Day One: Neo-Nazi’s Child-Enticing Trial Opens

The federal trial of neo-Nazi leader Kevin Alfred Strom for allegedly sexually enticing a minor and intimidating a witness opened yesterday, and some of the details that emerged weren’t pretty (here and here). Strom, the 50-year-old, Virginia-based leader of the National Vanguard hate group until he took a “leave of absence” last year, is accused of attempting to start a sexual relationship with the girl, who is now 12, when she was 10.

In the first day of testimony, Strom’s wife, neo-Nazi activist Elisha Strom, described returning home one day to find her husband naked, sexually aroused, and staring at a computer screen. He ran into the bathroom, she alleged, leaving behind images on the screen in which he had superimposed photos of the heads of two 14-year-old girls he knew well — the neo-Nazi twins who make up the infamous singing duet Prussian Blue and were then associated with National Vanguard — onto photos of grown, naked lesbians having sex.

Elisha Strom also testified that she caught her husband on another occasion looking at pictures of young girls and, when she tried to phone someone, struck Strom with the phone after he began choking her. A year later, Strom reported his wife to police for assaulting him with the phone and filed several legal motions against her (these actions are part of the basis of the witness intimidation charges against him). Testimony also revealed that Elisha Strom finally turned her husband in to the authorities — a fact that she has strenuously denied in many statements to white supremacist websites and activists.

Kevin Strom also faces possession of child pornography charges in a separate federal trial scheduled for next January.