A Trump-appointed federal judge denied a Satanist child exploitation network founder’s appeal on Tuesday, upholding his 80-year punishment in Texas.
Bradley Cadenhead, 20, failed a second legal challenge against his May 2023 sentencing on child pornography crimes in Erath County after creating 764, a still-online group the FBI says grooms minors into self-harm and sexual acts on camera, court documents show. Cadenhead’s petition, claiming he lacked a competent legal team, “is essentially a rehash” of his state-level appeal that was dismissed in November 2023 because it “was without legal or factual merit,” U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman said Tuesday.
An attorney for Cadenhead’s federal appeal did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Cadenhead’s appeals argued that his trial lawyer gave “ineffective” services by convincing him to plead guilty without exploring options for psychological assessment.
The child abuser created 764 on the chat platform Discord when he was 15, naming it after digits from his Texas zip code, court records show. The FBI labels 764 and groups like it as “nihilistic” extremist movements driven by hatred of humanity and a desire for societal collapse. Alleged 764 acolytes have been accused or found guilty of spreading child pornography and convincing minors to perform degrading acts such as harming pets, cutting abusers’ names into their skin or filming their own suicides.
Cadenhead’s appeal focused on his experience with bullying, inadequate parental supervision and other aspects of his “troubled childhood.” Before he started 764, Cadenhead once called his father in tears after a friend convinced him to watch a video of a man being beaten and stabbed in the face with a screwdriver, he told a psychologist. He said he later thought the video “must not be that bad,” watched it again and eventually accepted someone’s invite to a chat room with more violent content, setting the stage for him to begin extorting fellow children, the doctor wrote.
“By putting [Cadenhead’s] crime into the perspective of a lonely, abused teenager attempting to get attention, [the psychologist] would have been able to explain the offense conduct in a more sympathetic manner,” an attorney told the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in November 2024. “She then would have used an evidence-based risk assessment to show that [Cadenhead] would be able to be a functioning member of society through therapy and medication.”
Such testimony could have led to probation or other more lenient punishment, the lawyer argued.
Republican Erath County District Attorney M. Alan Nash warned the state not to grant him parole in a May 2023 document that listed the gruesome material found in the boy’s possession.
The content showed his “interest in, fascination with, and proclivity for” violence, including “INFANT murder and sexual assault,” “CHILD mutilation, torture, and death” and “human self-mutilation,” Nash said.
“THIS DEFENDANT IS DANGEROUS,” the district attorney warned.
The boy admitted that another Discord group known as”Greggy’s Cult” inspired his extortion tactics, court documents show. A federal grand jury indicted alleged Greggy’s Cult leaders on child exploitation and child pornography charges in December.
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