This story includes descriptions of child abuse.
Kaleb Merritt was recently named in a federal indictment alleging he and three others ran an international neofascist group that produced child sex abuse material.
Merritt pleaded guilty to a variety of charges connected to the 2021 abduction and rape of Henry County minors, and is currently serving 33 years at Pocahontas State Correctional Center, a facility in Tazewell.
Last week, the Central District of California’s U.S. Attorney's Office announced the new charges, and along with Merritt named men from New Jersey, Hawaii and France. Like Merritt, who lived in Texas prior to his Virginia convictions, the French suspect was already in custody.
Between 2019 and 2022, each of the four were leaders of a group called CVLT, a neofascist cohort that groomed children online and coerced them into creating child sex abuse material, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Merritt and others are said to have exploited “existing vulnerabilities, such as mental health challenges or prior sexual abuse to break down children’s willpower and resistance.”
The indictment refers to allegations of abuse against 13 children, using a numerical system that indicates at least three more could have been affected by the group.
“The defendants here are alleged to have committed horrific acts against children,” Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph T. McNally said in a DOJ press release. “There is nothing more important than protecting our youth. Our office will continue its effort to aggressively prosecute and incarcerate dangerous predators.”
When the group’s targets threatened to make their guardians or law enforcement aware of the leaders’ actions, Merritt and others allegedly said they would send the images — which also included depictions of self-harm — to the minors’ family and friends.
If convicted, each of the four men could be sentenced to 20 years to life.
After the DOJ announced this round of charges, extremist researcher Marc-André Argentino published a history of CVLT, where he also refers to Merritt as being among the group’s leadership. Merritt’s convictions several years ago for the Henry County crimes, Argentino wrote, focused law enforcement on accelerationist groups and potentially propelled a CVLT splinter cell to emerge.
A number of right-wing extremist groups use CSAM to push their victims toward violent acts against themselves or animals, or carrying out other real-world violence.
The report also draws comparisons between CVLT and the Terrogram Collective, another digital neofascist group that in January was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department.
Researcher Matthew Kriner told VPM News there’s been an increase in similar types of online extortion and attempts to radicalize children during the past three to six months.
“Those spaces are starting to merge and do it strategically with entities like No Lives Matter [and] Maniac Murder Cult, who are explicitly terroristic,” he said. “Their propaganda draws from previous and pre-existing terrorist activity from the jihadi space, as well as the neofascist far right, and the militant accelerationist spaces. So, they're mixing and blurring all these things together.”
Merritt, who’s currently scheduled for release in 2049, used the name “o9a.evil,” among others, while engaged in the alleged activities, documents indicate. It’s potentially a reference to the Order of Nine Angles, a Satanic neofascist group that since the 1970s has been connected to extremist activity in the U.K. and the States.
Merritt, who was 21 at the time of his arrest, began interacting with one of his victims, a 12-year-old girl, on Instagram and Discord, before camping out in a wooded area near her home in Henry County. An Amber Alert was issued after the minor and Merritt left the area, and about 36 hours later, the two were found near Raleigh, North Carolina.
“This is a clear Rubicon, in terms of technological advancements within terrorist and violent extremist tactics,” Kriner said, while discussing the proliferation of extremist groups capitalizing on access to online spaces that can be used for exploitation and radicalization. “We're past the point where we can prevent this from happening; it's going to happen. The question is, how much we can limit it from happening at scale.”
