Fresno County Sheriff's Office
- A federal grand jury indicted Nathan Larson on 5 charges related to an alleged kidnapping.
- Federal prosecutors say he used Discord, Kik, and a fringe chat room to talk with the 12-year-old.
- The failed Congressional candidate admitted in a 2018 HuffPost interview that he was a pedophile.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
A self-proclaimed white supremacist who has advocated for the legalization of child porn used social-media platforms to solicit sexually explicit images and messages from a 12-year-old girl before kidnapping her, according to allegations made by federal prosecutors in court documents obtained by Insider.
Nathan Larson, 40, was arrested in December when police say he kidnapped the girl from her Fresno, California, home, and planned to fly with her to his home in Virginia. Police intercepted Larson and the girl during a layover in Denver on December 14, the Fresno Sheriff’s Office said in a press release. He was indicted on five federal charges including kidnapping, transportation of a minor, coercion and enticement of a minor, sexual exploitation of a minor, and receipt and distribution of material involving child exploitation.
The January 28 indictment comes after reports documenting Larson’s white supremacist and pro-pedophilia statements. In a 2018 interview with HuffPost, while he was running for Congress in Virginia, he admitted to being a pedophile, though insisted he’d never committed any crimes.
In October, Larson met the victim on Discord, an instant messaging and voice chat platform, the federal complaint alleges. According to the complaint, Larson also communicated with the victim, who is not named in the filing, via Google Hangouts, the messaging app Kik, and a fringe rape and kidnapping fetish website that Larson himself allegedly ran. Larson is said to have used these platforms to receive explicit images from the girl, though he knew she was only 12 years old, according to the indictment.
When asked about Larson’s indictment, a Discord spokesperson told Insider in a statement, “We take the safety of all Discord users, but most importantly our younger users, incredibly seriously.” The spokesperson said that when the company became aware of this case, the platform banned users, shut down servers, and continues to be “engaged with law enforcement.” The spokesperson did not confirm whether Larson himself was banned from the app.
Kik did not immediately respond to an inquiry. The anonymous platform has been used by pedophiles to seek out explicit images from young girls, as The New York Times reported in 2016. Last week, a man in Illinois was arrested and admitted to police that he used Kik to send and receive child pornography, according to local news outlet WAND 17.
The complaint alleges that Larson solicited explicit photos from the 12-year-old girl online
The criminal complaint, filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, alleges Larson told the victim that he planned to "take her virginity and get her pregnant."
To gain full access to Larson's website last fall, the girl told investigators she had to "send a sexually explicit picture of herself" to Larson with the web address written on her body, according to court filings.
According to the complaint, Larson used the same username, "Leucosticte," as he used on pro-pedophilia chatrooms in the past, which HuffPost reported on in 2018.
Throughout a December conversation on the pedophilia kink website, which was excerpted and included in court documents, the user said to be Larson and the girl engaged in a sexual conversation and discussed the possibility of kidnapping. The conversation shows that the user described to the child certain poses to take photos in and upload those photos to the message board.
Larson and the victim then began messaging on Google Hangouts, where they "discussed the plans in detail" for the kidnapping, according to the complaint.
The complaint goes on to allege that the girl told investigators that once she and Larson got to the airport in California on December 14, as they were heading to his home in Virginia, he began kissing and touching her in public.
Investigators say they later found child pornography on Larson's cell phone that appeared to show the rape of a girl between 7 and 8 years old.
Since Larson's arrest, more people have come forward with information related to his online activities and communications with young girls, according to Tony Botti, the public information officer at the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. "We appreciate their willingness to get involved and encourage more to do so," he said in a January email to Insider.
Larson has advocated for the legalization of child porn
Fresno County Sheriff's Office
As investigators noted in the criminal complaint, Larson has been vocal about being a pedophile. He previously ran two websites for "incels," or involuntary celibates. Incel communities feature violent and misogynistic language and can overlap with fringe pedophile communities. The incel forums believed to be run by Larson in the past included private spaces for pedophiles. HuffPost's 2018 investigation revealed that the IP address for Larson's congressional campaign website matched those of the message boards.
HuffPost also reported that in an online post in 2018, Larson said, "feminism is the problem, and rape is the solution." His advocacy for chauvinism played a huge role in his failed campaign for a Virginia House seat.
"We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands," Larson said in a 2018 campaign manifesto. "The purpose of women, in a patriarchal society, is to be reliable conformists to what is expected of them, and to be judged primarily based on their beauty and cooperativeness, i.e., their averageness; and only secondarily on the basis of intelligence."
He also said in that manifesto that he supported the "legalization of child pornography possession and distribution" and called Adolf Hitler a "white supremacist hero." He also sought to protect "benevolent white supremacy."