A Sarah Lawrence grad sobbed as she was jailed for four-and-a-half years for helping a notorious cult leader sex traffic her fellow students while she enjoyed luxurious hotels and lingerie.
Isabella Pollok, 31, spent nearly a decade helping sex traffic young women with cult leader Larry Ray – and used money gleaned from prostituting them to buy designer lingerie and stay at Manhattan’s five-star Pierre Hotel.
During Wednesday’s sentencing, Judge Lewis Liman told Pollock that ‘the crime was an extremely serious one’ that lasted a long time and caused ‘immense harm’ to the victims and involved ‘sadistic’ violence, The New York Times reported.
He also told Pollok that although she was young when she met Ray and acknowledged that she he had been ‘extraordinarily manipulative,’ he said, she always had ‘choices.’ ‘There were moments over the years when you could have walked away or at least shown some mercy,’ the judge said.
He called a ‘significant’ sentence of imprisonment necessary, and his sentence fell just shy of the 5-year maximum available for the madam’s crimes.
Isabella Pollok, 31, leaving the Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday after a judge sentenced her to four-and-a-half years in prison
Pollok spent nearly a decade helping sex traffic young women and spending her days lounging at the ritzy Pierre Hotel. Before her sentencing, she addressed the court: ‘I badly hurt my friends, and I am ashamed and deeply regret it,’ she said during her apology. ‘I am truly sorry’
The sick and twisted photo of sex cult leader Larry Ray wearing a robe from The Pierre
Pollock wept and played the victim just before she was sent to the slammer, claiming she’d been brainwashed and coerced into pimping the victims by Ray.
He was jailed for 60 years last month.
Pollock struggled to speak as she addressed the Manhattan federal courtroom not mentioning Ray by name but said that she had ‘believed and supported someone’ who had controlled her in ways she could not understand.
In September, Pollok pled guilty and admitted to conspiring with Ray to commit money laundering. ‘I will live with the guilt forever. I pled guilty because I am guilty,’ she said. ‘I did what they said I did.’
As a co-conspirator, Pollok’s role was to manage Ray’s finances and enforcing Ray’s rules, which included ‘making and maintaining recordings of false confessions he elicited from followers, then used as leverage to demand payments,’ federal prosecutors said, the Times reported.
‘While collecting money from her abused and trafficked college friends, the defendant was spending luxurious nights at the Pierre Hotel on the Upper East Side and buying expensive clothing, beauty products and high-end lingerie,’ the prosecutors wrote.
Prosecutors spoke about how Pollok helped facilitate the attacks on Ray’s victims, including fetching a hammer that Ray then used to batter one of his victims.
Another victims and former student was Claudia Drury, who had been earning money for them by working as a prostitute.
One night in 2018 at the Gregory Hotel, Drury was tormented by Pollok as Ray made her strip naked, doused her with water and placed a plastic bag over her head for nearly eight hours while threatening to kill her, Law & Crime reported.
Pollok lounged in lingerie at Manhattan’s five star Pierre Hotel, pictured, using cash gleaned from forcing sex trafficking victims into prostitution
The hotel that was opened in the 1930s is known for its grandeur and opulence
Claudia Drury, now 31, was one of the victims of Larry Ray’s sex cult ring
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In April 2022, Ray was convicted of sex trafficking, racketeering and extortion in following a highly publicized trial where prosecutors detailed how he manipulated his daughter’s 20-something roommates after moving in with them in at their campus dormitories in 2010.
Pollok and Ray’s daughter, Talia Ray, were best friends and both were students attending Sarah Lawrence. When Talia asked if her father could live with them following a brief incarceration, the women agreed.
But, instead of simply crashing in their dormitory the sordid tale of betrayal and deceit took place at various hotels and a number of New York City apartments, where Ray targeted the group of women
He used psychological and physical abuse that involved separating them from their families and coercing them into degrading acts, before extorting them for his own gain and, eventually, holding some captive.
The sordid tale and crimes were first exposed in 2019 by New York Magazine’s The Cut. Some of the group remained loyal to him even then, after being cut off from their families by Ray.
Drury, now 31, one of the victims, who spoke during Ray’s trial detailed the sick and twisted way Ray destroyed her lives.
‘His evil withered us. I feel profoundly violated in a way that I cannot fully communicate,’ she said.
But, Drury would later write a letter to the court, asking for ‘leniency’ for Pollok.
‘I do not believe she had a choice in who she became in the hands of Larry Ray,’ Drury wrote in a letter, urging ‘lenience and mercy’ for her former friend,’ Law & Crime reported.
‘I believe that he specifically encouraged, groomed and conditioned callousness and meanness into her personality, while making her not only believe but know, with conviction, that her reactions were the appropriate and kind one.’
Pollok’s lawyers had written to Judge Liman that Pollok deserved ‘a non-jail sentence.’
They wrote that Pollok started Sarah Lawrence as a ‘damaged, lonely’ freshman, becoming first an ‘awed protégé’ of Ray and then a ‘broken automaton.’
They also wrote that Pollok came to the realization that his influence was malign and ‘made tremendous progress toward her own rehabilitation,’ the Times reported.
The campus at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where Ray preyed on victims, and where Pollok studied
During Wednesday’s sentencing, Judge Liman questioned Pollok’s attorney David B. Bertan, who argued that Pollok was a victim of Ray who was ‘brainwashed.’
‘The truth is she is a victim, albeit in a slightly different way,’ Bertan said, who had been referring to the government’s proposed five-year sentence.
Betran added: ‘To me, that sentence is vengeance, not justice.’
Pollok apologized to the courtroom: ‘I badly hurt my friends, and I am ashamed and deeply regret it,’ she said during her apology. ‘I am truly sorry.’
She is scheduled to report to the Federal Prison Camp Alderson, minimum security women’s facility in West Virginia, in April.
