This article contains descriptions of sexual violence.
The 15-year-old girl was sitting in her bedroom when “Sociopath” and “Rohan” added her to a Discord chat that, several months later, would nearly end in her death.
She said within hours of joining the chat on the online messaging platform in 2020, she became the target of a network of predators who, according to federal prosecutors in an indictment, specialize in coercing minors to perform sex acts and self-harm on camera.
She said she initially met Sociopath, identified in the indictment as Kaleb Merritt, during the pandemic on Discord servers dedicated to online games. She said he offered her an upgraded version of Discord in exchange for a conversation. Then, he added her to the chat with Rohan — later identified in the indictment as Rohan Rane.
The teen, whose name is being withheld because of safety concerns, had no idea she was being pulled into a highly organized and terrifying scheme that has ensnared minors across America, including girls in Los Angeles and San Bernardino, according to interviews with victims and federal agents, and a federal indictment in the Central District Court of California. Members of the sexploitation ring seek vulnerable girls, having found many in online communities dedicated to mental health or survivors of prior abuse, according to the federal agents.
In the early morning hours of July 4, 2020, Rohan and Kaleb, as she came to know them, sent the 15-year-old girl her home and school addresses, photos of her family, a screenshot of where her little sister’s sports team practiced and a trove of other personal information in the Discord group chat, she told The Times in an interview.
Next, she said, they sent her videos of minors performing sexual acts, followed by videos of homes being raided by SWAT teams, which they said happened to those who disobey them, echoing extortion tactics alleged in the indictment.
Then, they gave the teenager orders: Turn on your camera and do exactly what we say.
She felt like there was a digital gun pressed against her head.
“In that moment, they’re like, ‘Even if you did tell your parents, they’re not going to be able to find out who we are and we won’t leave you alone,’” said the victim, who is now 21.
Fearing the men would harm her family, she said she took off her clothes, wrote “slut” and “whore” on her skin, drew a pentagram on her chest, put a letter opener into her vagina, got on her knees and prayed for their mercy, reflecting demands described in the indictment.
The men recorded the night’s abuse and used it to blackmail the girl into performing escalating acts of self-harm for around nine months, she said.
She said she eventually cut Rohan’s name so deeply into her arms that she needed to use glue to seal the wounds.
Around March 2021, she said Rohan gave her a horrific choice: kill herself or watch as he posted all the content he had of her online, she said.
“At that point, I would have rather not be seen in that light, than be in the light of day at all, because of how humiliating the things that they got me to say and do were,” she said.
Following Rohan’s orders, she washed down painkillers with alcohol.
She survived, but not every minor targeted by this network of abusers has been as lucky.
This year, Rane and Merritt were identified in the indictment as alleged leaders of a group called CVLT, which federal authorities say has since splintered and grown into an even more sprawling sexploitation network called 764.
These violent online groups have allegedly abused hundreds of mostly female minor victims worldwide, according to Homeland Security Investigations. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received more than 1,300 reports related to these online groups in 2024 alone.
Rane, 29, was arrested in France in 2022. He is awaiting trial there for allegedly blackmailing French minors to perform acts of sexual torture on themselves. Merritt, 25, is currently serving a 33-year sentence for the 2021 rape and kidnapping of a 12-year-old girl from Virginia he met online.
Both men were indicted on child exploitation charges in the Los Angeles-based federal court case on Jan. 17, with other alleged key members of CVLT — Clint Borge, 41, of Hawaii, and Collin Walker, 24, of New Jersey. Walker has since pleaded guilty and Borge is scheduled to do the same Wednesday. Merritt has pleaded not guilty, while Rane has yet to be arraigned in the U.S. as he remains in French custody.
Borge and Merritt’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment. The Times could not reach an attorney for Rane. Jonathan M. Lynn, Walker’s attorney, said his client “wanted to plead guilty to accept responsibility for his conduct at an early stage of the process and to save the victims from having to go through a trial.”
A spokesperson for Discord said the company has teams dedicated to disrupting child exploitation networks and removing “violative” content and “bad actors.”
“We invest heavily in advanced safety tools and proactive detection systems, and we continuously seek to strengthen these measures,” the spokesperson said. “Discord has reported extremist groups and individuals to law enforcement, with our reports playing a material role in prosecution and jail sentences for bad actors.”
The case is a step toward justice for the girl who was victimized at 15. But it took years to collect the evidence needed to bring charges against alleged CVLT leaders.
Toward the end of 2020, Los Angeles-based Homeland Security Investigations special agents Theo Cushing and Jaclyn Jacobson were alerted to a troubling trend.
Law enforcement agencies in multiple states were reporting internet crime cases against children where minors had names carved into their skin.
“That raised all sorts of red flags for the state and local law enforcement, but also for us, since our investigation showed this was happening across state lines, sometimes outside of the country,” Cushing said.
Through their investigation, the federal agents learned that members of CVLT and 764 were building status by getting minors to carve their names into their skin and sharing their collections of “cut signs” in group chats and servers.
As they pored over the gruesome images of disfigured teenage girls, Cushing and Jacobson realized they were not dealing with a standard child sexual abuse case.
“The level of collaboration, the level of technical sophistication and just the physical harm they were causing minors, coupled with child sexual abuse material … That’s why we started dedicating significant effort into disassembling [CVLT],” Cushing said.
The ideology of CVLT and the splinter group 764 blends pedophilia with elements of neo-Nazism, nihilism, sadism and chauvinism, he said in an interview.
CVLT victims were coerced into performing dehumanizing acts like cutting and eating their own hair or referring to themselves as slaves, according to the indictment.
“Some of [the perpetrators] are genuine pedophiles with a sexual interest in children,” Cushing said. “Some of them do have a deeper philosophy that is interested in controlling people.”
Members use extreme content to desensitize children to the point that they are easily manipulated into performing acts of self-harm, according to Cushing. This included displaying videos of animals being tortured to death and women being raped, according to the indictment.
Another accuser in the Los Angeles court case said she was recruited when she was 14. Her identity is also being withheld because of safety concerns.
“One of the videos that I really remember was they had gotten this girl to stab her vagina with a kitchen knife, like a giant one, and it cut her and she was bleeding,” she told The Times, describing a video she was sent by members. “They had me do that too.”
The girl said she was recruited from a mental health server after she had been previously groomed by a pedophile when she was 11.
“For young people … if they are struggling with something, often they turn to the internet,” Cushing said. “It does make it easy for these types of individuals to find people that are already sometimes in a really tough place psychologically.”
Discord can be particularly easy for predators to exploit because its default settings have historically allowed strangers to direct-message kids in the same servers. Abusers can then use private servers, video chats and screen sharing to escalate grooming and coercion without revealing their identities.
Many parents are unaware of how Discord works, leaving minors in environments where predators can pose as peers blending into normal gaming and chat culture. Even if an account is flagged and deleted, the perpetrator can sign up for a new one and rejoin the same servers.
While much of the collaboration among alleged CVLT members and the production of child sexual abuse material took place on Discord, the sharing of photos of names cut into skin and the extortion operations often took place on many other platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Telegram, according to Homeland Security Investigations.
Amir Ehsaei, special agent in charge of the FBI’s counter-terrorism division in Los Angeles, warned that predators in groups like 764 and CVLT operate in all corners of the internet — the dark web, the open web, gaming platforms and social media applications.
“Anything that has a connection and can be in the online world, they can target,” he said. “They can be anywhere.”
As Cushing and Jacobson continued reviewing victims’ cases, they gathered an understanding of how CVLT operated and began creating a suspect list of usernames belonging to presumed leaders.
Tracking down the people behind the usernames proved challenging. Then, a breakthrough emerged halfway across the country.
The first-generation college freshman arrived in the quiet Midwestern college town of Ames, Iowa, hoping to escape the man who had blackmailed her online since she was 16. She blocked him and deleted her social media accounts, but he did not give up that easily.
He found her on a new account and threatened to release pornographic photos of her on the internet if she didn’t comply with his demands, according to the Iowa State University Police Department.
Too afraid to tell her parents and unable to focus on her studies, she reported that she was harassed to the Iowa State University Police Department in November 2020.
The initial officer assigned to the case was stymied by the fake names, addresses and financial accounts the person used to conceal his identity.
But Kami Feld, a young officer with the university police department, could not get the case out of her mind and decided to try her hand at solving it.
She pored through piles of subpoenaed data linked to the person’s online accounts before she found something useful — an instance in which the man had used his real information when transferring money from account to account.
“He just happened to slip up one time, and then I was able to use that slip up and then just start going down the rabbit hole,” Feld told The Times.
Feld said she had found Borge, one of the four alleged key members of CVLT. In analyzing his subpoenaed data, she also found more than a dozen of his alleged victims and began sharing information with relevant law enforcement agencies.
This brought her in contact with Homeland Security Investigations, which had been working to identify Borge as part of its efforts to take down CVLT.
In August 2021, Feld and Homeland Security Investigations special agents traveled to Hawaii and served a search warrant at Borge’s home in rural Pāhoa, bringing the officer face to face with the man she had dedicated months to hunting. She asked him how he had become so tech savvy.
“He just kind of bowed his head,” said Feld, “and he said, ‘obviously not tech savvy enough, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’ ”
While Feld’s dedication to the freshman’s case helped lead to the indictment of Borge, three other women told The Times they felt their local police departments failed to take their reports seriously.
The girl recruited at 14, who had been previously groomed when she was 11, said that reporting her abuse to the police made her life worse.
A turning point came the night Rohan told her to hang herself in December 2019, she said. In the middle of her attempt to do so, her dog started to bark loudly, leading her parents to knock on her bedroom door. She aborted the suicide attempt.
In that moment, something seemed to click in her mind and she became defiant.
Rohan told her to drink bleach. She said no. He told her to have sex with her dog. She said no. He told her she’d regret it. She went to sleep.
In the morning she woke up to a set of horrifying text messages from her Girl Scout friends — “Is this you?”
Rohan had released the graphic photos and videos he had of her and they were rapidly spreading among her peers, she said. In a panic she called the detective who handled her earlier abuse case.
The results, she said, were disastrous. The detective accused her of failing to be safe on the internet, she said. The incident strained her parents’ marriage as they grappled with guilt that their young daughter had now been groomed twice and fear that they could face legal trouble.
“A few months after this all happened, I tried to kill myself again,” she said.
Since her second suicide attempt in February 2020, she has been in therapy for ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, night terrors and struggles with her self-worth, she said.
The 14-year-old victim said the detective assigned to her case referred her to a therapist and then went silent. The next time she heard from law enforcement was in 2024 when Homeland Security Investigations agents reached out as they built their case against CVLT’s leaders, she said.
Local police departments across the country have differing levels of resources when it comes to investigating cybercriminals, said HSI Los Angeles Assistant Special Agent in Charge Eugene Villanueva.
Because law enforcement is held to the boundaries of their jurisdiction, they have limited powers in investigations that cross state or national lines.
This is why departments will often partner with or refer these cases to federal agencies and the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force program to assist. Homeland Security Investigations and the FBI are also working on educating law enforcement partners about how groups such as 764 and CVLT operate, so they can be better prepared to respond to victim cases.
On Jan. 17, after more than four years of investigations led by Cushing, Jacobson, Villanueva and a coalition of national and international law enforcement partners, a federal indictment was filed against the four alleged key members of CVLT: Rane, Walker, Merritt and Borge.
They were each charged in the Central District of California with one count of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise. If convicted as charged they could face life in prison.
With CVLT now largely dismantled, federal law enforcement is focusing on 764, which is considered a domestic terrorist group. The 764 network’s goals include social unrest and the downfall of the world order, according to the Department of Justice. This can be reflected in its efforts to encourage victims to commit suicide and other crimes, Ehsaei of the FBI said.
Bradley Cadenhead founded the group in 2021 when he was 15 years old, taking the name from the first three numbers of the ZIP code of his hometown of Stephenville, Texas. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison on child pornography-related charges in 2023 and the group has since splintered into countless offshoot networks, according to the FBI.
764 is now colloquially used to describe a variety of violent online rings that engage in criminal conduct within the United States and abroad, according to the FBI. The FBI is investigating more than 350 subjects connected to the network. In California, alleged network members have been arrested in Downey, the San Fernando Valley, San Diego and Porterville.
One of the alleged leaders of 764, Baron Cain Martin, was charged in Arizona in October with 29 counts of participating in a child exploitation enterprise, producing child pornography, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and crushing animals, among other offenses.
Assistant Atty. Gen. for National Security John A. Eisenberg called Martin’s alleged actions as part of the 764 “so depraved they defy comprehension.”
“We will use every available tool to protect our children and ensure that those who perpetrate such acts of pure evil face the full force of justice,” he said in a statement.
Ehsaei said that 764 networks have grown significantly in the last few years and that it’s a top priority for the FBI. “We’re trying to do everything we can to combat it,” he said. The agency released a public safety announcement in March about these violent online networks.
Catharine Richmond, a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on the case, said many of the victims “bear not only psychological but physical scars as well.”
“Some of the physical scars even required medical intervention,” she said. These groups “are growing in numbers and brutality. As adults, we need to better educate girls about these devastating online dangers and empower them with resources to avoid and report these groups.”
The victim recruited at 15 said it is hard to stomach the ease with which 764 members continue to target young girls.
She may be called on to testify at the upcoming trial in California, which means reliving the alleged abuse that almost killed her. She still has to live with her abuser’s name scarred on her arm, although she has gotten tattoos to cover it.
After suffering in isolation for so long, she said, she feels compelled to share her story and urged any other victims to report their abusers.
“As much as they humiliate and degrade and bring down every good bit about you, it’s nothing to believe,” she said. “It is their own tiny, decrepit egos bringing you down.”
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