Rhianan Rudd is at the centre of tragic documentary The Schoolgirl Terrorist? as her family reveal how she was radicalised online.
Rhianan’s mum Emily Carter and brother Brandon tell the shocking story of the teenager, who became involved with extremists while still at school.
By the age of 15, Rhianan was gouging a Nazi swastika into her forehead. She even told her mum that she planned to make a bomb.
Rhianan Rudd is at the centre of new documentary The Schoolgirl Terrorist? (Credit: Channel 4)
Rhianan also told terrified friends that she planned to blow up a synagogue after developing a hatred for Jewish people.
Documentary viewers will learn how Rhianan was radicalised by her mum’s former right wing extremist boyfriend, Dax Mallaburn.
She also spent up to 15 hours a day in lockdown talking online to another US extremist called Christopher Cook.
Rhianan, who was autistic, was later moved into a children’s home called Bluebell House. Tragically, she later took her own life.
Both Bluebell House and Cook feature heavily in Channel 4’s The Schoolgirl Terrorist?, but what else do we know about them?
What happened to Christopher Cook in The Schoolgirl Terrorist?
Emily is the first to explain Rhianan’s contact with Christopher Cook in The Schoolgirl Terrorist?. She says she gave her daughter a computer during lockdown. Shortly afterwards, Rhianan began talking about a “Chris”.
“One day she came down and she went, ‘Oh, my friend Chris… from school,” Emily recalls. “‘We’ve been doing this history thing on Germany’. And she became obsessed with Germany. She did talk to Chris a lot.”
Following Rhianan’s death, it emerged that the FBI had arrested Cook for neo Nazi offences in the US. His digital devices were searched and investigators found Rhianan had also been “sexually exploited” by Cook.
“He groomed Rhianan to the point where she had sent him sexual videos of herself nude,” Emily says.
Cook was arrested in August 2020. FBI agents raided his home and the homes of two other men. They discovered weapons and Nazi and white supremacist material.
This was around the same time Rhianan had been speaking to Cook online.
In 2023, Cook and two other men pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges. They had been plotting to attack a power grid “in furtherance of white supremacist ideology.”
Christopher Cook is currently in prison in America (Credit: Channel 4/ US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio)
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