LAS VEGAS (AP) — Nathan Chasing Horse, the former “Dances with Wolves” actor accused of sexual abuse, was temporarily thrown out of court Monday after he disrupted proceedings with demands he be allowed to fire his defense attorney a week before trial.
Judge Jessica Peterson in Las Vegas ordered his jury trial to proceed next week as planned.
Chasing Horse has pleaded not guilty to 21 charges, including allegations that he sexually assaulted women and girls and that he filmed himself sexually abusing a girl younger than 14. Prosecutors allege he used his reputation as a spiritual leader and healer to take advantage of Native American women and girls over two decades.
Peterson ordered him removed from court Monday for trying to speak over her. He argued that his attorney, Craig Mueller, did not come to visit him and did not file timely. He asked that a public defender who previously represented him be his attorney.
Mueller, a private defense attorney, told the court his client was ready and privately told the judge that one of his investigators had visited with Chasing Horse. He declined to comment to The Associated Press.
Best known for portraying the character Smiles A Lot in the 1990 movie “Dances with Wolves,” Chasing Horse was born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, which is home to the Sicangu Sioux, one of the seven tribes of the Lakota nation.
After starring in the Oscar-winning film, according to prosecutors, Chasing Horse began propping himself up as a self-proclaimed Lakota medicine man while traveling around North America to perform healing ceremonies. When he was arrested in 2023, he was living in a North Las Vegas house with his five wives, according to prosecutors.
The case sent shock waves across Indian Country. The original indictment was dismissed in 2024 after the Nevada Supreme Court ruled prosecutors abused the grand jury process when they provided a definition of grooming as evidence without any expert testimony. However, the court left open the possibility of charges being refiled, and a new indictment was brought later that year.
Prosecutors claim Chasing Horse led a cult called The Circle, and his followers believed he could speak with spirits. His victims went to him for medical help, according to a transcript from a grand jury hearing.
Prosecutors expect the trial to last three weeks. It is scheduled to begin Monday.
FILE - Nathan Chasing Horse sits in court, Feb. 8, 2023, in North Las Vegas, Nev. (AP Photo/Ty O'Neil, File)
Denmark and Greenland are seeking a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration doubled down on its intention to take over the strategic Arctic island, a Danish territory.
President Donald Trump has argued that the U.S. needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a select group of lawmakers that it was the administration’s intention to eventually purchase Greenland — a self-governing territory of Denmark and part of NATO — rather than use military force.
The remarks, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were made in a classified briefing Monday evening on Capitol Hill, according to a person with knowledge of his comments who was granted anonymity because it was a private discussion.
On Wednesday, Rubio told reporters that Trump has been talking about acquiring Greenland since his first term. He was on Capitol Hill for a briefing with the entire Senate and House, where questions from lawmakers centered not only on the administration’s operation to capture former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro — but also on Trump's recent comments about Greenland.
Tensions with NATO members escalated after the White House said Tuesday that the “U.S. military is always an option." Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned earlier this week that a U.S. takeover would amount to the end of NATO.
“The Nordics do not lightly make statements like this,” Maria Martisiute, a defense analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “But it is Trump, whose very bombastic language bordering on direct threats and intimidation, is threatening the fact to another ally by saying ‘I will control or annex the territory.’”
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Frederiksen in a statement Tuesday reaffirming that the mineral-rich island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America, “belongs to its people.”
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, have requested a meeting with Rubio in the near future, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland's government website.
Previous requests for a sit-down were not successful, the statement said.
Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, said an American takeover would not improve upon Washington's current security strategy.
“The United States will gain no advantage if its flag is flying in Nuuk versus the Greenlandic flag,” he told the AP. “There’s no benefits to them because they already enjoy all of the advantages they want. If there’s any specific security access that they want to improve American security, they’ll be given it as a matter of course, as a trusted ally. So this has nothing to do with improving national security for the United States.”
Denmark’s parliament approved a bill last June to allow U.S. military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, where U.S. troops had broad access to Danish airbases in the Scandinavian country.
Rasmussen, in a response to lawmakers’ questions, wrote over the summer that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the U.S. tries to annex all or part of Greenland.
But in the event of a military action, the U.S. Department of Defense currently operates the remote Pituffik Space Base, in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilized.
Crosbie said he believes the U.S. would not seek to hurt the local population or engage with Danish troops.
“They don’t need to bring any firepower. They don’t to bring anybody.” Crosbie said Wednesday. “They could just direct the military personnel currently there to drive to the center of Nuuk and just say, ‘This is America now,’ right? And that would lead to the same response as if they flew in 500 or 1,000 people.”
The danger in an American annexation, he said, lies in the “erosion of the rule of law globally and to the perception that there are any norms protecting anybody on the planet.”
He added: “The impact is changing the map. The impact I don’t think would be storming the parliament.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he spoke by phone Tuesday with Rubio, who dismissed the idea of a Venezuela-style operation in Greenland.
“In the United States, there is massive support for the country belonging to NATO – a membership that, from one day to the next, would be compromised by … any form of aggressiveness toward another member of NATO,” Barrot told France Inter radio on Wednesday.
Asked if he has a plan in case Trump does claim Greenland, Barrot said he would not engage in “fiction diplomacy.”
While most Republicans have supported Trump’s statement, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Thom Tillis, the Democratic and Republican co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, have criticized Trump’s rhetoric.
“When Denmark and Greenland make it clear that Greenland is not for sale, the United States must honor its treaty obligations and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark,” their statement on Tuesday said. “Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend.”
Kim reported from Washington. Geir Moulson in Berlin and Mark Carlson in Brussels contributed to this report.
FILE - Danish military forces participate in an exercise with hundreds of troops from several European NATO members in the Arctic Ocean in Nuuk, Greenland, Sept. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
FILE - A plane carrying Donald Trump Jr. lands in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 7, 2025. (Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, file)
FILE - United States Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller reacts on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein), File)
CORRECT THE ORDER OF SPEAKERS, FILE - Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, right, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, left, speak on April 27, 2025, in Marienborg, Denmark. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, File)
