members approached the police but because their story sounded so outlandish they essentially got dismissed and laughed out of the room. But once you hear what happened, can you really blame the police?

The story is about what amounted to a cult started by a man named Lawrence Ray at Sarah Lawrence College. Larry Ray though was no college student, but rather the father of college student Talia Ray who carefully inserted himself into the lives of his daughter’s friends before becoming their master and controller. He bullied and manipulated them and even engaged in sex trafficking.

Larry Ray is gifted at understanding an individual and twisting their fears and flaws into a way to control them and rebuild them into his servants. They show how Mr. Ray convinced them of so many things they knew to be lies.

Those that were featured in the documentary have broken free mostly of Mr. Ray’s control, but he was so effective and so thorough that you clearly see they doubt themselves. One even refers to the moments she feels of his conditioning as ‘Larry Brain.’ You get how broken each one is and as they talk how irretrievably changed their lives are.

Zachary Heinzerling and company really immerse you in this world and do a good job of showing that these were not fools that got sucked in. These were not dumb people that got suckered but people who were at the beginning of their lives and found themselves taken advantage of. You feel for these people and their damaged relationships. Whatever issues there were before, Larry Ray made far worse.

They also interview some of the powerful people Larry was connected prior to the cult-at least those that are willing to participate. Bernie Kerik (who has had his own fall from grace) among others are questioned and after you listen to what they say you realize what Larry did with them was a milder version of what he did with his cult. And what was not done with them but with the cult were new ideas on Ray’s part.

He claimed to have worked in the CIA in psi ops and also as a confidant of Gorbachev and done so many other things like being in the Marines. He created a fiction that was too good to be true but gave him so much cred that you would be uncomfortable questioning him.

Through letting the people speak and Ray’s own recordings (which he kept as ‘evidence’) Heinzerling leaves you quite unsettled. This is so effective you might be having doubts with some people. Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence might have been a touch better if they had managed an interview with Talia Ray or the few members that chose not to participate but by the end you understand why. They are trying to put the still unfolding saga behind them.

Ultimately Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence is a disturbing look at how easily people can fall victim. This is worth checking out, but you might not sleep well later.