After learning she was of Lakota descent around 1996, Melissa Leone, who was adopted, hungered to connect to her Native American tribe.
“I was grabbing a hold of any and all connections that felt good or safe,” she said.
Leone thought she found that after a relative recommended she talk with a self-described medicine man named Nathan Chasing Horse. As a child, Chasing Horse had acted in the 1990 Oscar-winning movie Dances with Wolves. As an adult, he traveled North America performing healing ceremonies.
In 2005, Leone, then a mother of a seven-year old daughter, attended a ritual in which Chasing Horse said he was connecting with ancestral spirits. “It was like he turned the lights on in a dark room,” Leone said. “It all just felt like I belonged. He had this ability to charm you.”
Eventually, after becoming part of Chasing Horse’s group, the Circle, attending healing ceremonies and surviving cancer, Leone started to see him as a messianic figure.
“He could say, ask or do anything, and there was no wrong,” Leone said.
And that was where it all went bad.
The belief that Chasing Horse had healing powers made it easy for him to sexually abuse minors, including Leone’s daughter, according to a criminal indictment. Chasing Horse now faces 21 charges, including sexual assault, sexual assault with a minor, first-degree kidnapping of a minor and the use of a minor in producing pornography.
He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial started last Tuesday in Las Vegas, throwing light on a shocking case of what seems to have operated like a cult and also on the often under-reported area of sexual or violent exploitation of Native American women.
Leone and others say the indictment is about more than Chasing Horse facing justice for his alleged sexual abuse. They see his behavior, including also allegedly sexually abusing and manipulating adults, as part of a larger problem of people in his position taking advantage of those they offer to heal – and of police not doing enough to stop them.
“This is about medicine people, and all Indian country, exploiting their people under the guise of spirituality,” Leone said. “That must end.”
In Dances with Wolves Chasing Horse starred as a character named Smiles a Lot and made a “noticeable cameo”, the New York Times reported. “The beautiful Indian child Smiles a Lot … comes of age during the film through his first tomahawk murder,” the newspaper wrote.
As an adult, Chasing Horse spoke at powwows around the country.
At a 2013 Fort Mojave tribe gathering, Chasing Horse shared how doctors diagnosed his mother with terminal throat cancer and told the family to “prepare because she’s not going to be here very long”.
But they held a ceremony, during which a messenger told her she would live. When she returned to the “white doctors” in New York, tests showed she was cancer-free, Chasing Horse said.
He then explained how a ceremonial whistle’s healing powers worked.
“The purpose of blowing this whistle is you’re going to give a part of your life to that person you’re blowing for, so be sure that you mean it because your life will be shortened a few years,” Chasing Horse said. “If you don’t do it from your heart, maybe they’ll take your whole life. That’s the exchange.”
Chasing Horse frequently instilled that sort of fear in his followers, said Fernando Trujillo, who from 2006 until 2014 was part of the Circle, which at its peak had about 300 members, the Associated Press reported.
Chasing Horse asked Trujillo to travel with his crew after a ceremony because he learned Trujillo could sing.
“I felt honored to know somebody like that,” Trujillo said.
But he started to see how Chasing Horse womanized and convinced people to give him their money.
“Let’s say you need help in some way, and the doctors ain’t trying to do much for you, you might say, ‘Hey, I think I want to go to a healer,’” said Trujillo. Chasing Horse “was able to manipulate a lot of people” by portraying himself as “the ultimate of medicine people or somebody with a spiritual connection that others didn’t have”.
When Leone was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, her 14-year-old daughter, Ren Leone-LaCroix, traveled to Las Vegas to ask Chasing Horse for help, according to court records. She prepared a meal and a pipe for him. He then took her into his bedroom closet, where he told her it was “a life for a life and explained that it meant taking her first born and her virginity”, records state.
Chasing Horse allegedly raped her and then took her on the road with him, where he raped her every night, she told ABC News.
Leone also survived cancer three times.
“He was saving people’s lives,” Leone said she believed at the time.
He allegedly continued to sexually abuse Leone-LaCroix for years.
In 2015, leaders of the Fort Peck tribe in Montana banned Chasing Horse from holding ceremonies on their reservation because of alleged human trafficking, drug dealing, spiritual abuse and intimidation of tribal members, IndiJ Public Media, an Indigenous news organization, reported.
“Lilda Christian, another supporter of Chasing Horse, said [she was] to seek out the actor because there are no legitimate medicine men around the reservation and the local ones have served time in prison for sex crimes,” IndiJ Public Media reported in 2015.
More than four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women have experienced violence and more than half have experienced sexual violence, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.
Chasing Horse is “not a one-off”, said Crystal Lee, CEO and founder of the organization United Natives, which offers services to victims of sexual abuse. Since 2024, purported medicine men among the Saskatchewan Cree; the Ojibway-Anishinaabeg; and the Ute Mountain Ute have all been convicted of sexual assault.
“It’s a big elephant in the room of holding our Native men accountable for being perpetrators among our own women, children and family community,” Lee said.
At 16, the age of consent in Nevada, Leone-LaCroix told her mom she wanted to become one of Chasing Horse’s spiritual wives.
Chasing Horse told Leone nothing had happened between them and that they were asking her permission, she said.
Leone told ABC News that she “looked at it as an honor” and that “when she told me that she loved him, that was enough”.
She said she had not been aware that he had allegedly previously raped her daughter and threatened her that if she said anything, her mother would die. She also did not learn until later that after Leone-LaCroix became one of his wives, he allegedly regularly beat her.
However, Leone had heard other allegations.
“He would always have evidence to justify that what the victims were saying was not true,” Leone recalled. “I’m not ignorant, but the brainwashing and the spiritual manipulation he uses to control each one of us in there. I didn’t understand what happened to me.”
Trujillo said he left the Circle when he learned that Chasing Horse had sexually abused a girl, who had become like a niece to Trujillo.
He wanted to leave before 2014, but Chasing Horse would “fearmonger that if you left his Circle, your family would die”, Trujillo said.
In 2023, eight years after the Fort Peck tribal leaders banished Chasing Horse, Las Vegas police arrested him at the home he shared with five wives.
The Associated Press reported that Chasing Horse told his wives to “shoot it out” with police officers if they ever tried to “break their family apart”. Police also found video of him having sex with a minor and sexual photos of a young girl, according to court records.
Chasing Horse also faces sexual exploitation and assault charges in Canada.
A Nevada judge dismissed the case stemming from the 2023 arrest because of the prosecution’s “improper instruction to the grand jury”, But a grand jury again indicted him in 2024.
The prosecuting and defense attorneys did not respond to the Guardian’s interview requests.
Despite the earlier dismissal, Leone said she was “100% confident” he will be convicted.
She also remains cancer-free – but now realizes it wasn’t because of Chasing Horse.
When Leone’s daughter left Chasing Horse and told her she had been raped, she said: “But mom, this is the reason why you’re not sick.”
Leone told her: “I am not giving Nathan the power over my wellness or my sickness.”
