Greene man guilty of child porn

The founder of a self-described "white nationalist" group pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to possessing child pornography.

Kevin Alfred Strom was originally scheduled for a trial this week on several child porn charges. Instead, the 51-year-old pleaded guilty to a single count and prosecutors dropped the remaining charges against him.

During the hearing, Strom said he is neither a white supremacist nor a neo-Nazi and maintained that he's been threatened in jail after media accounts described him as such, said defense lawyer Andrea Harris.

"The bottom line is that he feels like those terms don't accurately reflect what his beliefs are," Harris said. "He adamantly denies being either one of those things."

However, others said Strom's denial lacks credibility.

"I find that the most ludicrous comment I've heard this decade," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks hate groups.

Strom was once part of the leadership of the National Alliance, a West Virginia-based organization Potok said was a white supremacist group.

Strom edited some of the organization's publications and produced and sometimes hosted its shortwave radio and Internet broadcast.

"Jews are so dominant and influential in debasing and deceiving white women and girls on such a massive scale that, to any decent white person, no forgiveness is possible," Strom said at the beginning of one August 2003 radio show.

Still, his wife, Elisha Strom, said in a telephone interview Monday that neither she nor her husband would ever have described themselves as white supremacists or neo-Nazis.

"In our political world there are subtle differences," Elisha Strom said. "The thing I kind of wonder more about is that he doesn't seem upset that he's being called a pedophile, but he has a problem being called a neo-Nazi."

Elisha Strom, who is estranged but not divorced from her husband, said they moved to Greene County in 2000, when Kevin Strom was working for National Alliance.

They split with the group after a falling out around 2005 and Kevin Strom created the National Vanguard, Elisha Strom said.

Things started to break down for the couple in 2006, after Elisha said she returned home one day and found her husband sitting naked in front of the computer looking at child pornography.

Afterward, in an apparent attempt to patch things up, the two signed a notarized contract in which Kevin Strom agreed to seek treatment for pedophilia. But the couple's relationship continued to disintegrate.

In August 2006, investigators seized Strom's computer during a raid of his home. He was arrested in January 2007 after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of witness intimidation and possession of child pornography.

Elisha Strom was the alleged victim in the witness intimidation case. She said her husband attacked her to keep her from coming forward about the child porn, and that he filed a lawsuit and criminal charges against her.

In April, Kevin Strom was indicted on an additional charge of attempting to sexually entice a minor. Authorities said he'd been fixated on a 10-year-old classmate of his stepdaughter's.

During an October trial on the enticement and intimidation charges, witnesses testified that Kevin Strom sent the 10-year-old girl flowers and presents and wrote a love poem in which he expressed a desire to marry her.

However, judge Norman K. Moon threw out the charges. Though he said there was "overwhelming evidence" that Strom was sexually attracted to the girl, Moon ruled that there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with attempting to sexually coerce her.

Elisha Strom testified against her husband at the October trial, saying he attacked her to keep her from outing his predilection for child pornography and that he filed a lawsuit against her and sought to have her charged criminally in an effort to keep her from aiding authorities.

Moon also threw out the intimidation charge, which was based almost entirely on her testimony.

The trial for the remaining pornography charges was postponed until Monday. In a summary of what the case would have been had it gone to court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Gould wrote that Strom later acknowledged to authorities that he'd downloaded child pornography.

Strom will remain at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail until his sentencing. He could face up to a decade in prison at his April sentencing in U.S. District Court, though federal guidelines could call for a much lighter sentence.