Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Sarah Lawrence Kids: My Take

Contextual Note

This reflection is inspired by reporting on the case of Lawrence “Larry” Ray, whose actions at Sarah Lawrence College became the subject of extensive journalism and later criminal prosecution. Ray, the father of a student, embedded himself within a group of students and, over a period of years, exerted psychological and material control that culminated in multiple federal charges. In 2022, he was convicted in U.S. federal court on counts including racketeering conspiracy, extortion, forced labor, and sex trafficking, following testimony detailing patterns of manipulation, coercion, and abuse.

The essay above is not intended as investigative reporting or a comprehensive account of the case. Rather, it uses widely documented elements of the Sarah Lawrence story as a lens for examining broader dynamics of influence, consent, authority, and psychological boundary erosion. Readers interested in detailed factual accounts are encouraged to consult court records and major journalistic coverage of the case.

Epigraph
“I can’t force myself to say something
More than I can think of a thing to do
Any more than you can pull yourself out of nothing
When there is nothing forcing you to.”
— Bedhead, Extramundane

This isn’t really a story about sex, crime, or even a “cult” in the way headlines tend to frame it. It’s a story about how consent can be quietly eroded — not through force or spectacle, but through a gradual shift in tempo. An adult inserts himself into a group of bright, searching young people and begins, almost imperceptibly, to reorganize how they interpret their own experience. Nothing dramatic happens at first. There is conversation, attention, fluency in the language of care. The early moves feel supportive, even mentorship-like. And that is precisely why they work. By the time anything overtly troubling emerges, the conditions for real choice have already thinned out. The ground tilts before anyone recognizes that it’s moving.

The students drawn in aren’t naïve caricatures or damaged stereotypes. They’re thoughtful, introspective, and accustomed to treating their interior lives as material for reflection. That habit, usually a strength, becomes a vulnerability in the presence of someone adept at narrating other people’s feelings back to them. The dynamic isn’t driven primarily by charisma or intellectual brilliance. It’s driven by tempo. Boundaries aren’t crossed so much as softened. A late-night conversation becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a shared framework. A framework becomes dependency. And when harm finally appears, it doesn’t feel like a clear rupture between “yes” and “no.” It feels like a choice being made inside a structure already built.

There is often a moment when the room shifts, but it rarely looks like a turning point. Someone says they’re exhausted, and exhaustion is reframed as a signal with hidden meaning. Confusion becomes resistance. Ordinary hesitation becomes evidence of deeper moral or psychological blockage. Each reframing lands with the texture of insight rather than coercion. Over time, reactions are no longer treated as self-authorizing; they become data awaiting interpretation by the person occupying the role of guide. The students aren’t agreeing with an authority figure so much as agreeing with a version of themselves that figure has begun to narrate. When narrative voice drifts outward like that, autonomy doesn’t vanish dramatically. It diffuses.

The difficulty in describing situations like this lies in the absence of clear theatrical markers. There is no singular moment of surrender, no obvious villain/victim tableau. The participants often experience themselves not as surrendering but as collaborating. They believe they are doing the work, gaining insight, moving toward growth. Particularly for intellectually curious students, the promise of self-understanding is compelling. When directives are framed as pathways to clarity, resistance can feel like failure rather than protection. The structure tightens without ever announcing itself as such.

What emerges from observing cases like this is less outrage than a kind of double vision. On one level, the mechanics appear familiar: authority built through interpretive fluency, dependence fostered through narrative control, legitimacy derived from proximity to vulnerability. On another level, the situation remains unsettling precisely because the openings are so ordinary. The dynamic does not depend on extraordinary charisma or theatrical manipulation. It depends on recognizable human needs: attention, guidance, belonging, the desire to make sense of one’s own experience. Intelligence does not necessarily protect against these forces; in certain contexts, it can deepen engagement with them.

That recognition invites a measure of humility. The distance between observer and participant is not always as large as hindsight suggests. What protects one person in a given moment may be temperament, timing, or simple circumstance rather than superior discernment. The impulse to locate safety in personal invulnerability can obscure the broader lesson: susceptibility is situational, and the pathways into these dynamics are rarely marked by obvious warning signs. Often they look like ordinary conversations extended just a little too far.

If the Bedhead lyric offers a frame, it is through its quiet attention to inertia. The line does not describe dramatic coercion but a subtler erosion of agency — the sensation of trying to act from a place that has already been partially displaced. “You can’t pull yourself out of nothing when there is nothing forcing you to” captures the paradox at the center of this story: the absence of overt pressure can itself become constraining. Consent may appear intact even as its underlying architecture shifts. The drift is gradual, almost ambient, and therefore difficult to name in real time.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect is the ordinariness of the openings. The story is not about an extraordinary manipulator but about how easily authority can be constructed within familiar relational spaces, and how collaboration can feel indistinguishable from growth until perspective changes. The lesson, if there is one, is less about condemnation than awareness — a recognition of how narrative authority operates, how tempo shapes consent, and how autonomy can narrow without any single decisive moment marking its loss.

Dedication
For those who walked.
And for those who couldn’t.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also enjoy my other piece on educational institutions. You can read it here.

On My Seven Years Under Dr. Charles Fox
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz

Sometimes an argument tells you more about the man making it than the subject he claims to be discussing.

“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
— Carl Jung


“Chronologically I know you’re young,
but when you kissed me in the club you bit my tongue.”
— Loudon Wainwright III, “Motel Blues”

Note: In On the Safe Space (aka Corner Girl), I wrote about the interior rooms we protect — the places where selfhood gets built without interruption or performance. This piece is about the larger boundary: the one society owes to the developing self.

Opening
Alan Dershowitz has a way of wandering into arguments that look like legal questions but are really psychological ones. Back in 1997, he argued that statutory-rape laws were “an outdated concept,” a position he has never meaningfully walked back. It wasn’t a constitutional insight then, and it isn’t one now — it’s an ethical fog of his own making, clever on the surface, a little out of control underneath, and surprisingly indifferent to the actual developmental reality of adolescence. I’m not a lawmaker, and I’m not pretending to be one. I’m simply an adult who has spent decades in and around schools all over the world, watching young people grow into themselves — slowly, unevenly, beautifully. And from where I stand, there’s nothing arbitrary about protecting the forming self from the fantasies of adults who should know better.

Thesis
Bodily autonomy begins with the smallest choices — what you eat, what you refuse, what you allow into your system. Anyone who has ever fought for control over diet, appetite, or health knows that dignity is never abstract. It lives in the body first. Food, sleep, sex, presence, touch — these aren’t lifestyle accessories. They are the basic architecture of selfhood.

And that’s why autonomy matters.
Not as a slogan.
Not as a political hashtag.
But as the ground of being human.

People like Dershowitz talk about age-of-consent laws as if they’re philosophical puzzles, as if desire and authority rise from the same level floor. But bodily autonomy doesn’t work that way. It has requirements. Preconditions. A forming self needs time, scaffolding, protection — the freedom to grow into decisions that will define a lifetime.
Bodily autonomy is the core of human dignity.
And dignity requires a federal age of consent set at 18 — with room for close-in-age relationships, but no room for adult fantasies about adolescent equality.

Ethical Architecture


Autonomy isn’t a mood or a vibe. It’s a developmental achievement — the slow process of learning to inhabit your own body without needing permission, without coercion, without fear. Emotional regulation, impulse control, identity formation, consequence mapping — none of that arrives early.

I learned that early with food. When I was fourteen, I wanted to become a vegetarian. My mother didn’t approve, and at one point tried to enlist a doctor to shut it down. Decades later, it’s still not funny to me. It was my first glimpse of how threatened adults can feel by a young person’s bodily autonomy — even when the stakes are seemingly mild.

If this is true about diet, something reversible and lower-stakes, it is infinitely truer about sex, where the stakes shape a lifetime. This is why age-of-consent laws exist: not to police sexuality, but to protect the dignity of someone whose selfhood is still under construction.

Psychological Layer

Adults love to project adulthood backward — to imagine that adolescents are simply smaller, louder grown-ups. But when an adult looks at a teenager and sees “maturity,” they are seeing their own desire reflected back at them. It’s projection disguised as equality.
And that’s the shadow: the part of the adult that refuses responsibility.
When an adult insists “adolescents know what they want,” what they’re really saying is:
“I want them to know what I want.”
Desire is real.
But consent requires architecture.
Adolescents feel everything — intensity, longing, hunger, embarrassment — but they don’t yet have the scaffolding that turns feelings into sustainable decisions. They’re still learning how to hold their boundary, which means adults must hold it for them.
Layer on top of that the baked-in authority of adults — teachers, coaches, mentors, older partners — and it becomes obvious that any adolescent “yes” is distorted by fear, approval-seeking, and conditioning. That’s not consent. It’s compliance.
The danger is never the adolescent’s feelings.
The danger is the adult’s refusal to be an adult.

Policy Layer
I’m not talking about university students and professors. That’s not my area. I work in a high school; I work with adolescents. My authority such as it is is rooted in those spaces.

And there are practical reasons for setting the line at 18 that have nothing to do with purity politics. Eighteen is already the age of legal majority — the moment a person can sign contracts, make medical decisions, join the military, lease an apartment, and carry full responsibility for their choices. Consent belongs in the same category: it requires structural independence, not just emotion.

Before 18, almost every part of life is mediated by adult authority; after 18, the power balance shifts. A federal standard removes the patchwork of loopholes and state-by-state inconsistencies that predators rely on. And for the record, I support lowering the federal drinking age to 18. I’m not arguing for innocence. I’m arguing for dignity — and dignity requires autonomy, not surveillance, and certainly not adult desire dressed up as philosophy.

Close-in-age exceptions protect real relationships. They do not protect adults who want to pretend a teenager is their peer.

Why It Matters Now

Silence used to feel like neutrality. It doesn’t anymore. I’ve been in and out of high schools around the world — Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, China, Southeast Asia, North America — and I’ve seen enough to know that adolescents today are more exposed than ever. More pressure, more surveillance, more chaos, more online distortion.

Adults can either disappear into clever hypotheticals, or they can show up. The world is louder now than it was in 1997. More invasive. More demanding. Adolescents have less room to breathe, to fail safely, to grow without an adult’s shadow pressing against their outline.

That’s why I’m saying this aloud.
Not because I enjoy the argument.
Because silence, at this point, feels like complicity.

Closing

At some point adulthood has to mean something. Not moralism — responsibility. Adults hold the boundary. We don’t collapse it when it’s inconvenient or reinterpret it because we prefer a clever argument. Adulthood is the willingness to carry the weight of our power without pretending it isn’t there.

Which is why Dershowitz’s old argument still bothers me. It treats adolescents like abstractions in a constitutional seminar instead of actual forming selves. And you don’t need to mention Epstein or anything else to see the flaw — you only have to hear the tone. A man brilliant enough to win a debate in his sleep, is nonetheless a little off-the-hook. Dershowitz is strangely pre-occupied with farmer’s market battles, and often more enchanted by the elegance of the puzzle than the dignity of the child.

But here’s the thing:
I’m not coming for art.
I like Loudon Wainwright. I love “White Winos.” I like “Motel Blues,” even with its sideways energy. Songs are allowed to be messy. Human desire is allowed to be messy. And if the girl in the song is legal and in the club, then that’s that. Adults can make mistakes, write about them, sing about them, and turn them into something worth listening to. That’s art’s job.
But real life is different.
Real life has a boundary.
The line between adolescence and adulthood isn’t drawn to stifle desire.
It’s drawn to protect dignity — the child’s dignity, yes, but also the adult’s. A clean boundary keeps everyone honest. It keeps projection from rewriting the story. It keeps the shadow in check. It keeps the music in the music, not in the courtroom.
A federal age of consent at 18 is not about purity or panic.
It’s about clarity.
And clarity is what lets adulthood do its actual work.
Because the truth is simple:
I can enjoy Loudon’s songs, raise an eyebrow at his more questionable moments, and still believe absolutely in a boundary that protects adolescents until they’re ready to stand on the same ground as the adults around them.
Art can be blurry.
Ethics can’t.
And adulthood — the real kind — knows the difference.

Dedication
For the forming selves,
and for the adults who finally decided to act like adults.