When Felicia Rosario met Larry Ray, she had no idea her entire world would be destroyed. Felicia was a bright, ambitious graduate of Harvard and Columbia who had just begun her psychiatry residency when her brother introduced her to Larry, a fast talking, charismatic man who also happened to be his girlfriend's father. Little did she know, Larry was leading a sadistic cult, manipulating and abusing her brother and his
fellow classmates at Sarah Lawrence College. What began as a fast paced courtship quickly deteriorated into a coercive and terrorizing relationship that dismantled Felicia's health, career, family, and life. In this intense episode of Navigating Narcissism.
You will hear more untold.
Stories of the cult at this pristine Djus College when Felicia reveals details of her experience for the first time. From Red Table Talk Podcasts and iHeartMedia, I'm Doctor Rominy and this is Navigating Narcissism. This podcast should not be used as a substitute for medical or mental health advice.
Individuals are advised to seek independent medical advice, counseling, and or therapy from a healthcare professional with respect to any medical condition, mental health issue, or health inquiry, including matters discussed on this podcast. This episode discusses abuse and suicide, which may be triggering to some people. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent the
opinions of Red Table Talk productions, iHeartMedia, or their employees. Felicia, thank you so much for joining me. Last week, we actually spoke with your fellow survivor, Daniel Levin, and although you both were abused and tormented by the same person, your experiences are very different. So can we just start at the top. How did you meet Larry Ray?
So? I met Larry Ray through my brother Santos, who was a student at Sarah Lawrence. He was friends with his daughter, Talia, and Santos really wanted me to meet him, and I flew back from California to visit because I started my job, my training in psychiatry out in Los Angeles. And then we went to dinner. That's when it started for me.
And what was it like at that first meeting.
The first meeting was very exciting, he's a very big personality, can easily overwhelm. He talks a mile a minute. He's just very excited. But he was really interesting and he knew a lot about a lot of different things, and he really seemed to genuinely care about all of us, which was really, you know, meaningful to me.
You said you were doing your psychiatry training. What was your life like when you met Larry?
So when I met Larry, I was living in California. I was an intern, I had my own apartment. You know, I was really enjoying my job. I was making friends. The things were good.
I think that it's also important for people to know you're an incredibly accomplished person. Not only were you in psychiatry residency at the time, you had completed your undergraduate degree at Harvard, and you'd done your medical training at Columbia. The reason I'm mentioning that is that when we hear stories like anyone who's gone through something like this, there is a reflexive assumption that, well, there's something wrong with
this person or they didn't have it together. You had it about as together as anyone I could think of in terms of discipline and focus and ambition.
And pursuit.
That stereotype is one that I've always been very focused on breaking that.
Well, only broken.
People get pulled into these relationships, or only people who don't have anything going on. It's absolutely not the truth. But unfortunately people look backwards and say, maybe I didn't have it together, and I'm just telling you, clearly you had it together.
Yeah. I have doubted myself in the past and like, you know, what was going on with me, what was wrong with me? But I agree, I totally agree with you that it's not that I was broken. It's that, at least in my case, he had an agenda and he had bad intentions, and it didn't matter if I have had it together or not. No, you know, it's about Larry's intention in the relationship, in the interaction.
And not only is it about Larry's intention. I mean, Felicia, that wasn't his opener. It wasn't like you met this person who was manipulative and confusing and exploitative from the jump you yourself said. You just said, I met a person who was incredibly engaged, incredibly interested and interesting, who was very present. These are things that people are normally
drawn too. And I'm putting a finer point on it, because again we have this picture of, oh, you didn't see something right from the beginning, or it's just because there was something off about you. I'm not hearing anything off about you at all, and very together, very clear on who you were, what you stood for, and you met someone who was actually incredibly interesting in all of that. But from that first meeting with Larry, how did the relationship develop from there?
So it started off with Larry. It was very friendly at first. I think Larry had plotted with my sister and my brother to have this dinner so that way they could you have us meet and then could start to work on me.
By the time Felicia met Larry, both her brother Santos and sister Yalitza had been pulled into his web. A detail that is often missed in this story is that not only was Larry charismatic and engaging, Felicia's own siblings had sort of signed off on him.
He was very charming. We started talking once a week, and then a few times a week, and then it was every day, multiple times a day. I would wake up, he would call me, We would talk all day and or text. I would call him at lunch, and then at night he didn't sleep. He was just up at all hours. Right because he was in New York and I was in California, he laid it on. I think we met in September, and by November he was saying
I love you. By February he was planning our wedding in Disney World, and like babies, the whole nine escalated very quickly, and then he started accusing me of cheating on him. And he was like, I know you're out there having sex with all of these people, but he was obsessed with this idea of like really hyper sexualizing me, and if it wasn't that he was accusing me of cheating on him, he would go to the other end of wanting me to go out and have sex with
strangers and recording it for him. So the message was very confusing and uncomfortable, because you know, on one hand, I was being accused of lying, and then the other he was trying to get me to do things that I had never done before and that I didn't want to do, and I resisted for a very long time.
There were some patterns that showed up in the first few months of Felicia's relationship with Larry that reflect early signs of a coercively controlling relationship. These include a quick escalation, a sort of fantasy planning phase, what would their wedding be like, that they would have children, constant and frequent contact, jealousy, and accusations of cheating. When Felicia met Larry, her life was going well and she found Larry to be interesting
and engaging. This confusing mix of factors means that anyone in a relationship that has all of these confusing features is getting lost in something that is at times exciting but also unsettling. And it is basically a period of indoctrination, and that leaves a person so confused that they are easier to control. I mean, that's not a surprising pattern, right, It's fostering of doubt in yourself. You're doing this, you're doing that. No, no, I'm not so, you're defending yourself.
You're off balance. But then in that same breath, it's basically go out and do things, get evidence of it, which I'm going to turn around and weaponize.
But you wouldn't have known that at the time.
It's all incredibly, incredibly confusing. Do you think it was the long distance that fostered it moving so quickly and becoming so intense so quickly.
One we connected very quickly, and he was really good at talking to me and engaging me right. There were external factors that helped move it along, because one, Santos had already dated Talia, and I met Talia before I met Larry, and she was lovely, she was super sweet. I really liked her. She was a very kind, honest, honorable person. So then my brother started talking to Larry, and then my brother said, oh, Larry is great. Then my sister started talking to Larry, and then my sister says,
Larry's great. My parents meet Larry, they really like him too. So my whole circle is invested right, and everyone's like signing off on him. So I feel more comfortable talking to Larry because everyone else around me is like, yeah, this guy is a good guy, and you know, we're all believing him. The other part of it was that he was helping my brother, he was helping my sister, helping them with their self esteem, helping them understand themselves better.
What he was doing with them at the beginning was real. He was actually employing like actual techniques to help them. We had been through a very difficult time not too long before that. My brother had had a suicide attempt in two thousand and nine, and we had quite a bit of chaos in our family and we hadn't totally dealt with it. And as the eldest, I'm nine years older than my brother and I'm seven years older than my sister. My parents came from Dominican Republic. They only
spoke Spanish. I'm the translator from a young age, and then I'm the one that figures stuff out, you know, So I become a parentified child. Yeah, and I'm effectively the third parent, and I'm taking care of my sister and my brother, and I'm helping to raise them, making sure that they go to good schools, making sure that, you know, they're successful. My brother thankfully was able to graduate from high school and went on to Sarah Lawrence, which is a wonderful recovery. But we still didn't deal
with what had happened. And Larry comes and he's helping my brother, he helps my sister. He start to bring some clarity to what had been going on with us, and honestly, he was taking some of the load off from me to he was helping me because I was in California, but I was still trying to, you know, be a good sister to my siblings, but it's hard to do from across the country. I felt like a
huge weight off my shoulders. I'm like, there's finally somebody around who's competent, who's capable, who gets stuff done, and who's actually helping them and helping me by helping them. Yeah, and I felt supported. You know, I haven't had that before. My parents have been supportive. I'm not going to take that away from them, but it gets tiring when you're doing things all on your own.
I'm so glad you gave that context, Felicia, because otherwise it almost sounds like, meet this person, super charismatic, we talk a lot, and then it becomes intense and you know, we're in a relationship and you fall in love. You're missing this really really subtle and important, important dynamic because the place where a person can get us the most is the thing that we need the most. So it may not be a dozen roses or a gift coming in the mail, it could be this sense of feeling supported.
It is an incredibly seductive dynamic in a way that we wouldn't traditionally think of something as seductive. And I think that piece of it really rounds out the understanding and makes us understand how every one of these ultimately really toxic relationships can really start at a place where somebody's fitting a puzzle piece in that we needed and it's specific to us.
Yes, absolutely, we like to.
Talk about love bombing and the early idealized phases of these relationships as though they always go down the same way. And while there were some of those elements in this story, each of us has vulnerabilities that are unique to us and represent a spot where love bombing can simply be someone giving us something we desperately need. Felicia had been carrying a heavy load for a long time. She often had to care for her younger siblings, had major academic demands,
and helped her parents. Larry Raised power may simply have been that he was lifting some of that burden for her by providing guidance to her brother. Love Bombing isn't always nights out and over the top romance. Sometimes it is simply someone helping us when we need it most.
Larry was incredibly clever and manipulative, So he profiled everyone beforehand. He knew what was going to be attractive to me and what would bring me into him.
You were in psychiatry residency, I'm a psychologist. Did you ever take pause at the fact that it almost felt like Larry was acting as a sort of untrained therapist with your brother, with your sister, with a lot of other people. I mean, he was sort of spouting out sort of first year seminar kinds of stuff to them. Did that ever give you pause or make you sort of look sideways at the situation?
Oh? Yeah, totally. I'm still trying to figure this out because I remember when Santos first started talking about Larry. There was something that he said that Santos was basically like, you can't speak negatively about Larry. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like? Who is this guy that you can't talk bad about? Right? And I was clear minded then, and I was like, this doesn't make sense.
Why are you like this about him? You know, I had to manage a lot of difficult situations like growing up and then you know, as a woman, as a minority, navigating the academic circles that I was in. I was very emotionally intelligent, and so with Larry, it wasn't so much about if I'm a doctor, why didn't I recognize it? It's more that I'm a human being. I'm training as a doctor to perform a skill a profession, but I'm a person and feelings, emotions, connection, that's way more important
than any profession. Right. So then when he came in and he was able to help with that feeling of connection, with that support, you know that was going to override anything.
Yeah, yep, And I think that is a really important point. It's not just about technical skills, but about that again, that emotional connection and you reading it as such, above and beyond all this technique stuff.
He slipped under the radar. So he presented really well, and that took away my natural guard, right, my instinct. So there was alarm at the beginning, and then he quelled it because he was able to have very intricate conversation about the mind in psychiatry, and then he claimed to have training, and then when I would see him talk to people, it was actually effective. And he goes and talks to doctors and everyone's speaking to him like a peer, and it would happen at every hospital we
went to. By the time we left, he was shaking their hand, they were hugging him. They're like, thank you so much, Larry for coming in. So he was so smooth and he was smart. It was something that did give me pause at first, but then I saw other doctors be comfortable with him, and even though he might not be credentialed, he was still competent.
When people show up with confidence, it's very very convincing. And you understand this because you're in the biz. Those of us who are therapists, we're really kind of taught to hold back a little.
Bit, right.
We're not advice givers, we're not life coaches, right, like we're helping someone meander through emotions. He was being very directive. He was sort of doing what people fantasize therapy is, which is somebody telling you what it's about. And they were younger, and so for them, somebody just sort of laying it out. Can feel really reassuring. That very directive stance he was taking wasn't therapy. Was some you know, it was madness, but it wasn't this manipulation.
But it felt helpful, and then there were results yesterwards. He gets them motivated enough to do five hundred push ups a day, and they get their work done on time, they get you know, good grades, and so all of the things that they're wanting results on, they're actually happening.
Right in that time.
Your internship and residency anyone listening to this, if you don't know, is an extraordinarily demanding time. Trainees are working twelve to fifteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty four hour you know call it is exhausting. You're on edge, you don't fully know what you're doing. The people who are training you aren't always nice to you. It's not easy. You were talking to Larry a lot mornings, lunch breaks, nights. Did you have other people you were spending time with
at that time? And talking to friends colleagues doesn't sound like as much time as with him. But were there other significant voices in your life or people you were spending time with?
So? Yes, so at the beginning, I have made you know, friends early on with a lot of my intern class. Then Larry time started to take over. I mean I did keep up the relationships, but not as much as I would have had I not been talking to Larry all that time.
So it was the hospital and the work, and so it seems though over time Larry started encroaching more and more of whatever tiny shreds of spare time you had. I'm trying to understand how much he was becoming the loudest voice in your life.
Yes, you know, on a weekend before I met Larry, I was going out to the beach or restaurants or exploring different parts of Los Angeles, and you know, trying new things with my new friends. And then as the months went on, I would spend all weekend on the phone with him, like from morning tonight, and it was all day every day, and like my phone would die in the middle of us talking, and then he would freak out because I had hung up the phone because
my phone died. So he did become the loudest voice.
How would you make sense of his tantrums at a phone hanging up after you were spending so many hours on the phone. How did you tell that story to yourself?
That's a great question because so when you say it out loud, right, when I tell you that I was on the phone phone with him for hours and he has a tantrum because my phone died. Like even now that sounds crazy, something's wrong with him because the time that we spent on the phone, he's wearing me down, like every hour, and some of the conversations were so draining. And I remember a conversation I had on the beach.
I wanted to enjoy my Saturday, and he was trying to get me to talk about like if I had ever been abused, or if I had had sex with my teachers at school, all of these really heavy, very uncomfortable topics, and he just kept pressing them. So by the time I got off the phone, I was just relieved he had worn down my confidence in myself and my own trust in myself that I was just freaking out that he was freaking out. I was like, oh no, Larry's upset. How do I fix this? Like how do
I make it better? Like I'm not even thinking about me anymore. I'm not clear minded anymore when it comes to him, because of how he had been wearing on me, like day after date.
Night after night.
It isn't a doctrination process. And it's this interesting pull because it goes exactly back to what your brother said, don't say anything bad about him. It's sort of the manipulation sets you up to always appease someone like him. You need to make sure he's okay. There's a fear if he's not okay. Do you have any recollection of what the fear was for you? If he wasn't.
Okay, my life would be over. It wasn't like I was never going to find somebody right that I'm like. I was worried that I'm never going to meet someone like Larry again, I'll never find love again. And it wasn't even like that. It was more primal that like my life would end like mentally, I could no longer survive without him. And if he stopped talking to me, I don't know what I would do. I would just
fall apart and the world would end. And I don't know how he did that, because it's a very extreme line of thought, right, But that's how I felt for years. My life would be over if he stopped talking to me. It didn't matter if he was beating me, it didn't matter what he was doing to me. The worst thing that could happen to me is if he went away.
People like him literally convince you they are the air you breathe and it's what he was doing. I'm going to keep you on the phone for eighteen hours at a time. It is a systematic indoctrination where if you hear something enough, it becomes your reality. It's that simple. It would happen to any of us. Yeah, absolutely, that's
slowly what was happening. But yet he had been legitimized by his relationship with your brother, with your sister, with your parents liking him, with you liking his daughter, you know, with him caring about your life, all of that, and you were far away and the conversations were a touchstone in the middle of a very very busy, impactful time in your training. It gives us a rounder picture of how this could happen so insidiously over time. So he
kept trying to push this question hour after hour. Did you experience prior abuse as a child with teachers? What did you think he was trying to do?
Then, you know, he didn't ask it the way that a therapist would ask it. I think that's actually something that I'm just thinking about right now. For example, with the teachers, it would be more like he was trying to have like a sexy conversation, and it was like so not sexy to me. But he was like, oh, I bet you blew your math teacher. I'm sure you had sex with like tons of guys in high school. He would try to pry this information from me, and I would just keep saying no, right, and then he
would see like, no, you're lying. I know you're lying to me. You look like a good girl, but I'm sure you were. You were up to a lot of stuff when you were in school. I'm like, no, I wasn't. And then he got so aggressive that I started making stuff up. Yep, Like I started saying, yeah, yeah, I did it. Yes, I totally did it. Yeah, yeah I had sex with my math teacher. No, I've never had sex with my math teacher. Just a broad disclaimer there. I've never had sex with with any teacher. So I
started to make things up just to appease him. And then he would be like, oh, that sounds good, tell me more, and I'm like, tell you more of what you know, and then I would have to like try to make up stories.
We're seeing the beginnings of a pattern of him breaking you down and then starting to rescue you. Breaking you down and then starting to rescue you. This is a very classic element of something we see malignant, narcissistic and psychopathic relationships. Right, they start working both sides of the game, right, they destroy you, they rescue They destroy you, they rescue you, and that's how you create probably one of the most persistent trauma bonds. But even the thing you were saying
about is making stuff up. I'm going to give you a mild example of this, right, because I think that people say, well, I want to make up that I would have slept with my math teacher. No, maybe a lot of people wouldn't, but I'll tell you this. When you have a toxic person who's coming at you, yeah you did, Yeah, tell me, I know you slept at that teacher. Let's use a mild example of this is the best pizza. No, this is this play this is the best pizza. Come on, tell me, tell me, tell
me it's the best pizza. Right, best, And you're after a while you're like, okay, yes, you know, Luigi's is the best pizza. In down done, you win, you win. You're like, fine, and make it stop right In what we're you, it's like negative reinforcement is the reward that comes when you stop something bad from happening. It's like closing a window against the noise you're gonna keep. Next time,
you'll close the window again. Same thing here. And although it's a silly example, we do this stuff with toxic people all the time. The difference is the unique element, this unique aspect of this relationship with Larry is that he was insisting on these horrifying things being true.
You would relent.
Daniel shared something very similar of just making stuff up to make it stop. But then he would revisit it and he would be able to plausibly say, but you said just slept with your math teacher.
And then so you said you slept with your math teacher. Wait a minute, did you lie to me? How could you lie to me?
Bingo? That's it.
Either way, you can't win.
And I've said this, Felicia, I've written it, I've said it, i've preached it, I've drawn it. Is that you can never win. It is the hallmark of any toxic relationship with a narcissistic, psychopathic, manipulative person. You give into everything they say. That's not winning, that's just getting this person out of your way. The vast majority of manipulative, narcissistic toxic people are not trying to do what he was doing, which was to have you fully under his psychological control.
In most of these relationships, the person just wants to get their way and maintain some level of control and just want their lives to be convenient. So obviously what you experienced was far far more pronounced.
Exactly.
Yeah, absolutely, But the challenging thing is is that it's subtle and it's a million small things, and in this case it was so unrelenting. Most of us in these scenarios will say, okay, fine, yeah, sure, I did this thing, and you think it's done. What we don't bank on is that this is going to come back and bite us, which is what happened to you. Now as this is going on, though you're still not seeing it, you're still thinking, I'm in a relationship with this person, I'm involved with
this person. And you were in California, he was in New York. Can you talk to us about that transition from California to New York for you, So.
Going from California back to New York, that was probably one of the worst experiences of my life, including being with him. But this was really harrowing. He sorry, I just it comes flooding back whenever you ask, but it's okay. So he just kept escalating as time went on, right, and then he kept pressuring me, trying to get me to admit to things that I didn't do, trying to get me to have sex with people with strangers and record it to send it to him. And I had
come to visit a few times. Larry is exceptionally extravagant, and so the few times that I did come to visit, we stated at the Plaza, at the Waldorf and then at the Carlisle. It's like these ridiculous hotels. I'm not that kind of person. One of those times he had a business meeting. I met the person that he was working with, and she asked him to help her with her divorce. So he did all this work for her. We go out to dinner with her, and then we
leave dinner. Next day he starts accusing me of destroying the deal with this woman, that now he's not going to get paid for all the work that he did, and that I made him lose a million dollars. I was like, what are you talking about. He always carried around like tens of thousands of dollars in a backpack cash anyways, So he says that while he was sleeping, I stole money from him, like one hundred thousand dollars. So he's already been wearing me down, and this was
what over now ten months. I'm doing well at work actually, but he is wearing me down in my personal life, and I'm worried that I did something that I don't remember at this point, and I'm like, oh my god, I made him lose money. Oh my god, I stole money, but I don't have it. What happened the week before that, I told him that I was going to apply for my state medical license. I was about to take my exam and I was about to get my license. So he decides to lay into me after I tell him that,
and he gets me extra paranoid. I start to think that people are coming after me, that people are surrounding my apartment, that people are trying to kill me, that I was terrified I couldn't go to work, and he was just gaslighting me for hours and hours. He would say, well, you you're wasting my time, like you're saying that you're upset,
and like you're probably lying. I thought you're sleeping with somebody right now, and you're not actually worried about somebody trying to kill you, and you stole money from me. I'm going to come after you. I'm going to sue you. And I'm on the other end crying. You can hear me, like, because he recorded all of this, So I actually still have the recording of this conversation.
Who was recording these conversations because he's so he's recording everything.
I was recording everything. He was recording all the conversations. I didn't know. I was not aware of this at all. He wanted to record me saying that I did hurtful things to him, that I had cheated on him, or that I had stolen from him, you know, because it would get to that point that I would just submit whatever or it was he was alleging that I did, so then he would have the recording that, oh, well, you said this, and I have proof that you said it because you said it on this day, and I
have the recording. I mean, and it was in just hours, like it was days. He sent me to Best Buy to get cameras and stold my apartment so that he could see me from New York, see me in my apartment and watch me sleep. Even at best Buy when I went to get the cameras, he was trying to get me to have sex with the workers at best Buy. It's like, no, Like, I am terrified for my life and you're trying to get me to have sex with
people like that much. I was able to fight back on, to push back on, but then eventually, you know, I was so distraught. He's like, well, you know, you need to just come back to New York. This is after seventy two hours of this. I'm like, okay, yeah, I can't take it.
My conversation will continue after this break. So, Felicia, in these seventy two hours, in these days, he is telling you that there are people who are trying to harm you, consistently telling you this, and it's adding up to a plausible narrative.
It's plausible in the state that I was in, the mental state that I was in, Yeah, it made sense to me, and I was terrified and I really believed that people were coming after me, that people were trying to kill me.
So that's what I'm saying. It's plausible, Felicia.
He has this sort of storied past, so it's not beyond the paale that someone from his past could have been seeking vindication. It feels a little cinematic, but it's not beyond the paal. He keeps telling you, keeps telling you. He's selling it to you. You care about him, so there's some buy in. You believe him. He keeps going and going. He doubles down and he triples down, and it's almost like this hook is working, because it does feel with him that he was dropping multiple lines in
the water. Felicia, let me see if I can get her to admit to, you know, wanting to sleep with the best buy guy, or let me see if I can get her admit to this, admit to that. What kind of collateral can I get from her to use against her down the road. And then he started a new tactic, let me tell her that she is at risk. Like it does almost feel like he had a big psychopathic bag of tricks and he was digging into it because of who you are. Some of the tricks weren't working,
so he switched up his game. And escalation is always what we see in this coercive and malignant relationship. But it's not only just escalation it's trying different things. This one was working right exactly.
Yes, And you're totally right because of the person that I am. I didn't go along with a lot of the things that he was trying to get me to do that he did get others to do. Yes, I just wasn't working. And going back to what you were saying about how they play both sides of the coin, right, So I'm about to get my medical license, and then he decides then to start this attack, this assault. I'm about to be independent, a full fledged doctor, but he
wants to break me and fix me. So he's going to break me right before like the critical point where that's going to make me a doctor. Then he has that carot, which is a giant carrot, my career, my future, my dream of helping people, right, and then if he manages to quote fix me right, get me back to work, get me back to medicine, then I owe my career to him. Then I owe my whole life to it.
Wow, that's so telling.
You know, that's something I didn't understand, and that's a really important observation because you're absolutely right, he was sapping her autonomy because that final exam was going to be the exam and that then would allow you to independently write prescriptions. It was a critical professional ledge and it speaks to how studious. I hate using that word, but how studied. Somebody with a psychopathic personality style is about taking in all the data on a person and literally
it's like setting a precise trap. This is not randomly like I'm just going to mess with someone's head. It is calculated, it is careful. This is why in the literature traditionally psychopathic people have always been characterized as quite intelligent. You have to be smart to be able to draw this big circle and say, well this, then this, and if I get her right there, and if I do this, then that, and how can I figure out what Felicia's
sort of vulnerability is? And then he found it in this sort of creating this fear that someone would be out to harm you. And it even sounds like in his storytelling he was even harnessing the plausibility that your parents could have been involved in this too.
Oh yeah, he definitely did. He started early on. He knew how important my family was to me. My parents, my siblings are the most dear people to my heart. So he held all of those relationships hostage, and then he started to say that they were plotting against me, that they were trying to come after me, that all of them were trying to kill me. That was part of his method of isolating me, right, just breaking down
the other relationships. But then I'm so invested in my family that if any threat to my family, I'll capitulate. Like if you tell me that if I do something, it's going to hurt my brother, my sister and my dad, like, I'm not going to do it. He was constantly threatening me with I'm going to send them to jail they hurt me, I'm going to make sure they never graduate. I'm going to get them to kill themselves.
I'm sure you know about this as well. It's coerce of control. This is coercive control, fear, intimidation, isolation, menace, manipulation, financial abuse, interruption of professional development, threatening harm to people you care about, and the only way to stop that harm is by giving into their requests. That's coersive control. That's what you are surviving. And I think that the piece people don't understand about course of control. It is
as if not more insidious than physical violence. Physical violence is actually much more obvious in your face, and there's often bruises coercive control. Only recently felicia has been recognized as a form of emotional violence. And even then it's not a criminal violation. And as he mentally breaks you down and plays back your own voice saying that it is, there's the audio clip, and then you almost realize that I don't have a leg to stand on.
The real kicker is that he recorded it to show it to the authorities. Yeah, that was his intention. He would threaten, Now I can show the government. Now I can take this to the FBI and show them how hurtful you've been to me, and you're gonna go to jail, and this is how I'm gonna get you put away for life. Yep. And so that's.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it complete.
I mean it is again that's the arrogance.
Yes, he was so arrogant that he really thought that recording these things was proving the harm that was being done to him, when it was really capturing him hurting us, which is and in the irony is just so so great.
I think that the other thing is that self victim put he was perpetually a victim in the means of his manipulation. And I will say just a sort of
a sidebar about the backpack. We were chuckling about the backpack, but now in the greater schematic of who Larry is carrying a backpack full of tens of thousands of dollars or you're saying even hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, right, means that if some of it goes missing, it's believable, right, if you've a strange prop this backpack filled with cash. Actually it became a tool for him to continue this extorative approach to money is missing. I mean, you don't
know how much money was in there. So he's like, listen, there was this many thousands of dollars before. Now there's only this much. You were the only one in the room with it. And he's been doing this stuff to you all along. It's not like that came out of the blue. I think that all of these, every single action he did was intentional. He was a predator in its clearest form, but using all these coercive techniques. So you move to New York, you're on the cusp of
getting your medical license. What happens with the whole taking the exam and getting that license to practice.
I'm kidding, I still haven't taken my exam. When it's twenty twenty, I'm nowhere closer to going back to being a doctor right now. I come back from New York. He sends a man, an armed man who he claims was a former federal agent, to come get me from my apartment and fly back with me to New York. He never leaves my side for months, actually, and I'm so distraught. He tries to get me to ask my
parents for money. So by the time we actually move into the apartment, because that first month, we were staying at my parents' house. Actually, who was wee? Larry and I?
You were living at your parents' house?
Yeah, yeah, because that first month that I came back from California, I was so upset. I mean I was really just a mess.
Yeah, you know, you were scared. You were scared.
I was terrified, so that Larry thought it would be better if he stayed with me at my parents' house.
What is your parents think of him?
I mean they were thankful that there was somebody helping me because the way that he presented, you know, what had happened to me that I was something horrible happened to me in California. They were just happy that somebody was helping their daughter, right, and that had taken her out of the situation.
Did you feel like Larry was using this month to start grooming your parents?
Oh? Yeah, he vilified my father, and then my mother was good until he couldn't break her, and then she turned bad in his narrative.
Oh, she turned bad in Larry's narrative.
In Larry's narrative, So what he was trying to get us to think about or believe it was like, your dad is the bad one, your mom is a good one, and like, let's try to help your mom leave your dad. And when he couldn't get to my mom, then it's both of them are bad. You need to just walk away from him.
So you know what's interesting is that your parents were able to be resistant to that. We wonder, like, why don't some people get fully sucked in? Right?
And it can be any number of things.
You were there for a month, he gets to know your parents, whatever sort of grooming process he was doing, trying to split them apart. Again, if he can triangulate like that, he would have had a lot more power in that system. Whatever he tried to do didn't work. So again always the dangling, multiple strategies, multiple hooks in the water. Now he realizes the strategy is, let's isolate her from them.
They're not gettable.
But being in their house for a month also let him know what kinds of resources they had, so if there was going to be a financial shakedown, he was well aware of what the house was worth, or did they own their home, or did cars or whatever, you know, fungible assets they had that he knew that It's always working some angle right.
Absolutely, yes, I'm certain that that's a huge part of what he was doing, that he wanted to profile, you know, living in their house, then he could profile them better. But I tried to go to the hospital, like tried to check myself in to the psych ward because I knew I wasn't okay. I knew something was really wrong. And I try to sneak away with my dad while he's sleeping, and he calls me right when I'm about to go in, and I turned around and like my future was over. I felt like I had to turn
around and go back. Like once he woke up and I heard his voice, it was over for me. It didn't stop being bad, like since the moment I got back to New York and I didn't move to New York. I left with a backpack. I wasn't intending to just leave my job or you know, just like run away with my boyfriend. Like that is not my personality type, that is not my profile. I don't do that kind of thing. You said, he tripled down. He like quadrupled like quintupled down on what he was doing to me.
He wouldn't leave me alone. I wasn't allowed to be alone. I wasn't allowed to go outside by myself. Someone else always had to go with me. Mind you, I am a thirty year old doctor and I need a college student to go with me across the street to get a bottle of water. And actually, sorry, this is one
of the worst things that happened. Within the month of me getting back to New York, he decides he needs to go visit a business partner in Washington, DC, and he doesn't have a license because he can't get his act together and actually get a new driver's license. I think that was very intentional, right, so you would always have someone driving him. But either way, I was the one who had to drive us to Washington, and the whole way down he was yelling at me, calling me names.
He even hit me in the head, like punched me in the head while I was driving. He called my brother to get my brother to say he wanted me to die, that my brother wanted me to die. He started a whole fight, and within a few days of us being in Washington, I tried to kill myself. I'm so sorry I overdosed on Tyler Knoll and he made
me feel so guilty. He made me feel like such a bad person for everything that I had quote done to him, stealing from him, cheating on him, that my family it was all a bunch of criminals that everyone was trying to kill Larry and you know, and they're my family, and that makes me a bad person. I mean, he laid it on every which way that he could. And yeah, I mean I ended up overdosing. I thankfully, once I started getting toxic, I changed my mind, but it was too late, right kind of had a like,
oh my god, I don't want to die. Thankfully, the police find me and then they take me to the hospital. But what made that whole experience even worse was So he talks to the psychiatrist, He talks to the residents, and he tells them a whole story about why I had the suicide chempt. It was about my mother and me hating my mom. And then he talks to the
attending and then decides. He says, well, this is going to ruin your career, he tells me, and I'm in the hospital like just recovering, I'll never be a doctor again if you stay here. We need to get you out of the hospital. So we leave, and then he holds this whole episode over my head for the rest of the time.
What does that look like holding it over your head?
So he would say if I tried to go back to work and he didn't approve of whatever I was doing, that he would report me to the medical board, that he make me lose my license, that he would get me blacklisted.
Essentially, it's more of the coercive control.
Once again, when you were in the hospital, was he talking to the medical professionals there.
Yes, all of them. He talked to the residents, the er doctors, the psychiatrists, the head psychiatrist, the head of the department, the nurses, everyone, and he charmed everyone. Yeah, and then he told them that I feel so bad for her. She has a really horrible childhood and she has abusive parents, and she's angry yet her mom, you know. And he paints his picture and I'm there lying in bed trying to just get my wits about me after having like almost died.
It's kind of terrifying to me because this was recent. This didn't happened twenty thirty years ago. You and I both know if a woman is coming in this kind of reaction with a partner, one of the hypotheses that should be ruled out is domestic abuse. I see charming. I immediately say, Okay, we might have a real problem here. I really literally do it, rather than oh, how charming
and helpful. That one of their differentials and hypotheses could very well have been relational abuse, and that there should have been the attempt to bring in other stakeholders.
And all of that.
I really want listeners to understand what you were up against. This person was so skilled in his psychopathy that he was tricking people who really should have known better.
Yes, absolutely, yeah, on a regular basis, it was without fail Like if Larry said he was going to a meeting. You knew that he was going to come out of their winning, and then people are like, well, why didn't you just leave? Why didn't you just walk away? How like how was I going to do that? How like? In what world was that going to be possible?
You know, there are very few absolutes to me in the world of mental health. I'll tell you one absolute is you never ever ever ask a person why didn't you leave?
We know why people don't leave.
You are completely alone. You are in a psychiatric hospital in a city you don't live in, several hundred miles away from the city you do live in, and thousands of miles away from the city that is your new home, having a very very acute psychiatric stress reaction to what you're being subjected to, and the world keeps falling from for it. You've been fully isolated from everyone.
You are alone, Yeah, absolutely, completely alone, utterly like, well, who else? The only person left was Larry. He was the only one correct. The world burned down, you know, he burns down the world and you're the only one there to pick you up.
And I'm glad you put it. It's not the world burned in Berlin. He burned the world down, and then he said, and look at you. I saved you from the burning world. And that's the horror of this. And this is the way this dynamic shows up every single time. Yes, this is more than usual, but at the same time, this is all happening. You're still living with the fear from California. You've driven him down to Washington. You're horrifically abused during that drive you have I would be an
expectable reaction to all that's happening. How's your relationship at this point? And as you come back to New York with your brother and sister, are you all living in that apartment together with you know, your siblings and the people Larry.
So when we come back, Santos and my sister are not living at the apartment. They've been spending a lot of time there, but the only people who were actually living there were Isabella and Daniel. Okay, but I was seeing my brother and my sister a lot. But our relationship was already getting very straight, and it was really at the whims of Larry, like if we were doing well or if we were not doing well, Like if Larry said that everything was good and life is happy,
then everyone is happy. If Larry says that Sanchos is trying to kill you and he hates you, then we're not talking to him, right. And it was absolutely Larry's playground, whatever he wanted, whatever he thought of, that's what would happen. Yeah, I had no say or control and what was going on around me.
You didn't.
And you were all pieces on a chessboard, right. He was playing a game. He was moving the pieces around strategically as he saw fit.
And you really had.
Had your choice and your free will in many ways completely taken away in this situation. That's what coercive control does. So Isabella is living in that apartment. Can you talk to us about Isabella, the role she played in this, and more importantly, how that affected you.
So Isabella is Talia's best friend from Sarah Lawrence. Isabella is the first person that Talia asks Larry to help. When Larry gets out of prison. He spends countless hours with her. One of their first conversations, or very early on, he MESSU spent between seventeen and twenty hours with her in a conversation. And I think she's nineteen at this point.
Yeah, that's not a conversation.
No, that's not a conversation. So eventually he ends up sleeping in her room and they start a relationship that they hide from everyone, including me. By the time I got to New York, Isabella was living in the apartment with Larry and with Daniel. Isabella and Larry slept together in the bedroom. He tried to tell everyone that he was quote helping her with her issues and she couldn't sleep by herself, that she would have night terrors and had all of these issues. That's not what was happening.
And when I got there, I was coming back from Washington, DC after having tried to kill myself. When we go to go to sleep, he wants us all naked. He wants us all sleeping naked, and He's like no, and Isabella likes sleeping naked, like that's what she prefers. I was like, what where am I? But I'm not to say anything right or to do anything. And yeah, we would each sleep on one side and is involved with
sleep with her hand on his generals. Sometimes I would wake up to her performing oral sex on Larry and mind you, Okay, I'm going to take just a little bit more context. I've never had sex with Larry, so he was my boyfriend. It was very platonic the whole time.
The whole relationship, even from beginning to end.
Never from beginning to end.
Thank you for clarifying that.
So never, like never, in all of the years that I was with him, I never had relations with him. There were times he had me try to like perform some oral sex on him, but I was so hurt that I just I was not capable of doing anything sexual, so that he would just give up and he's like, he was like, you suck at it, so like I'm just gonna go get Isabella.
You know, a context is so important here because the depiction, frankly, is that you were his girlfriend, which would have then implied you were in a sexually intimate relationship.
Any any sexual.
Relationship you would have had, which I think many people assumed you did, would not have been consensual.
Right.
You were in a coercively controlled relationship. Sex is not consensual, it can't be. What was happening was he wasn't forcing you into sexual acts. Instead, he was weaponizing it in a different way. He was using it as a place of degradation and humiliation and triangulation. But You've also given us tremendous context here, because this wasn't operating like a normal intimate relationship by any stretch of the imagination in any way.
Absolutely not. No, he did totally weaponize it within the relationship because he said, no, if I have sex with you, it'll mess up your mind, and I want you thinking clearly. I want you to be more effective. You need to go have sex with all of these strangers and record it and to break free, to become a liberated woman
right before I can have sex with you. So I mean there were times that I did actually end up doing that, because he sent Isabella to supervise and to make sure that I did, and to make sure that it was recorded, so he would have me having sex with strangers. From what I can remember, there are still lots of blanks in my memory. It didn't happen very often.
I resisted regularly, and I think because of who I am, even in the traumatized state that I was in, him saying you need to go have sex with all these people before I can have sex with you, that was an incentive to me. I was like, okay, so that I'm not going to have sex with all those people, and I'm not going to have sex with you. But he did make me feel ugly, undesirable, unwanted, not lovable,
try to have competition with Isabella. Oh she's sexy, Oh she's young, Oh she's naked, she likes to walk around scantily clad, And why don't you do that? Why don't you do your makeup? It took a couple of years for me to get a little bit of my mind back. I figured out that that's what he was doing, so I just did the opposite. So I didn't take care of my hair, I didn't wear makeup. I dress in baggy clothes and sweatpants and sweatshirts all day. I didn't
look feminine. I didn't want to look attractive because if I looked attractive, then he would try to send me out to have sex with people, and then he would try to make the competition with Isabella, and I just didn't even want to engage. That was a way I think of my mind in survival mode, trying to protect me from more hurt.
But what's fascinating, though, Felicia, is that means that a lot of his tactics aren't working right, because if this went down as one would think it would. This would have fostered a tremendous jealousy of you towards Isabella, because you perceive yourself as being in a relationship with him. But instead, what I'm hearing is that you actually didn't
want to have sex with him. You were almost trying to sexualize yourself in any way, So you were not sent on these sorts of you know, coerced missions to go out there and be videotape having sexual relations to give him collateral, and you were disengaged, yet you were also stuck. You didn't feel you could leave, but you also weren't engaged in this relationship. Because of this, my question becomes was there any fear if Larry left it
would be terrible for you? Like was he ever threatening abandonment or putting you out or.
Oh yeahs like the end goal of our relationship that was the carot, So like me going back to work and being a full doctor and being successful and helping people, and then him doing something being successful in business and us being like a power couple. That was the fantasy that we were working towards. And then he would say, but we just have to do this one thing and we just have to get through this one, right. That was one context, and then he was like, let's help
Isabella together. He would say, you know, if we were doing something, it would be for her sake. So he was trying to foster competition. But I leaned into the compassion for Isabella more and I was wanting to see
her get better. I wasn't actually jealous, but he did try to foster competition, competition, but he set me up for failure constantly, so you know, if there was a task, he would give me something like basically impossible to do, or even if I accomplished it, he would say, well, Isabella would do it better.
So she was a golden child.
But I did care very much for him, and I tried to hang on to the Larry I met at the beginning, you know, the facade, but I didn't think it was a facade. I thought he was just I didn't even know what was going on. But I was trying to hang on to the idea of the Larry that I had.
Met right right, right.
So I was very attached to that Larry. And then he isolated me from everyone right, so effectively he was the only person in my life. He was the only one who was going to take care of me. He blocked all the doors, and so even if I didn't want to be there, I was physically, financially, emotionally, mentally attached to him. Right.
Those are the coors of control dynamics. What is so important here, though, is that this person and you met at the beginning of the relationship, right whoever this was, what he represented was being present and seeing you and supporting you. When you're having a shoulder such a heavy burden and somebody even takes one thing off, it can create an almost instantaneous bond what I'd call sort of
an over gratitude. Right, you're just living with no support, and one person even does something as I know, no gentle as doing the dishes in the sink, You're gonna be almost, you know, like overfawning.
Like, oh my god, you did my dishes.
And it's too much like they did the dishes, like they didn't, you know, cure your incurable illness or something. But that what he did, and this what he didn't wasn't insignificant like doing dishes. He actually got in there and helped your brother, helped your sister. Parents liked him, all that stuff happened in the beginning, but he lightened your load. That's who you wanted back. And what I'm not hearing is that it was romanticized and it didn't
turn into a sexual relationship. I mean, sex was weaponized in this space, but not in the way we traditionally think.
But there's this other thing.
Too, he would say, once we get through this one thing, once we get through this one thing, there's that future faking. There's not a relationship like this where we have never not talked about future faking. After this, after this, after this, because, like you said, the buy in for you, interestingly, was you getting to that professional endgame. Your original identity I want to succeed professionally was always operating.
He was playing on that.
But the idea of him leaving you was terrifying because you had become so dependent on him, which is every coercively controlled relationship. This is why people need to understand coercive control. This is why people don't leave. Coercive control is like having one hundred chains locking you to one hundred locks, even when the room is full of doors. And that's what people don't understand.
So some of that context of that was he's threatening to leave me, but then he says, if I leave you, I'm going to get you arrested and you're gonna sit in county jail, and I know one's going to come help you. If you try to go get help at the psychiatric hospital, I will never go visit you. I will never see you, I will never talk to you again. So what are the options? If I leave, he will
get me arrested. If I try to go to the hospital, he'll never talk to me again, and also sue me and try to get me arrested after I get out of the hospital. So just it's what you're saying, all of the chains and all of the locks, and like, okay, so what am I supposed to do?
There's nothing you can do.
Your suck, right, He's the only one who can quote fix all of this, or at least that's what I thought at the time.
Well, I mean, you would have become a doctor without him. All of the work you had done for years in high school, university, medical school, all of that you did that without him. What he did in how he manipulated you in the relationship was he convinced you that you needed him, And that's where you got stuck. Some of the sequences in the documentary that really I found heartbreaking was you were like digging ditches for drainage and overseeing
all of these sorts of menial labor tasks. Are you able to think back to that time when you were doing what I can only call is physical labor.
Oh? Yes, he says, Let's go help Gordon, his stepdad. Let's go help fix up his house. He's gonna really like it, and he's elderly and he's been having a hard time. Let's go help him. So we're going back and forth from North Carolina and we stay there for
months at a time. There was so much of that time either one I don't remember or two I was incoherent, Like there was a lot of that time that I mean, I remember a little bit of just walking that I would spend all day walking around, like singing little songs like I used to say, I love you, Larry, I want to get married, because that was one of the things I would appease him. I regress significantly while I
was there doing that physical labor. Parts of me were still present, like the analytical part of me, but in a weird way, in a backwards way. The yard work gave me purpose because at that point he had taken away everything else that was a meaning to me. I couldn't be a doctor. I didn't have my family, my friends, I couldn't work, I couldn't do anything that I wanted,
anything that mattered to me. So it gave me something to do, something to apply myself to, Like I would rather lay down sod multiple times a day, day and night than go out to Walmart to try to have That's.
What somebody, yeah, with the spectrum of survival strategies, you know, it's because that's all this was, right. It's survival is that you were a It speaks to how much you know human activity matters to us. Right to be able to do something that still mattered to you. And so in that task, you were still trying to find some meaning, some purpose, some focus. But you said you didn't have your family.
What do you mean right, Because by then there was already the narrative that my parents were trying to get my brother and my sister to try to kill me and Larry and Talia. So I didn't feel safe with my family.
At that point. Still talking with them, I guess I.
Was minimally talking to them, because at that point I didn't even have a phone anymore. You had smashed the phone the hammer, and I was in North Carolina. My family was all in New.
York, including your siblings. Your siblings didn't come to North Carolina.
They came periodically. Got it one of his projects while we were in North Carolina to really pit us against each So he made chaos, that's the best way to put it. He just created this web of chaos for everyone around. There was no sense of stability.
It was all very very carefully orchestrated. But at some point, your brother does decide to leave the dynamic with Larry, does your sister do the same?
Yes, So my brother leaves runs away in December of twenty fifteen. And then my sister, she had spent significantly less time in the apartment because she was actually still at Columbia. Then at some point she took a year off because school had gone to be too much and we're all carrying a lot of grief and like we had a lot of undealt with family, you know, dynamics that were really difficult for all of us. So she was going through her own journey and then Larry started
to help her. She was getting better, but like you were saying, just he would help somebody get better and then he would throw them right back into the fire. So he had her oscillating and she ended up cycling like in and out of hospitals for a few years. We would go to the hospital. He would say, tell everybody you're a doctor, tell everybody you're a psychiatrist. And then he wanted my sister discharged us, and I was like, no way, Like I mean, I didn't want her in
the house because of how we were living. And then separately, there was also this stuff in the background that he was trying to instill in me, that she was trying to kill me, that she was trying to hurt me. So I was like, no, I don't want her to come home with us. So the last time I saw her was in twenty sixteen, after she had graduated from Columbia. Something else that we don't really talk about, this ordeal with Larry is just like a giant onion that they're
just all of these layers of abuse. Once you start peeling them back, it's just like it just like never ending.
But he got all of us suicidal and you know, I know this is a sensitive topic, but this is one of the things that I get very emotional about it, and I'm very passionate about it because this makes him that much more evil because he literally did play with our lives, and so when he would say I'm going to get you to kill yourself, like he wasn't kidding, very certain that if he hadn't been around, none of us would have had any And that makes him so
much more evil. He wasn't just trying to like, you know, destroy a reputation or destroy you financially, or even like physical abuse. No, if like he wanted you to die, he would tell us, He's like, it would be so great if the two of you just held hands and just open that window over there. We were on the fifteenth floor. She just opened that window and jumped. That would make me so happy if the two of you did that.
We will be right back with this conversation.
We did actually end up having suicide attempts, and some of them very severe. You know, my sister almost died many times. Thankful that she was able to get away and leave.
It is a miracle all of you survived. It really is the hopelessness that people feel and coercively controlling, exploitative relationships, it is not unusual for a person to end their life. And here's the thing, Felicia. The way we collect statistics, we registered the loss of life. Sometimes it's even not recorded as a suicide, accidental this or something like that. But even when it's recorded as death by suicide, what
we don't look at is what the contributors were. And generally we view it as some sort of internal phenomenon. The person was depressed, the person was stressed, the person was going through something. But where we don't trace the line out to was what was happening in their life.
And when I have talked with advocates who have work with people going through coercively controlling relationships, especially within the context when these are marital relationships and it's a complex divorce and the children and all of that, And these advocates have told me the number of people they see whose lives are ending, and they know it really directly tracks back. But we're not getting those statistics that way,
so we're not talking about it. In the case of Larry Rays, with one person, I couldn't agree with you more in a way, this is a form of committing murder right, and it's a way of committing murder that he will get away with because this coerced suicide to me.
Is a murder. It is.
It's a homicide as far as I'm concerned. But no way, no court in any land would ever see that. They would see someone, Oh they're having a mental illness, they're having this, they overdose whatever, and they would make it
about that. But when we miss that, we miss a much larger public health issue here, that when you get to this level psychopathy, manipulation, coercion in a relationship, that things can get to this point where a person is so in the survival mindset that you can be coerced to that point or in sync with that is the absolute hopelessness. You are screaming out loud and no one
can hear the scream coming out of your mouth. Therapists aren't identifying it, law enforcement isn't identifying it, domestic violence isn't recognizing it. No one is recognizing this. And so your sister, Yolyzia gets out, Santos gets out. Felicia though it is sort of still in this web with him. I fully understand this. I'm not even looking at you, perplexed at all. You were there and we were there when the FBI raided the house. Can you talk about what your experience of that was.
So when the FBI raided the house, I was terrified. They stormed the house like five or six in the morning, It was pitch dark. There were two dozen agents like surrounding the house, and then they shuttled me off back to my room and I didn't get to see Larry again until maybe like midday when they finally took him out. So after five six hours of being interviewed by the agents and the police, then they took him away in handcuffs, and that was the last time I actually saw him.
And I was terrified because while they were asking me questions, like he always threatened us with the police. He always threatened us with the FBI. So it was like, you can't lie to the police. It's a federal offense. You know. That fear was very well instilled in me. So when they came and they were asking me questions about what had happened, I'm like, well, I can't lie to them. I'm going to go to jail if I lie. So then I answered honestly and I was terrified because I
was afraid of what Larry was going to do. I was still afraid of what he was going to do, even though they were already there and had got him, and I was afraid of what was going to happen. Now I see it now, I'm just like, this was one of the greatest days, of course, of my life.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're not going to know that at the time.
No, Yeah, absolutely, I was terrified. And then after they left, Isabella comes to me, She's like, did you tell them, Like, did you say anything? I was like no, because then I was afraid of Isabella because Isabella was a mini Larry. Yes, by that point, she was just really bad.
When Larry was first arrested, did you feel the need to defend him, Yes.
I still thought that he was going to win or prevail, because that's what he would talk about. But I was afraid of what he would do if I turned on him on the outside. And I was afraid of Isabella.
Okay, I was.
Afraid of his family because also at that point, since I didn't have a family, My family was Isabella was Talia, was Gordon, and Poppy his biological dad. If I said anything negative about Larry. Then I was bad I would be perceived as the enemy. So yeah, I did feel the need to defend him and to try to be helpful.
The other part of me, though, was acknowledging reality, like I knew that my life was horrible with him, and then when the article came out, that was a big shock and that shook everything up and that really got things moving. But he wanted us all to help him fight the article, to get him a defamation lawyer to write into the magazine and say this is all lies, and you know, kind of do to like testimonial type stuff to try to, you know, speak on his behalf.
But then I was sitting there, I'm like, well, what am I going to say? Has Larry actually been good for me? No? Like, I'm not working, I've had multiple suicide attempts, I have no family, no friends, Like I'm nowhere close to where I wanted to be in life. When I read the article, I was like, Wow, they did a good job. All the stories with Daniel that was there for them, Like I knew that they were true,
and Larry was trying to say that they weren't. So I was conflicted because I'm supposed to be on his side, but it's true what he did to everyone. As I had more time away from him, I was able to see more.
You have This arrest happened and also gives us some clarity on Isabella. She was treated differently and she was also a perpetrator within the system. It's very, very, very complicated. So you did ultimately cut ties though with Isabella. How did that go down.
When the raid happened. I was completely and utterly dependent on Larry. So once Larry was gone, I had no job, I had no source of income, I had no one to turn to, and I had to start figuring out life, how to fend for myself after not having been allowed
to do that for eight years. Thankfully, my brother had come back around and he helped me to some degree financially, which was just I didn't even want to take it at first because I was so scared, because I was still dealing with the Larry brain of being afraid of everyone but Isabella. I was really trying to move forward, and I was really trying to get a job. I mean I couldn't get a regular job like in an office. Then the pandemic happened, all I could get was working
for Instacart and doing DoorDash. That's all I could do to support myself. And she would make fun of me, and she actually even made fun of me for trying to go work at Amazon. But I was really trying to actually move forward. And I think because she knew she had done all of these horrible things that she was going to be indicted soon, but she just didn't know when. But she didn't say that to me at the time. She was really mean, she was really abusive.
I started to get space. The pandemic actually really helped me remember who I was and remember my purpose because I was a doctor. Where I am a doctor, but an unlicensed doctor, and there's a global pandemic and I'm sitting at home, like healthy, capable person, but I don't have a license, so I can't help anyone, and people are dying. And it was heartbreaking for me to know that I was trained that I could do something, but
I couldn't. So having that contrast and like just having that world crisis reminded me it's like, wait a minute, I am a doctor, I am capable, I am competent. But then it was like, but wait, you're not and then why are you not because of Larry? And you're not a doctor now because of Larry. So I tried. I went volunteered to the Morgue. I got to work, and I started to talk to other people, you know, because when I went to work at the Morgue, met new people, like made new friends, and I was able
to interact with people outside of Larry. So when Isabella tried to bully me, or I was barely talking to Santos, I didn't know if my sister was alive. I didn't know if my parents were alive. She would yell at me and accuse me of trying to get the police to the house to get her in trouble. And as much as I wanted to be there for her, she made it so that I couldn't because as much as he tried to instill competition and everything like, I still care about her. I lived with her every day for
almost ten years. But it happens with loved ones when going through their own thing, you can't always be the one to help them.
It is quite remarkable that you were able to hold that pathic position on her. How much time elapsed between the raid and his arrest and the actual trial beginning two years. Okay, it's a long time. So in those years, what was your process of healing like?
So in those two years since he got arrested, the first few months were really me still being on team Leary. But then very soon after he got arrested, when we went to meet with the federal defenders that were his lawyers, Marnie was very clear that we each needed our own representation,
So engaging the attorneys was really a turning point. Talking about what happened has been one of the most powerful things that I've done to heal, between the therapists, the lawyers of the documentary, being able to talk about what happened, but not just speak about it. It's the connection. The human contact of being seen and heard, you know, was the complete opposite of what I had been experiencing before.
That did a huge amount for me as far as healing goes, because it reminded me that no, I am a person, I am a human being, and people are safe, people aren't trying to kill me. The world isn't what Larry said it was, and that was incredibly powerful. But also I drove all day for work, and because I was alone all the time, and I was thinking about Larry all the time. I would have imaginary fights with Larry in my head all day, right, and I almost totaled my car many, like over a dozen times, And
it was so scary to me. I was like, I'm literally going to die if I don't deal with this, If I don't figure out what happened and what's going on in my head right now, I'm going to die. So I went all in. I mean, I tried. I looked up as much as I could, I read as much as I could. I was super open with my lawyers and my social worker. But you know, the only way I was going to get better was if I was completely and utterly honest with myself and with whoever
I talked to about what was going on. I wasn't going to get anywhere by telling a lie. As I was coming out of this, I was so ashamed, so embarrassed. How could I let this happen? How could I let this happen to me? Like, I'm so smart, I'm supposed to be so educated, you know, I'm supposed to be a psychiatrist. How could this happen to me? I judge myself so harshly that then the reflex is to try to not feel bad about myself, right and then lie.
But that wasn't going to help me heal at the beginning. You know, when I would meet new people, they would ask me, oh, so, what's your story? And then I would I would have to make up a story, but I would tell the story that I wish my life had been with Larry. Well, you know, I'm a doctor. I'm taking a break because I'm sick, but my husband
is in the military and he's away right now. You know, I would I made up a whole other life, but then I would go home to Isabella, you know, yelling at me, and it's like this isn't going to work. Like I need to stick to the truth because that's the only way out right.
And you know, a lot of what you're describing is really consistent with what we know to be complex trauma, right. I mean a lot of this sounds very dissociated. You know, the sense of you almost getting into the accidents because you were so long and really what were the flashbacks and the rumination about call it rumination about the perpetrator and you know, over focus on that and trying to almost work all of that through and it pulls you
out of your life. And then all of the anxiety and the fear and the loneliness, the isolation, all of this feels like complex trauma. And nobody's going to heal that on their own. There's no chance. And so what you were doing we call that the confabulation, the storytelling around what happened. There's a guy and in a military
and that this and then that. You know, that's still almost like the ongoing echoes of the trauma, bondedness, the kinds of justifications you were having to make while you were in it, because the moment of facing truth would be such a tidal wave of grief, such a tidal wave of loss of recognition that it's so overwhelming that the trauma brain is going to keep it cordant off.
And this is what complex trauma looks like. And it is different than what we call PTSD, different than the assault in the alley or the car accident or the wartime trauma. So the trial happens. Were you involved in the trial, Were you involved in providing testimony?
Yeah, I testify in the trial. And it was so powerful, it was so liberating. Sure, it just felt like a huge weight off my shoulders, and it didn't even matter what happened. Afterwards, I felt like I got to tell the truth, and I got to tell other people what happened, and then they believed me. I lived for years, sure and actually seeing people not believe me. Yeah, when I
would try to say something about him. But then when I finally got to tell the truth and people believing me, that was incredible.
But you also said, you know, the interesting thing about Larry Rays he was always obsessed with this idea of truth.
Truth.
I'm all about the truth, you know, And I think that obsession was it was really what he was obsessed with, wasn't the truth. He was obsessed with being able to manufacture truth. That was the obsession for him. Other people would buy that. But in this space of the courtroom, your truth was heard, it was validated, and it was integrated into the proceedings. That in and of itself is a healing process to have your truth heard and seen.
So at the end of this trial, he sentenced to sixty years and that's that he will die in prison.
And what did that feel like for you?
I sobbed tears of joy. Yeah, I was so relieved. I really felt like the judge got it. Yes, he completely understood the case. He understood all of the dynamics, you know, really what were the underlying factors that contributed to all of this. He really understood the scope. I mean, I was so impressed with Judge Lyman, and I felt represented and heard and validated through the process and especially with his sentence.
So I agree with you, and I read his take on it.
He got it, like, he really did get the nuance, the depth harm that this man had created, and the need for him to be kept out of the public in perpetuity because he would have perpetrated the minute he was back literally the minute, the day, the second that he would have been right back out there as this process unfolded.
Were you able to reunite with your family.
Yes, I reunited with my family before the trial started. We did our best to support each other while we were preparing for the trial, but we couldn't talk about I see the elephant in the room.
Because you were told you couldn't.
Yes, we were instructed not to. But you know, after the trial we were able to finally speak. And it's been really very very therapeutic, very healing to be able to talk openly about what had happened, what we were thinking at the time, how you were feeling, and really to be able to validate each other's feelings and fears. And it's like, oh, you were thinking that. I was thinking that too, but I couldn't say anything, And yeah, he's crazy. This was really horrible. It was awful that
this happened to us. But we're all so glad that we were able to get out. I didn't get out. I was taken out by the government, but then I mean I did leave, Yeah, you know, willfully in the end. But yeah, I mean, there's still a lot of processing to be done because this happened for many years, and all of us were hurt in different ways, and he was very exacting about how he perpetrated the harm and
very specific. So everyone has their own harm and we're doing our best to support each other as we heal.
It's a process. It will always be a process as a nature of complex trauma. Many years did this unfold?
It would have been twelve years.
Wow, it's a very very long time, and thus it's a long process of healing. What was it like reuniting with your mom?
Oh my god, it was so blissful is the first word that comes to mind. I just felt so safe and happy and love. I just felt a lot of love. And I was so afraid that she wouldn't talk to me, or that she was mad, and she was upset that she didn't want to talk to me, that she didn't want to deal with me, And then when she was, it's like one of the happiest moments in my life, like being able to see her.
It must have been remarkable. How long had it been since you'd spoken with her?
Seven years?
Seven years? It's a long time. It's a long long time. And if you were to say what has been most useful or most impactful in your own process of healing in these last few years, what would you say those things were?
I would say communicating, writing and speaking, restarting that conversation with myself which I didn't have while I was with Larry, and starting to get to know myself first, and then connecting with other people. And I know it's so scary to be vulnerable, it's so scary to share, but really that's where the healing is. We are who we are because of our connections, and we're people because of our connections. We wouldn't be able to live or survive without each other.
And Larry was very intentional about isolating everyone and also being very withholding of love, so being willing to connect with others and to share and having a safe space to share, having people who are not judgmental and open and holding space. Those are critical. I'm a totally different person.
It's striking to me to watch the documentary, like it feels like an out of body experience where I'm seeing someone and I'm seeing someone else be abused, Like it's not me that it's happening too, because I'm present now whereas before I wasn't, and I'm much further along. I think then people expect me to be given how soon this was, But I attribute that to all of the
support around me. I have a friend that I was able to reconnect with and she actually told me she changed her parenting style because of what happened to me. She has a young child that she had a very different attitude about what she was going to teach her given what happened with Larry. For me, it's like, Okay, well, how do I make this not happen? How do I
help my child not be in this situation. So I think that's really important for me now actually to get people to understand that, you know that it is about knowing yourself, and it is about being self aware and being self assured enough to be like, I know that this is me, even if he's saying that I'm not telling the truth. And you actually just reminded me of the other thing that helped me. It was accepting that I can make mistakes, yes, and that I can be wrong.
Some of this for me, at least was not preventable, right, but at once I was in far enough. You know, he laid in so much shame, so much guilt, and then I was too embarrassed to reach out to anybody and tell them, hey, this is happening. And that's stopped me from getting help correct. And I know that especially people who are high achieving and have it together but do end up in situations in coercive relationships, they don't
seek help because they're like, well, I know better. I made my bed, so I need to lie in it. No you don't.
No, you can get up, you can get out of the bed.
I can go get a new one.
Well, I think that's it. And shame is a prison. Shame is an absolute prison. I can't thank you enough for an absolutely incredible conversation. You just gave us the untold story of this whole Sarah Lawrence cult, because we've gotten more context from you today, and I'm so glad we gave it because Felicia, your story was so powerful.
Any survivor who's been through a relationship that was coercively controlling, a really malevolent, malignant and predatory will say, now I see even those things like what were the things that made him attractive, we're actually things that we'd expect anyone to find attractive if they were in your circumstance. We're really about breaking down shame and'sma here and I think the way you shared your story, we're just hearing so much of this for the very first time. So thank
you so much for being so open. Thank you so much for sharing. And it's not easy to talk about, so I'm incredibly grateful to you for being willing to share that.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
That was our absolute pleasure and honor. Here are my takeaways from my conversation with Felicia. First, there was a relentless quality to Larry Ray's abuse wearing down his targets until they were making things up to appease him, and he would then use those coerced disclosures to call Felicia and others liars. In abusive relationships, people will often give in just to end the ongoing abuse. There is one
truth in these relationships. You simply cannot win. Either you hold your ground and keep getting broken down, or you give in and are accused of lying or worse, it is an eternal catch twenty two. There is only one agenda in these relationships, and that is to maintain a delusional version of reality and for the perpetrator to suck everyone else into it. In our next takeaway, listening to Felicia, we are reminded that there are a lot of folks
out there who were psychopath goggles. Felicia shared that more than once, Larry was able to ingratiate himself into what should be confidential spaces like psychiatric hospitals and fall into what she was describing as almost collegial banter with the other physicians, despite having absolutely no medical background whatsoever. These psychopath goggles also mean that people may miss some important assessment opportunities, such as exploring whether there were relationship abuse
issues raised by the situation. Maybe it's my personal bias, but when someone rolls in and is very authoritative and overly confident, I become suspicious. For this next takeaway, a major theme that resonated throughout Felicia's story was this idea that a perpetrator in a coercively controlling relationship will break someone down to rescue them. This dynamic repeated throughout their relationship. He would break her down, and then he would soothe her.
He told her that people were going to harm her, and then he told her that the solution was to leave her life in Los Angeles and move to New York.
Where he could protect her.
The abuse rescue cycle is a horrific dynamic that can result in the psychological imprisonment of a person in this type of situation. In this next takeaway way, numerous themes of coercive control arose throughout Felicia's experience. Isolation, menace, financial dependency, threats to her family, threatened and destroyed livelihood, and sexual manipulation. Her independence was slowly eroded, and her professional identity and
training were blocked. In a coercively controlled relationship, free will is stolen. This links to the concept of bounded choice that doctor Yanya shared on a previous episode. At one point, Felicia shares that her choices were to either do manual labor or give in to coercive sexual demands. Other choices, such as going back to her career, are effectively stolen under conditions of coercive control. And lastly, Felicia's path of healing after Larry Ray's arrest shows us the slow process
of healing from psychopathic and coercively controlled relationships. She went through a process of still feeling supportive of Larry after his arrest. However, when she finally was pulled away from the system and from Isabella and had her own attorney, she saw that as a turning point, although it took a long time, during which she still struggled with rumination
and playing out conversations in her mind. Significant steps in this process included radical acceptance of the situation and recognizing her rock bottom, talking about what happened with her therapist, attorneys, and the director of the Stolen Youth documentary, being seen and heard, and having the support of people close to her. She acknowledged that she was stuck for a while and that healing remains an ongoing process for her