An aboriginal spiritual healer accused of carrying out a series of alleged rapes and sexual assaults will stand trial on the Gold Coast.
Stephen Norman Richards, 79, who runs a business called Holographic Kinetics that offers “dreamtime healing” services and courses, was charged in October and appeared in Southport Magistrates Court for a committal hearing last Monday.
Mr Richards did not enter a plea to nine charges, including five of rape and three of sexual assault, and Magistrate Nicholas Brown committed him to stand trial at Southport District Court at a date which is yet to be determined, the Gold Coast Bulletin reported.
Police allege Mr Richards committed the offences against the same victim at multiple Gold Coast locations in 2023, and listed his occupation as “alternative therapist” in court documents.
Mr Richards was granted bail with additional conditions on top of existing bans on contacting the alleged victim and a named witness.
On his business website and social media accounts Mr Richards describes himself as the founder and creator of “holographic kinetics”, which he says can help with attempted suicide and self-harm, a variety of mental illnesses, Tourette’s, drug and alcohol addiction, PTSD, “intergenerational trauma”, and “interdimensional interference”.
“Dreamtime healing is about what I was taught by my aboriginal grandmother and mother about our cultural past and the multi-dimensions of our world and about the spirits of man, the ancestors, the totems, the animal spirits, and the spirits in nature, it was from this our research led to understanding of the balancing and the imbalances of man’s internally- created realities through the cycles of dimensions that man calls ‘time’,” his website states.
“Dreamtime healing can access the internal dimensional world of all living things, the life force, the invisible, man at times calls spirit, [different from the soul] where all creation is first set-up, and then flows through into the visible external world of reality.
“It is an advanced aboriginal-healing modality, incorporating the applied knowledge of Lore that governs the internal invisible dimensions of life, which no man can escape, these are different from our external laws that govern our physical reality.”
Mr Richards also claims to have taught courses on the method to 1,600 students from 42 countries as of 2023, and said he was nominated for the 2007 Australian of the Year and the 2005 Human Rights Medal for “achieved outcomes in indigenous communities”.
Header image: Stephen Richards (Facebook).
