It wasn’t until after the article came out that Levin realized he needed to be the one to write his story — especially because Hollywood was interested. “Soon there were a lot of powerful men trying to tell my story for me, and suddenly folks in Hollywood, all these adults were fighting over this story of trauma,” Levin tells NYLON. “None of them were the victims, but they wanted to make it into entertainment and I just couldn’t stomach it, so I started writing. I just wanted to tell my story.” I was assaulted, and I didn't deserve to be hurt or touched that way or coerced into doing things I didn't want to do," he said. "So I can kind of set everything else aside and say that was wrong. That's what the justice system is here for."

Sarah Lawrence — where the unofficial slogan is "We're different. So are you"— revels in a unique pedagogical pedigree, one that suggests there are no clear answers and that there's a process of exploring and becoming. That's a scary place to be, for someone seeking certainty, Levin said. It is still an out-of-body experience for me watching myself getting beaten and body-slammed—I watch myself and I think, 'Wow, this is horrible what's happening to that woman! How could he do that to her!?' When all the while I am watching Larry beat me up—I feel like a completely different person from the poor woman in the footage." Felicia Rosario on Her Escape from Ray And 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. It's an intense tale of coercion, humiliation, gaslighting and physical torment. It's also one of hard-won survival, and creating a life after the unimaginable. 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. Those years ofa person’s life are often vulnerable and exploratory. And this is what Levin and I spoke about during our interview. What I gleaned from his insightful and often heart wrenching book,and our conversation, is that this is the trap that their perpetrator set for Levin and his friends: the extreme rawness of young adulthood. I am certain this bookwill be a tremendous help to others who have gone through something similar.She and I sat down and I explained the whole thing to her and it was as if a mirror was held up. I started to really see what had happened to me and slowly from there, work to be able to call it what it had been, which was a cult. At the time, I had no frame of reference because most people I think have a very specific definition of what cult is. That was years before I started writing this book. But I started writing from then, trying to write it in poetry, trying to figure out how to make it make sense to other people, all the while also trying to hide from the people I thought might come after me and try to hurt me if I said something bad about them. And now we’re here, talking to you. I think that if she reached out to me I would be curious to have that conversation. But it's really hard for me to imagine what her experience is, and I feel a lot of compassion for someone who has lived with Larry Ray since she was a baby, I can't imagine that."

Levin follows the story to the Upper East Side apartment where, federal prosecutors say, Ray’s criminal enterprise took shape, where Ray held a knife to Levin's throat, and humiliated him psychologically and sexually. They both appear in the documentary during that time in the third episode, which later charts Rosario's journey to healing and reconnecting with her family after finally leaving and cutting ties with them both. When I talked to those reporters and time went on, I was thinking more about it. First of all, for myself, I wanted that not to be true. I thought that if I wrote this book maybe it would mean that people would understand this experience a little bit better and breach that gap, not just for me, but for my friends. There's a support group in New York that I went to for people who had escaped cults and that helped democratize my understanding or complicate my understanding of what a cult survivor is or what a cult is. There were people in those support groups that were in what most people would describe as an abusive partnership, but we were talking about it in terms of cult dynamics. All of this helped me see myself inside of this a little bit more.

How Daniel Barban Levin Hopes To Help Other Survivors of Abuse and Cults

Ray was 30 years older and the father of a fellow student — but he was more than just that. He was a constant presence on campus and in the lives of Levin and his friends. It took Dan Levin a long time to admit it, and even longer to write it in his book: "I was in a cult." Levin tells the story of what happened in the Sarah Lawrence townhouse-style dorm, in his 2021 book, "Slonim Woods 9." The disturbing story discusses sexual abuse, disturbing events that couldn't have been easy for Levin to retell. Read the story of the book, and watch as Levin reads passages from "Slonim Woods 9." Claudia Drury's testimony put Larry Ray behind bars Levinsaid he wept as he watched the announcement of the charges against Ray, realizing the abusehadn't stopped when he left years earlier. Possibly the most haunting thing about what happened to Daniel Levin and his friends was how eerily recognizable their lives were when they ended up under the thumb of Larry Ray.

This is a weird question, but are you familiar with EMDR therapy at all? (EMDR therapy, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, is a psychotherapy method that helps people recover from trauma.)But, also, I get to explore the things I love. I am a writer and Larry tried to take writing away from me and I get to spend everyday writing and I teach other people how to process their own trauma through writing, that's incredibly fulfilling." People are so negative about the word ‘brainwashing.’ I don’t see what’s wrong with it. That is what I’m doing. I’m washing your brains. Larry Ray, alleged Sarah Lawrence cult leader Raven also talked to Claudia around that time, sharing that once Claudia realized the scenario Larry had painted for her was not real, "she acted on it really swiftly. And she just left as soon as she could so she wouldn't have time to change her mind and stay."