MANISTEE COUNTY, Mich. – A 47-year-old man on Michigan’s west side will spend the next 30 years behind bars for their role in creating a network that forced children into “heinous abuse.”
According to authorities, Richard Anthony Reyna Densmore pleaded guilty to sexually exploiting a child as part of a larger indictment that charged him with other child exploitation offenses.
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Densmore was a member of a group of violent extremists who aim to normalize the production, possession and distribution of child pornography to desensitize and corrupt children toward future acts of violence. Authorities said the group targets, grooms and extorts victims online and demands its victims to engage and share media of self-mutilation, sexual acts, animal abuse, acts of random violence and more in an effort to disrupt society.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said Densmore “orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence.”
Officials said Densmore was notorious in the group under the name “Rabid,” where he created online communities for other members to recruit children by getting involved in communities that children frequent, and then pressuring the children into self-harm and engaging in graphic sexual acts.
Densmore reportedly advertised live streams of children engaging in self-harm that he called “cutshows.” He used the children’s personal information and explicit content to pressure the children into self-harm.
Children reportedly had cut “Rabid,” and the name of the community Densmore created into their arms with razor blades and box cutters.
When he failed to pressure a minor girl into sending him a shirtless photo, Densmore paid another user of the group to help him secure an explicit photo of the girl. Densmore then used that photo to pressure the minor into creating more sexually explicit media.
Densmore was sentenced to 30 years behind bars, the maximum sentence for sexual exploitation of a child.
