A Saskatchewan healer will stand trial in 2025 after pleading not guilty to a dozen charges of sexual assault.
Cecil Wolfe, who says he is a traditional healer, had originally pleaded guilty to a dozen counts of sexual assault involving his female patients in Saskatoon, Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and Loon Lake between 2013 and 2021.
Wolfe is now scheduled for a jury trial set to begin on Feb. 18, 2025, at Saskatoon’s Court of King’s Bench after court allowed him to change his plea in September to argue his innocence.
Before changing his plea, a joint submission from the prosecution and the defence suggested a nine-and-half-year sentence.
In the earlier proceedings, Wolfe had signed a statement of facts saying he would often ask the women to visit while wearing a skirt, then ask them to remove their underwear before he began touching them inappropriately. Wolfe claimed what he was doing was not sexual and that he was removing “bad medicine.”
The statement of facts, to which his defence counsel and the Crown prosecutors agreed, stated women sometimes didn’t question Wolfe, who is Indigenous, because he is an elder and because they believed he was a healer.
Court allowed Wolfe to change his plea after deciding that he may not have understood what he was pleading guilty to and how severe the consequences might be.