Stream It or Skip It: ‘Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’ on Hulu, a Deep Dive into a Collegiate Sex Cult

When a group of Sarah Lawrence students agreed to let their friend Talia’s dad stay with them, they thought they were doing her a favor. No one could have predicted that Larry Ray would permanently alter the course of their lives. That’s the story of Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence, Hulu’s new three-episode docuseries about a shocking sex cult that started on campus and ended with a prostitution ring, multiple suicide attempts, and a 60-year prison sentence.

STOLEN YOUTH: INSIDE THE CULT AT SARAH LAWRENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After Santos Rosario makes himself a cup of tea, he looks at photos of his old college friends. As he flips through them, he smiles to himself and laughs. He pauses over one where Santos and two of his friends are making weird poses. “I don’t even remember what we were doing in this photo,” he says half to himself. It’s a sweet, serene moment until it’s not.

“It’s hard to think of these times and enjoy the memory just because I know what’s coming,” Rosario continues. “It’s like a, I guess, sense of impending doom.”

The Gist: Talia Ray’s friends knew that she was incredibly close with her father. She would talk about him constantly, and she often told people that she wanted to be a lawyer so that she could one day people who had been wrongfully imprisoned like he had. So when her father Larry Ray was released from prison, no one thought twice about letting him sleep on the couch of their on-campus townhouse. Eight people were already living full-time in the two story house. What was one more person?

The answer was everything. Initially, Ray made sure he was a good houseguest. He would buy the students pizza and keep the kitchen clean. But it wasn’t long before the dynamic between this father and his daughter’s friends started to shift. He held house meetings, during which he outlined his philosophy. One by one, he would corner members of the household and get them to open up to him using mind control techniques he allegedly learned in the CIA. It only got weirder from there.

As Ray endeared himself to these students, he would often become involved in their sex lives. He was sexually intimate with Isabella Pollok, who has been dubbed Ray’s “top lieutenant,” and stayed in the same room as her. He even stayed in the room when Pollok had sex with Daniel Levin, which he insisted was part of his radical sexual coaching. Then there was the guilt-tripping. Later when the group moved to a New York apartment that Ray claimed to own, he often accused his unknowing followers of damaging his belongings. He would then coerce them into apologizing for mistakes they hadn’t made. More often then not those apologies were accompanied by money, detailed notes, and personal secrets that Ray would later use against them.

That’s the truly jaw-dropping cycle of abuse Stolen Youth explores. And as a reminder, all of this was only covered in Episode 1. This is the rare docuseries worth its three-hour runtime.

Our Take: Even if you’re familiar with this stranger-than-fiction case, Stolen Youth is worth your time. It’s one thing to read about a bunch of college students who were duped by a grifting older man. But seeing it play out on screen is an entirely different experience

Director Zach Heinzerling takes great care to repeatedly remind the audience of how young these students were. Most of the music comes from the era when these victims were in college — 2009 to 2013. Modest Mouse and other artists from the time make an appearance. Photographs of this friend group being silly together are prominently featured, and when there are no photos to support the narrative, childlike doodles are often utilized. Through these flourishes, Heinzerling manages to capture the wondrous haven for creativity many of these students expected Sarah Lawrence to be. Can it be a tad infantilizing at times? Sure. But it’s an effect that mostly works.

By always focusing on how close Ray’s victims were to their childhoods, the extent of his manipulation feels even more vulgar. In one especially heart-breaking scene, Rosario’s mother reveals that she pawned the jewelry she was wearing to give her son $750 — a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands Rosario allegedly owed Ray. It’s a painful moment that highlights how Ray always targeted the most vulnerable and how Stolen Youth always takes care to humanize its victims above all else.

Sex and Skin: Sex is certainly mentioned; this is, after all, a sex cult. But these more risqué topics are always handled respectfully, and there is no gratuitous imagery.

Parting Shot: A group of friends outside of the main group talk about a letter that was sent by one of the cult members, Claudia Drury. After spending the summer with Ray, Drury sent a long open letter to her former and current housemates, Ray, and the Dean of Students. In it she apologized for spreading rumors abut Ray, something her friends say she never did.

The last moments of “The Arbiter of Truth” shows several of these friends reacting to the letter. But it’s Max Mamis who has the most memorable response: “That was when I think I would have first started using the word cult.”

Sleeper Star: Most of the subjects interviewed for Stolen Youth tiptoe around calling Larry Ray abusive and manipulative. Not Raven Juarez. She calls it like she sees it and is responsible for the best summation fo this bizarre case:

“Everyone at the beginning thought he was weird,” Juarez says. “And then one by one he’d get them alone, have these conversations, and suddenly they’re like ‘Oh he’s not so bad’ to ‘Actually, he’s pretty great, actually he’s saving my life, actually he’s the best thing that ever happened to me, actually I’ll never not listen to him, actually fuck you I will never listen to you if you ever talk bad about him. And it happens steeply”

Most Pilot-y Line: This doesn’t exactly apply to documentaries, but do you want to know the most cringe-worthy detail of this horrific cult? As Ray “coached” Pollok and Levin through their sex workshops, he’d play 13th century Gregorian chants.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Stolen Youth isn’t just an informative look at a shocking case. It’s a well-made docuseries that’s always respectful to these survivors.