0:00 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
0:47 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 prestigious College when Felicia reveals details of her experience for the first time from Red table talk podcasts and I heart media I'm Dr Romney 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
1:35 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 I heart Media 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
2:21 Santos who was a student at Sarah Lawrence he was friends with his daughter Talia and Santos really wanted to meet me to meet him and I flew back from California to visit because I started my job my training and Psychiatry out in Los Angeles and then we went to dinner so then it started through 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
3:07 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 those things were good I think that it's also important for people to know you're incredibly accomplished person not only were you in Psychiatry residency at the time you had completed your undergraduate degree at Harvard and you had done your medical training at Columbia the reason I'm mentioning that is that when we hear
3:52 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 us together as anyone I could think of in terms of discipline and focus and and ambition and pursuit that stereotype is one that I've always been very focused on breaking that well only 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 you clearly you had it together yeah I did 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
4:41 totally agree with you that it's it's 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 would have had it together or not you know it's about Larry's intention in 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
5:28 normally drawn to 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 that but from that first meeting with Larry how did the relationship develop from there so it started off with Larry it's very friendly at first I think Larry had my um plotted with my sister and my brother to have this dinner so that way they could you know have us meet and
6:13 then Larry could start to you know work on me by the time Felicia met Larry both her brother Santos and sister yelitsa 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
6:59 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 it 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
7:47 and recording it for him so the message was very confusing and uncomfortable because I 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 so 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
8:35 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 I'm not no I'm not so you're defending yourself you're off balance but then in that same breath it's basically go get go out and
9:20 do things get 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 becoming moving so quickly and becoming so intense so quickly one we 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 um I really liked her she was a very kind honest honorable person so
10:10 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'd 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
10:56 the beginning was real he was actually um employing real like actual techniques to help like to help them we had been through a very difficult time um not too long before that my brother had had a suicide attempt in 2009 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
11:43 translator from the young age and then I'm the one that figures stuff out so 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 he starts to bring some clarity to what had
12:30 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
13:15 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 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 fear 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
14:03 a place where somebody's fitting a puzzle piece in that we needed and it's specific to us right 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 Ray's power May simply have been
14:48 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 profiles everyone beforehand he knew what was going to be attractive to me and what would what would bring me into him you were in Psychiatry residency I'm a psychologist I I 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
15:35 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 about 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 is this doesn't make sense why are you like this about him you know I had to manage a lot of
16:21 difficult situations like growing up and then you know as a woman as a minority navigating the academic circles that I was in so 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 it's more that I'm a human being I'm training as a doctor to perform a a skill a profession but I'm a person and your feelings emotions connection that's way more important than any profession right so then when he came in and he was able to to help
17:08 with that feeling of connection with that support you know the job is 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 my natural guard right that was all my instinct so there there was alarm at the beginning and then he kind of he quelled it um because he was able to have very like intricate conversation about the mind and Psychiatry and then he claimed to have training and then when I would see him talk to people it was
17:55 actually effective and he goes and talks to doctors and everyone's speaking to him like a peer um it would happen at every hospital we went to wow 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 um 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 he was still competent when people show up with confidence it's very very convincing and
18:41 you understand this because you're in the bids 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 affect can feel really reassuring that very directive stance he was taking wasn't therapy with some you know it was it was Madness but it was this this manipulation but it felt helpful yeah and I mean and then there were results afterwards he gets them motivated enough to do 500 push-ups a day and they get they get the their work
19:27 done on time they get you know good grades and so all the things that they're wanting results on aren't they're actually happening right in that time you're in internship in residency anyone listening to this if you don't know is an extraordinarily demanding time trainees are working 12 to 15 sometimes 18 hours a day sometimes 24-hour you know call there 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 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 anyone doesn't sound like as much time as with him but were there other significant voices in your life or people you were
20:14 spending time with so yes so at the beginning I made you know friends early on with a lot of my um intern class then Larry Larry time started to take over and I had I mean I 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 so over time Larry started encroaching more and more of whatever tiny shreds of spare time you had 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 beach or restaurants or exploring different parts
21:00 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 it that he did become the loudest voice how would you make sense of his Tantrums at a phone hanging up after you spending so many hours on the phone how did you tell that story to yourself that's a great question because
21:48 so when it you say it out loud right when I tell you that I was on the 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 talking about trying to get me to talk about like if I had ever like been abused or if I had
22:34 had sex with my teachers at school um 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 I was freaking out that he was freaking out I was 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 don't I'm not clear-minded anymore when it comes to him because of how he had been wearing on me like day after day yeah it is an indoctrination process and this
23:20 it's in this interesting pull because it goes exactly back to what your brother said don't say anything bad about him it's sort of this he the manipulation is about the it it 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 do you have any recollection of what the fear was for you if it would happen if he wasn't okay my life would be over it wasn't like I was never gonna find somebody right that I'm like I was worried that I'm never gonna meet someone like Larry again I'll never find love again it wasn't even like that it was more Primal but like um my life would end like mentally I could no longer survive without him and if he stopped talking to
24:07 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 and 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 and what he was doing I'm going to keep you on the phone for 18 hours at a time it is a systematic indoctrination where if you hear something enough it becomes your
24:55 reality it's that simple it would happen to any of us yeah absolutely that's slowly what was happening and and 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 with him you know with him caring about your life all of that and so 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 you said he kept trying to push this question hour after hour did you experience prior abuse as a child with teachers
25:41 what did you think he was trying to do then I you know he didn't ask it the way that a therapist would ask it I think that's actually something that I'm I'm just thinking about right now with that 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 had 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 you know sometimes I would just keep saying no right and
26:28 then he would he would get upset 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 up to a lot of stuff you know when you were in school I'm like no I wasn't and then he got so aggressive that I started making stuff up yeah like I started saying yeah yeah I did I did it yes I totally did it yeah I yeah I had sex with my math teacher no I know I've never had sex with my math teacher just it's a broad disclaimer there I've never had sex with the map with any teacher um so so I started to make things up just to just to appease him and then he
27:13 would be like oh that sounds good tell me more and I'm like tell you more what and 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 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 gonna give you a mild example of this right because I think that people say well I wouldn't 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
27:58 have a toxic person who's coming at you yeah you did yeah tell me I know you I know you slept with 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 the best pizza right best bet and you're after a while you're like yes you know Luigi's is the best pizza intact done you win you win you win yeah you're like fine and make it stop right and what we're doing is 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
28:44 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 butcher said you 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 like him go bingo that's it either way that's it and you can't win you cannot and that's and I've said this Felicia I've written it I've said it I've preached it I've drawn it is that it you can never win it is the Hallmark
29:30 of any toxic relationship with a narcissistic Psychopathic manipulative person if you give in to 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 and I but the challenging thing is is that it's subtle and it's it's a million small thing in
30:15 this case it was so unrelenting most of us in these scenarios will say uh 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 would 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 you know involved with this person but you and you're 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 to back to New York that was probably one of the worst experiences of My Life um including being with him but this was really
31:02 harrowing he sorry I just it comes flooding back whatever you know whenever uh 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 stay with him to visit we stayed at the plaza at the
31:50 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
32:38 while he was sleeping I stole money from him like a hundred thousand dollars so he's already been wearing me down and this was what over now 10 months I'm doing well at work actually um but he he is wearing me down in my personal life and I'm worried that I did something that I don't remember now at this point yeah and I'm like oh my God I made him lose money oh my God I stole money but I don't have it like 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
33:23 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 um people are surrounding my apartment that people are trying to kill me I was terrified yeah 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 bet 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 should I'm gonna come after you I'm gonna sue you I'm on
34:11 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 um who was recording these conversations so he's recording everything Larry okay Larry 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 I mean 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 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
34:56 it on this day and I have the recording so I mean and it wasn't just hours like it was days he sent me to Best Buy to get cameras to install in 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 I mean I said that much I was able to 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 72 hours of this I'm like okay
35:45 yeah I I can't I can't take it so Felicia in these 72 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 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 she has this sort of storied past so it's not Beyond The Pale that someone from his past could have been seeking Vindication it feels a little cinematic but it's not Beyond The Pale he keeps telling you keeps telling
36:31 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 he knows like now he'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 being wanting to sleep with the Best Buy guy or let me see if I can get her admitted that's admitted that what can 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
37:18 so he switched up his game and escalation is always what we see in this coercive and malignant a relationship but it's not only just escalation it's trying different things this one was working right exactly yes and and you're totally right because because of the person that I am I mean 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 um but it just wasn't working and going back to what you were saying about how they they play both sides of the coin right so about to get my medical license and then he decides then to start this
38:03 attack this assault is that I'm about to be independent a full-fledged doctor but he wants to break me and fix me so he's gonna break me before right before like the critical point where that's gonna make me a doctor then he has that carrot 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 wow that's so telling you know that's something I didn't understand and that's
38:49 a really important observation because you're absolutely right he was sapping your autonomy because that final exam was going to be the exam that then would may 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 gonna mess with someone's head it is calculated it is careful this is why so in 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
39:35 well this then this and if I get it right there and if I do this then that and how how can I figure out what Felicia's sort of vulnerability is and 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 um he started early on he knew how important my family was to me my parent 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
40:20 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 was 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 gonna hurt my brother my sister my mom my dad yeah like I'm not gonna do it he was all constantly threatening me with I'm gonna send them to jail like yeah they hurt me I'm gonna I'm gonna make sure they never graduate I'm gonna get them to kill themselves I'm sure you know about this as well as coercive control this is coercive control fear
41:05 intimidation isolation Menace manipulation Financial abuse Interruption of professional development or um threatening harm to people you care about and the only way to stop that harm is by giving in to their requests that's coercive control that's what you were surviving and I think that the peace 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 against it's not it's not a criminal violation
41:52 and as he mentally breaks you down and plays back your own voice saying that that you you are like there it is there's the audio clip and then you almost realize 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 was 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 I'm gonna get you put away for life and so that's that's yeah yeah yeah complete I mean it is again that's the end it was crazy because it was so yes it was so arrogant that he really thought that recording
42:39 these things was proving the harm that was being done to him when it was really capturing him hurting us which is and then the irony is just so so great I think that the other thing is that that that self victimhood 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 drained prop this backpack filled with cash
43:25 actually became a tool for him to continue this this extortive 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 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 and in its clearest form but in using all these coercive techniques so you moved 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 uh practice yeah no that's I still haven't taken my exam and it's 2023. yeah I'm I'm nowhere closer to going back to being a doctor uh right
44:12 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 um he never leaves my side the whole 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 live we were staying at my parents house actually who is we meet Larry and I you were living at your parents house yeah yeah because that first month um that I came back from California I
44:58 was so upset I mean I was really just a mess yeah you know you're scared you were scared I was terrified um so then Larry thought it would be better if I stayed if we if he stayed with me at my parents house did that how did what was that what did your parents think of him I mean they were thankful that they 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 them 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
45:46 was was good until he couldn't break her and then she was she turned bad she turned bad in in his narrative Larry's narrative in Larry's narrative so the narrative that so what he was trying to get us to think about or believe is like yeah your dad is is the bad one your mom is the good one yeah yeah 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 them yeah yeah 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 and it's it can be any number of things when you were there for a month he gets to know your parents whatever sort of
46:32 grooming process he was doing trying to split them apart again if you 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 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 very well aware of what the house was worth or did they own their home or cars or whatever you know fungible assets they had that he knew that's always working some angle right absolutely yes and that's definitely I I'm certain that that's a huge part of what he was doing that he wanted to profile you know
47:17 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 tried to sneak away with my dad and while he's sleeping and he calls me right when I'm about to go in and I I turn around I'm 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
48:03 with a backpack I wasn't intending to just leave my job or you know just like run run away with my boyfriend like that is not my personality type that is not my profile I don't do those that kind of thing you said he tripled down he like quadrupled like quintupled down on what was 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'm a 30 year old doctor and I I need a college student to go with me across
48:50 the street to like get a bottle of water and actually sorry this is and one of the worst things that happened very within the month of me getting back to New York uh he decides he needs to go visit a business partner in Washington DC and he he doesn't have a license because he had he can't get his act together and actually get a new driver's license um I think that was very intentional
49:35 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 um he called my brother to get my brother to say he wanted me to die that my brother wanted me to die um he started a whole fight and within a few days of us being in Washington I tried to kill myself um I overdosed on Tylenol uh
50:21 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 was all a bunch of criminals that everyone was trying to kill Larry and you know then they're my family and that makes me a bad person I mean he laid it on every which way that he could um and yeah I mean I ended up overdosing um I thankfully once I started getting toxic um I changed my mind but it was too late
51:08 right I 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 it 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 I had the suicide challenge it was about my mother and me hating my mom and then she 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 love her be a doctor again if you stay here we need to get you out of the hospital
51:53 so we leave and then he 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 uh that he'd make me lose my license um the people would get me blacklisted Essence it's more of the coercive control once again when you were in the hospital was he talking to the medical professionals there like what was this all of them he talked to the residents
52:39 the the doctors every the ER doctors the psychiatrists the attending the head psychiatrist the 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 at her mom you know I need to paint this 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 happen 20 30 years ago you and I both know if a woman is coming in this kind of reaction with
53:26 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 um relational abuse and that there should have been the attempt to bring in other stakeholders and all of that I really want people 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 you if Larry said he was going to a meeting you knew
54:11 that he was gonna come out of there 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 gonna do that how like in what world was that gonna 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
54:58 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 that's why you didn't leave me 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 he's the only one there to to pick you up and I'm glad you put it it's not the world Brendan 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 now you're you're still living
55:44 with the fear from California you've driven him down to Washington you were horrifically abused during that drive you have what I would be an expectable reaction to all that's happening what's 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 other people Larry so when I 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 so um but I was seeing my brother and my sister a lot but my our relationship was already getting very strange and it was
56:32 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 Sandra's is trying to kill you and he hates you then we're not talking to him right and it was absolutely it was Larry's playground whatever he wanted whatever he thought of that's that's what would happen yeah yeah I had no 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 you really had had your choice and your free
57:18 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 in how that affected you um 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 must have spent between 17 and 20 hours with her in a
58:03 conversation and I think she's 19 at this point um that's not a conversation you know 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 Isabelle 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 that's not what was happening and when I
58:51 got there I I was 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 Isabelle likes sleeping naked like that's what she prefers where am I but I'm not well enough to say anything right or to do anything and yeah we would each sleep on one side and Isabelle would sleep with her hand on his genitals I would have to wake up sometimes I would wake up to her
59:39 performing oral sex on Larry and mind you okay I'm gonna take just a little bit more context I never I've never had sex with Larry so he he was my boyfriend it was very platonic the whole time the whole relationship even from beginning to end never getting into end no yeah and thank you for clarifying that mm-hmm so never like never in all of the years that I was with him I was I never had relations with him um there were times he had me start to do you know try to like perform
1:00:24 some oral sex on him but I was so hurt that I just I was not capable of doing any anything sexual um so then 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 that's you know a context is so important here because the depiction frankly is that you are his girlfriend which would have then implied you were in a sexually intimate relationship any any sexual relationship I 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
1:01:09 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 he would no he completely he did come 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 and I want you to be more effective you need to go have sex with all of these strangers and record it and to like to break free to become a liberated woman right before I can have sex with you so
1:01:57 I mean there were times that I did actually end up doing that because as 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 uh sex with other with strangers from what I can remember which a lot of there are still lots of blanks in my memory um it didn't happen very often I resisted regularly and I think because of who I am even 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 gonna
1:02:42 have sex with all those people and I'm not gonna have sex with you and but he did make me feel ugly undesirable unwanted not lovable try to have competition with Isabelle always yeah and then oh she's sexy oh she's young oh she she's naked she likes to walk around and like 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 dressed in baggy clothes and sweatpants and sweatshirts all day I didn't look feminine I didn't want to
1:03:27 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 so then that was that was a way I think of uh 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
1:04:14 instead what I'm hearing is that you actually didn't want to have sex with him you were almost trying to de-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 oh yeah absolutely he kept our like the end goal of our relationship
1:05:00 that was the carrot 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 I wasn't he was trying to Foster competition but I leaned into the compassion for Isabella more and I was more I was wanting to see her get better I
1:05:48 wasn't actually jealous but he did try to Foster competition yes competition but he only he set me up for failure constantly so he would you know if there was a task he would give me something relatively 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 saw and I I just tried to hang on to the Larry I met at the beginning you know the facade right 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 to the
1:06:35 idea of the Larry that I had met right right right right so so I was very attached to that Larry and then he did all 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 I was even if I didn't want to be there I was physically financially emotionally mentally just attached to him right those are the coercive control Dynamics what is so important here though is that this person you met at the beginning of the relationship right whoever this was what he represented was being present
1:07:20 and seeing you and supporting you when you're having to shoulder such a heavy burden and somebody even takes one thing off it can create an almost instantaneous Bond and oh and over what I'd call sort of an over gratitude right some if you're just living with no support and one person even does something as I don't know gentle as doing the dishes in the sink you're going to be almost you know like over fawning like oh my gosh you did my dishes and it's it's too much like they did the dishes like they didn't you know cure your incurable illness or something and right 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 like them all that stuff
1:08:06 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 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 to this one thing once we get to 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 end game 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
1:08:54 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 a hundred chains locking you to a hundred locks even when the room is full of doors and that's what people don't understand so some of the contexts of that was he's threatening to leave me but then he says if I leave you I'm Gonna Get You arrested and you're gonna be sit in a county jail and no one's gonna come help you if you try to go get help at the psychiatric hospital I'm I will never go visit you I will never see you I will never talk to you again
1:09:40 so what are so where 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 it's just it's what you're saying the all of the chains and all the locks and like okay so how am I supposed what am I supposed to do there's nothing you can suck right and then I'm he's the only one who can quote fix all of this or at least that's what I 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 and in your in high school University Medical School all of that
1:10:26 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 and that's where you got stuck some of the sequences in the in the documentary that really I found heartbreaking was you were like digging ditches for drainage and 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 and 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
1:11:12 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 some a little bit of just walking that I would spend all day walking around like singing little songs like um I used to say I love you Larry I want to get married because that was one of the things that would appease him I regress significantly um while I was there doing that physical labor parts of me were still present like the analytical part of me but in a in a weird way in a backwards way
1:11:58 the yard work gave me purpose because by that point he had taken away everything else that was of meaning to me I couldn't be a doctor oh wow 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 then go out to Walmart try to have sex with somebody yeah with the spectrum of survival strategies you know it's like that's all this was right it's survival is that you were a it speaks to
1:12:44 how much you know human activity matters to us right to be able to do something that you know that that you you still matter 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 what do you mean right because by then the 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 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 he had smashed the phone that with a hammer and I was in North Carolina my the my family was all in New York including your
1:13:30 siblings physically apart your siblings didn't they came periodically got it one of his projects while we were in North Carolina to really pit us against each other he made chaos I think that's that's the best way to put it so he he just he yeah he just created this web of chaos for everyone around got it there was no responsibility right 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 2015 and then my sister she had spent significantly
1:14:17 less time in the apartment because she was actually still at Columbia then at some point she took a year off because school had gotten to be too much and we're all carrying a lot of grief and like uh we had a lot of undealt with family you know dynamics that were really um 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 you would help somebody get better and then he would put him like throw them right back into the fire
1:15:02 so he had her oscillating and she ended up cycling like in and out of hospitals um 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 discharge to us and I was like no way like I mean
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