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Many years ago, Melbourne public radio station 3RRR used to air a Saturday morning show by the Australian Skeptics. One of their favourite New Age whackadoodles was a bloke who claimed to be able to cure cancer by looking up women’s skirts (from memory, they kept their knickers on). The faith-healing upskirter seems almost benign in comparison to some of the creeps preying on women and girls under the cloak of ‘indigenous culture’.
As I reported for Good Oil recently, Dances With Wolves actor Nathan Chasing Horse, celebrated Lakota ‘medicine man’ and spiritual leader, was recently sentenced to 37 years to life for sexually assaulting indigenous women and girls in a decades-long reign of rape. A jury convicted him on 13 counts after victims described how he exploited sacred ceremonies to groom and rape them, including a girl who was just 14 when the abuse began. Families spoke of shattered faith and lasting trauma.
Chasing Horse used a familiar playbook for these tribal predators: trust earned through cultural reverence, then shattered by predation. An ‘Aboriginal spiritual healer’ in Australia is in the dock for turning sacred rituals into a rape racket.
A man claiming to be a spiritual healer has been charged for allegedly drugging, raping and sexually assaulting women over four months on the Gold Coast.
Police said a 21-year-old woman and 23-year-old woman took part in what was meant to be a spiritual healing ceremony at the 50-year-old man’s Southport apartment about 10pm on January 6.
Stephen Norman Richards (79), founder of “Holographic Kinetics” and self-described Dreamtime expert, has been committed to stand trial on nine charges. Richards, who claims to have once scored nominations for Australian of the Year, runs a booming international business peddling courses on ‘interdimensional interference’, ancestral spirits and curing everything from PTSD to ‘intergenerational trauma’.
“It will be alleged that a 50-year-old man administered the women with stupefying and hallucinogenic substances causing them to lose consciousness,” Queensland Police said.
"“It will further be alleged that the man then raped and assaulted the 23-year-old, resulting in neck and facial injuries” […]
Police also charged the man in relation to alleged dealings with two other women last year after subsequent investigations.
“Dreamtime healing is about what I was taught by my aboriginal grandmother and mother,” his website gushes, promising access to the ‘internal dimensional world’ where all creation is set up. Sixteen hundred students from 42 countries supposedly lapped it up. Now one alleged victim says the healing session ended with drugs, unconsciousness and brutal assault. Just another day in ‘the world’s oldest living culture’.
This isn’t isolated bad apples. It’s a pattern. Vulnerable people, often women and girls seeking genuine healing, are drawn in by the exotic allure of indigenous mysticism repackaged for the modern wellness grift. ‘Alternative therapist’ becomes cover for predatory crimes.
Australia’s reflexive deference to anything wrapped in ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘cultural’ leaves victims doubly betrayed. We’re told to celebrate these traditions without question, pour taxpayer money into ‘culturally appropriate’ programs, and nod sagely at claims of unique spiritual wisdom. Yet too often the result is predators hiding behind feathers and bunches of smoking gum leaves.
Richards was granted bail with extra conditions. Chasing Horse’s victims waited years for justice. Meanwhile, the wellness industry keeps churning out gurus promising ancestral cures for modern woes. Intergenerational trauma, they say: conveniently ignoring that some of the worst trauma is being inflicted right now by the very people claiming to heal it.
Time to drop the romantic mysticism. A rapist in a possum-skin cloak or a grass skirt is still a rapist.
