He said, "Come have some pasta," and that's hard to say no to and is innocuous. We were on the meal plan, eating the not very good college food, and he showed up and was buying us fancy takeout. In my experience, this is my friend's dad who just showed up at our dorm. But nobody says, "Oh, this is a cult and I can't wait to get involved." They join a group of friends or they join a self-help group or whatever it is. You don't get into them because you think, "I would like to be tormented and abused." How did it start for you, where you became drawn in with this person? What this book illuminates so clearly to people who have not been in what we would characterize as cults, or in abusive relationships, is they don't start out abusive. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course. The thing on the other side of the scale that outweighs everything is, he was the person who was hurting me and I didn't deserve that. If you spend your energy trying to figure out who your abuser is or if they're a good person, you're not leaving. The process of trying to answer that question, to arrive at a clear definitive answer to who is this man, or even what are his intentions, was for me kind of a trap. Bush and Gorbachev and they looked like pals, so there were all those things. He had shown me photos of himself with George H. He was a father, he was supposedly a Marine, he was supposedly an intelligence officer. There were a lot of answers, and it was unclear to me where those answers were coming from and what was real and what wasn't. I will say that for a lot of the time that I was in his presence, that I was actively being tortured even, in those moments, I was asking myself that question. When you think about him now, how would you answer the question "who is Larry Ray?" You talk about this man who was such a skillful manipulator and storyteller and disruptor of reality. Then also even further, it's kind of an attempt to trust other people, just to give people my story and hope that they will believe me. I'm staking my flag in my own credibility, and I'm saying I trust myself. I spent a year writing this, and every day of writing it I had to make the claim that my account matters and is valid. Writing was not only about telling my story as I remember it and believe it. The man who abused me was such a talented storyteller that he could convince you that something that wasn't real was real. I had gone through an experience that seems explicitly designed around telling a new story for me about who I was and what my memories even were. The process of writing the book did a few things for me. It takes a lot of courage to make yourself vulnerable again, to relive that experience writing about it. Salon spoke to Barban Levin recently via Zoom about writing his way to a new narrative, when he knew he had to walk away, why nobody sets out to join a cult - and what really happened at Slonim Woods 9, the name of a dormitory on Sarah Lawrence's campus from which Barban Levin took his memoir title.Īs always, our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. It's also one of hard-won survival, and creating a life after the unimaginable. It's an intense tale of coercion, humiliation, gaslighting and physical torment. It was instead an object lesson in the life cycle of an harmful relationship, and how vulnerable anyone can become.The story led to a development deal from Amazon, and an indictment for sex trafficking and extortion for the man at the center of it, Larry Ray.Īnd now, one of the former members of the group, Daniel Barban Levin, has written his account of what went on during those tumultuous, painful years of his young adulthood. The story - of a charismatic, just-released-from-prison parent who reportedly manipulated, blackmailed, abused and ultimately divided a group of friends - seemed like a tabloid-ready tale. Walsh published "The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence" in New York magazine in 2019, an immediate flurry of attention followed. What do you think of when you see the word "cult"? A bunch of Manson girls wending their way toward Cielo drive? A Peoples Temple flock forced into suicide in Jonestown? What you probably don't think of is a bunch of kids from a prestigious liberal arts college being manipulated by the dad of a fellow student.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |