Child Sexual Abuse > FN Girl lied when she accused Chief of CSAM; Life Coach get 9.5 years for CSA and child rape in Queensland

 

Child sex abuse charges stayed against Lake St. Martin chief

By Kathleen Martens

Jun 16, 2025

Child abuse charges have been stayed against Lake St. Martin Chief Chris Traverse in Winnipeg. Photo: APTN.

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The chief of an Anishinaabe Nation in Manitoba saw his child abuse trial end last week after the 10-year-old complainant admitted she lied.

Christopher Traverse, 41, had been on leave as chief of Lake St. Martin First Nation since he was arrested in February 2024. He had been free on bail conditions since then.

Traverse had pleaded not guilty to one count each of sexual assault, sexual interference and possessing and creating child pornography.

But on June 13, the complainant confessed she took the photo of herself, and when her mother found out and questioned her about it, she blamed Traverse.

“I got scared,” the girl said under questioning from defence lawyer Candace Olson.

“You were worried you were going to get in trouble? That your mom would yell at you? That she would take the phone away from you?” asked Olson.

“Yeah,” answered the girl who accused Traverse of taking cellphone pictures of her when she was eight-years-old.

“But that wasn’t the truth?” said Olson.

“It wasn’t the truth,” the girl replied.

Read More: Accused chief assaulted at Winnipeg courthouse, says lawyer

The girl told Winnipeg court she had taken a picture of herself when she was using the toilet that was discovered by her mother, who told her not to do it again.

The girl said she first lied by telling her mother the photo was taken “by accident.”

“You did take it on purpose?” Olson asked.

“Yes,” the girl whispered. She then said “Yes” a little more loudly.

The identity of the girl is under a court-ordered publication ban.

The girl explained she knew how to take “selfies” and make videos on a cellphone and was familiar with social media sites like TikTok and YouTube, noting she received her first phone when she was six-years-old.

She said she no longer has a phone but does use a tablet.

Crown attorney Boyd McGill stayed the charges against Traverse halting the two-day trial that began in March. A stay of proceedings means the Crown can reopen the case within 12 months if new evidence comes to light.

Traverse, who had been ejected from First Nations boards and banned from attending group events, did not respond to a request for comment from APTN News on Monday

“I can confirm that the charges against Chief Traverse have been stayed and the matter is concluded,” Olson said in an email to APTN News on Monday.

“We appeared on Friday (June 13) for the continuation of the trial. At that time, the complainant in the matter admitted during her testimony that she had lied about the allegations against Mr. Traverse and they had not happened.”

McGill, the Crown, did not respond to a request for comment.

I'm guessing they'll need a healing circle of some sort in Lac St Martin FN.

Queensland life coach Wolfgang Raven Wildgrace

jailed for years of child sexual abuse, rape

Wolfgang Wildgrace and Sonya Maria Lindley-Jones were arrested in Far North Queensland in March 2024. (Supplied: Facebook)

In short:

Wolfgang Raven Wildgrace and his then-partner Sonya Maria Lindley-Jones have pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse offences.

Wildgrace, a disgraced life coach who was linked to the controversial 2018 Adelaide Crows pre-season camp, has been sentenced to nine-and-a-half years behind bars.

What's next?

Wildgrace must serve at least half his sentence before being eligible for parole.

abc.net.au/news/life-coach-wolfgang-wildgrace-jailed-child-sexual-abuse/105427014

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A Queensland man who once touted himself as a life coach and therapist, has been sentenced to almost a decade behind bars for rape and child sexual abuse. 

One of Wolfgang Raven Wildgrace's claims was that he helped people "manage their emotions effectively".

It was this reputation that led him to his involvement with an AFL pre-season camp for the Adelaide Crows in 2018 that became notorious for being "psychologically stressful" and offensive to Indigenous players.

But in the years before, he psychologically manipulated two children and sexually abused them.

Wildgrace was sentenced to nine-and-a-half years behind bars at the District Court in Cairns today after pleading guilty to a raft of offences.

They include two counts of rape, two counts of repeated sexual conduct with a child, and more than 30 counts of indecent treatment of a child under 16.

Wolfgang Wildgrace was involved with a highly publicised pre-season training camp with AFL club Adelaide in 2018. (Supplied: Facebook)

The court heard Wildgrace, now 59, committed the offences over eight years from about late 2009 until 2017.

The abuse escalated to occurring on an almost weekly basis, the court heard, with victims made to believe the acts were "sexual training".

Wildgrace's former partner Sonya Maria Lindley-Jones, 52, also pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent treatment of a child under 12.

Her charges related to an incident in which the couple performed a sex act in the presence of children.

A concern was first raised with police in 2015, but the victims did not disclose the abuse when they were questioned.

Sonya Maria Lindley-Jones and Wolfgang Wildgrace have been convicted of child sex offences. (Supplied: Facebook)

Almost a decade later, in early 2024, Wildgrace disclosed the offending to a friend after learning a report was to be made to police.

But after a meeting was called to discuss the offending, he and Lindley-Jones suddenly disappeared from their south-east Queensland home, leaving their bank accounts untouched.

The pair was arrested and charged in March last year, having been found in the far north Queensland town of Kuranda.

'Twisted' therapy

Wildgrace and Lindley-Jones' victims addressed them directly in court, reading out statements in which they detailed how the "twisted sort of therapy" shattered them psychologically.

"You knew the moment you met me that I had no-one to look out for me, to protect me," one victim told Wildgrace.

Another told the court she needed regular therapy to recover from what she had endured.

She said the fact that Wildgrace and Lindley-Jones ran a therapy business themselves had "shattered the trust a person should be able to place in a healthcare professional".

"I hope an unrelenting spotlight follows him for the rest of his days, stripping him of any privacy, comfort or escape, just as he stripped me of mine."

Wildgrace and Lindley-Jones were sentenced at the District Court in Cairns. (ABC News: Brendan Mounter)

'Warped' state of mind

Defence counsel Aaron Dunkerton, representing Wildgrace, said his client was sorry, had suffered abuse as a child, and had PTSD symptoms from a siege in the 1990s when he was held hostage by a gunman.

From 2011, Wildgrace had been drinking heavily and he had also used cannabis and mushrooms, which caused his sense of reality to "become quite warped", Mr Dunkerton said.

Rachelle Logan, acting for Lindley-Jones, said her client was "genuinely remorseful" and had only since understood she was controlled by Wildgrace in their relationship.

Neither Wildgrace nor Lindley-Jones had any criminal history.

In sentencing, Judge Anthony Rafter SC said the offending was serious and involved a "grave breach of trust".

Wildgrace will be eligible for parole at the end of 2028.

Lindley-Jones was sentenced to two-and-a-half years' jail, but the remainder of her sentence is suspended, having already served 14 months. She will be subject to three years' probation on release.

Residential Schools > Hundreds of Millions of Dollars disappear in hunt for children's bodies - none found yet

 

Kamloops... $8 million spent, no bodies and no proof of an outrageous blood libel

Writer Brian Giesbrecht questions how $8 million of taxpayer money could be spent by the Kamloops band, and not either prove their claims of murdered children in unmarked graves, or withdraw it. Western Standard files

Brian Giesbrecht is a retired provincial court judge in Manitoba.

Western Standard Guest Columnist

Published on: 

11 May 2024, 9:30 am

They spent $8,000,000 without putting one shovel in the ground.

That’s how much money the Kamloops Band spent on… exactly what we have no idea. If you remember, that indigenous band claimed that the people running the local residential school had, for unexplained reasons, secretly buried 215 of the students under their care.

To back up that highly unlikely claim, they presented no evidence that would have stood up in any court in the western world. But the federal government immediately gave them $8,000,000 to... well, that’s the mystery. What did they spend that money on?

They have not put one shovel in the ground, but apparently they have somehow spent the $8,000,000 of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

It was claimed that the money would be used to uncover the “heartbreaking truth”. But the only heartbreaking truth seems to be the complete waste of tax dollars.

But it gets worse. A whole lot worse.

Because the Trudeau government — in addition to lowering the flag for six months, and performing teddy bear pantomimes in community ceremonies — then went on to promise not just $8,000,000, but $320,000,000 to any other indigenous community that wanted to make similar claims. 

It should come as no surprise to any sentient being that dozens of poor indigenous communities immediately took the bait and claimed the prize.

So, the result is that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent somehow. But with no graves found. In fact, none have even put a spade in the ground.

Well, that’s not completely correct. The Pine Creek community in Manitoba was absolutely convinced that the stories about indigenous children dying under sinister circumstances, and being secretly buried under the local church, must be true. After all, they had all heard those stories.

But the stories weren’t true. Excavations went ahead, and what was found? Stones.

The stories about priest murders and secret burials are just that. Stories.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of dollars that should be spent on useful endeavours — like providing better health-care for indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians — are being wasted.

Rural paramedic services are being constantly cut back, for example. How many rural residents — indigenous as well as non-indigenous — will die from heart attacks because the paramedics were simply too far away from them to get them to the hospital in time to save their lives?

There’s no money to improve rural medical services because millions are being wasted searching for phantom “missing children” and “unmarked graves”? 

Canadians are beginning to wake up to the fact that they have been had. Somebody is getting rich on all of this government largesse.

But it’s not poor indigenous Canadians. They remain stuck on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. And medical and other essential services go wanting, because of this complete waste.

So, are there people in “unmarked graves”? 

Absolutely. Billions of them in fact. This planet is basically one huge graveyard. The number of marked graves, with headstones naming the person interred, is a tiny fraction of the billions of people who have died on this planet. 

Are the remains of some of the children who died from disease while attending residential school in unmarked graves?

Absolutely. For that matter, so are the remains of many of the children who attended day schools, or no school at all in unmarked graves. There is nothing sinister about this fact of life. It simply means that the families of those children did not keep up the graves and cemeteries where the children were interred. (The vast majority of children who died while enrolled in residential schools are buried on their home reserves.)

This is not a criticism of those families. In fact, some of those families might have died out, and cemetery upkeep became impossible. Others just had different priorities.

So, what we have is just a sad fact of life. Many children died of diseases a hundred plus years ago who would not have died today. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing. And indigenous children died in much greater numbers, for many different reasons. Tuberculosis, in particular, was a major killer of indigenous people.

In fact, tuberculosis is still 290 times higher in the indigenous community than in the mainstream community.

But the fact that death from disease was so much higher in the indigenous community than in the non-indigenous community has nothing to do with residential schools. It has nothing to do with the people running the schools, many of whom devoted their lives to working with indigenous people.

So, we come around to the question —why is $320,000,000 being spent to find the long lost burial places of children, simply because their families decided — for reasons of their own — to not keep up their gravesites?

Because it is not true that there are thousands of “missing children” as alleged. Rather, as Professor Tom Flanagan puts it, in “Grave Error”, there are thousands of “forgotten children.” [Watch here.]

And as the special interlocutor, Kimberley Murray puts it, “These children are not missing, they are buried in local cemeteries.”

Perhaps that’s the reason that Murray’s upcoming National Gathering on Unmarked Burials has been postponed. Because there is nothing to say.

Her six-figure salary, and those of all of her staff and associates, to say nothing of the $320,000,000 that has been spent — somehow — on searching for phantom graves and phantom “missing children,” could have been better spent on the real needs of living children.

We are approaching the three year anniversary of the Kamloops claim that 215 children from the local residential school had been somehow killed and secretly buried in the apple orchard on the school grounds.

There was no good reason to believe that highly improbable claim in the first place.

It was only the foolish and emotional reaction of the Trudeau government, and the incompetence of the media that persuaded Canadians that they should take that nonsensical claim seriously in the first place.

It is time to get back to sanity. Treat those who claim — with no real evidence — that priests murdered and secretly buried children, exactly the same way that we treat those who claim that the Martians have landed, or that aliens have abducted their mothers. 

Be polite. But don’t finance their delusions.

Canadian Convulsions > Trudeau drops another program for helping sexual assault victims - 2nd in a month

 

Another useful program to help women survivors of abuse gets dumped by the Trudeau government. Last month they dropped a program that helped rape survivors in Ontario. This month they drop a program in Manitoba for sex assault survivors. In 8.5 years, Trudeau has done nothing to help protect women and children from sexual abuse, nothing! And he calls himself a feminist!

Manitoba program helping sexual assault survivors

loses federal funding

By Daisy Woelk  Global News

Posted April 12, 2024 3:45 pm

 2 min read

At Manitoba’s largest domestic violence shelter, the 38 beds are near capacity all the time, and stays are

getting longer. The narrative is the same at shelters giving safe housing for women and children across 

the province. Rosanna Hempel reports. – Nov 2, 2023

A Manitoba organization helping sexual assault survivors is scrambling after 

federal funding for one of its programs was stopped.

On April 3, Ottawa’s justice department notified Pinawa’s Survivor’s Hope Crisis Centre (SHCC) in an email, that funding for its recovery and healing program ended March 31.

“It was a devastating blow,” said Coral Kendel, the centre’s executive director.

She said this means the program is about $75,000 down, adding at this rate it will barely last past May, sustained by savings and community donations.

“We’re the only such program in the entire Interlake Eastern Region who provides supportive services to survivors of sexualized violence, and those indirectly impacted,” she said. “We deliver hundreds of counselling sessions each year, for folks 13 (years old) plus all over the region.”

Ottawa said the cash injections were a part of a three-year funding commitment that was set to end on March 31 this year. But, Kendel said the cut-off was still unexpected.

“Based on our relationship (with the department), and based on communication that we had with them back in December when they reached out — saying they’re looking to continue funding for their sexual assault centres — we were anticipating that it would be continued, and the government would see that as a priority.”

A federal spokesperson said the email was to “gauge their interest in potentially continuing the project. That email made it clear that not all funding requests were guaranteed to be approved.”

The spokesperson said comment could not be made on decisions about funding for specific projects, but there are a “a number reasons funding may not be allocated, including resource limitations.”

Kendel said the community has gathered to try and help SHCC with donations through a go-fund me page started by a survivor. Private donations and foundation donors have also had a part to play, she said.

Overall, support has come out to around $10,000, Kendel said. But, “we need something sustainable,” she said, adding the centre can’t do this every year if it survives that long.

Rate of family violence victims in Canada in 2016 which were physically or sexually assaulted, by province:

I believe the high (extremely high) numbers in northern Canada are a reflection of the high indigenous populations there. No government has ever created any comprehensive, effective program to address this extraordinary issue.