When Nicole Daedone co-founded OneTaste in 2004, she introduced it as a facilitator of feminine pleasure and energy. OneTaste emphasised “orgasmic meditation,” or OMing—a 15-minute partnered clitoral stroking follow meant to foster focus, connection, and conscious sexuality. OMing may help individuals “uncover richer relationships, an embodied sense of self and the uncompromised feeling of wholeness,” the OneTaste web site marketed in 2009. To OM, “one particular person strokes one other particular person’s clitoris for quarter-hour with no aim apart from to really feel the feeling,” it mentioned in 2018.
There was no point out of snakes. Or magic. Or intercourse trafficking.
Through the years, OneTaste took off, internet hosting conferences that includes boldfaced names and receiving pleasant protection in shops starting from from Vice to New York to The Atlantic. In 2017, Khloe Kardashian referred to as OMing “the important thing to final satisfaction.”
However as OneTaste’s attain expanded, some puzzled whether or not the corporate was as much as extra than simply mindfulness. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on complaints in regards to the firm from disgruntled former staff and alleged occultish exercise: a “Magic Faculty,” “momentary ceremonial piercings,” individuals being decreed clergymen and priestesses of orgasm. OneTaste, in line with the article, mentioned “the ceremonies had been ‘play’ and in contrast Magic Faculty to Burning Man.”
The media began calling OneTaste an “orgasm cult.” A Lena Dunham–produced Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc, solid the group in an occult gentle, mixing dramatized footage of robed rituals involving snakes with real-life footage from the group’s occasions.
Quickly the FBI received concerned. A couple of months after its preliminary article, Bloomberg reported that the bureau was “making inquiries into OneTaste,” asking individuals “a variety of questions, together with whether or not the corporate pressured staff into sexual encounters to assist shut a sale.”
The company was contemporary from investigating NXIVM, one other self-help group accused of being a intercourse cult. That investigation resulted in convictions for NXIVM chief Keith Raniere and 5 girls concerned with the group, together with actress Allison Mack.
Now the feds had been on the lookout for potential OneTaste victims. One identify on their checklist was Alisha Value.
Value, now 49, was working as a hairdresser in Port St. Lucie, Florida, the place she’d moved to assist deal with her aged dad and mom. However years earlier, in San Francisco, she had labored for OneTaste, dwelling in a communal area the place some staff and OM practitioners selected to reside.
Two FBI brokers flew in from New York in April 2021, and so they arrived at her door with a subpoena. A type of was Particular Agent Elliot McGinnis, a former New York Metropolis police officer who had resigned within the midst of an investigation right into a criticism about extreme pressure. McGinnis had additionally led the investigation into NXIVM.
“Once they got here to my home, I used to be like, ‘You suppose that is like NXIVM, do not you?’ They usually had been like, ‘Yeah, we do,'” Value advised Cause in an interview. On the time, she thought: “They needed a excessive profile case that was salacious and had a sexual element and was one thing that they may, you already know, take down a giant group for.”
Value remembers them saying she was an necessary “sufferer witness.” She would want to return to New York to testify in entrance of a grand jury—or maybe chat now as a substitute?
Value says she felt “ambushed.” So she chatted, stressing that she was not a sufferer. That didn’t convey the bureau’s curiosity in her to an finish. She was repeatedly advised, via her lawyer, that the FBI would want her to testify.
The lawyer put her in contact with two FBI sufferer specialists, one in all whom she says advised her the nervousness she felt was simply residual “trauma” from OneTaste. This went on for over a yr. Value felt like she “had no alternative however to be a sufferer within the FBI’s eyes,” she says. She calls the victim-specialist system an “institutionalized sufferer mill” meant to “manufacture victims.”
She additionally thinks she knew what the FBI was after. “Based mostly on the questions they requested me,” she says, she believes “they had been hoping that I used to be going to say issues on the file and so they might flip right into a cost of intercourse trafficking.”
Regardless of Value’s refusal to play the function of sufferer, the feds discovered a option to convey a cost—albeit one much less salacious and in the end weirder than what they might have initially meant.
Later this yr, Daedone will likely be tried in federal court docket. The trial was initially slated for January however was pushed again on the authorities’s request. It is now scheduled to begin Could 5, though the protection has requested the trial be pushed again additional, to September.
On trial along with her will likely be Rachel Cherwitz, OneTaste’s former head of gross sales. Like Value, Cherwitz initially received the sufferer therapy. When she would not take part within the case that method, they took a distinct strategy.
“After Ms. Cherwitz declined to establish as a sufferer,” wrote attorneys Duncan Levin and Jennifer Bonjean in a letter to U.S. District Decide Diane Gujarati final summer season, “a phalanx of FBI brokers in full SWAT gear descended on her residence with a helicopter and convoy of SUVs regardless of her legal professional’s assurances that she could be accessible to reply any questions that they’d.”
The 2 face a single depend of conspiracy to commit compelled labor, an offense allegedly undertaken “between roughly 2004 and 2018.”
Neither lady is charged with really forcing labor or participating in different prison acts. Their attorneys consider that is the primary time the feds have charged compelled labor conspiracy with out an underlying compelled labor cost.
“The Authorities needn’t show that anybody was, in truth, victimized by a conspiracy,” U.S. Legal professional Lauren Howard Elbert advised the court docket throughout a standing listening to final April. “They want solely show that an settlement existed to victimize any person.”
Main as much as the trial, prosecutors have appeared hard-pressed to show even this. In outlining the case, they’ve employed doubtful theories of criminality, similar to “coercive management,” and so they have relied on expansive readings of authorized phrases like “serious harm.” Above all, they’ve exploited rank sensationalism, as if hoping that throwing in a number of particulars about kinky intercourse and free love whereas suggesting cultish conduct will do the place proof of authorized wrongdoing falls quick.
Underlying the case is without doubt one of the Justice Division’s catchall justifications: stopping intercourse trafficking and prostitution. The case is not explicitly about that, however the feds clearly intend to indicate that that is actually a intercourse trafficking case, even when the fees do not go that far.
‘Aware Sexuality’
OneTaste’s identify is a nod to a line attributed to the Buddha: “Simply as the good ocean has one style, the style of salt, so additionally this instructing and self-discipline has one style, the style of liberation.”
OneTaste was meant “to assist different individuals get out of struggling,” says Daedone. She likes to quote scientific analysis that she says exhibits orgasmic meditation’s potential range of benefits, together with selling emotional resilience and serving to individuals with sexual trauma really feel arousal. “I consider that every thing is about intercourse aside from intercourse—intercourse is about energy,” she says. And ladies will “all the time be on the mercy of sexuality till we will really seize it and harness it and drive it.”
One resolution, she argued, was orgasmic meditation. In an OM session, which might occur in personal or in a bunch, the “stroker” stays clothed whereas the “strokee,” resting in a “nest” of pillows, disrobes from the waist down. OMing is to final for quarter-hour, no extra and no much less. Gloves and lube are used. An OMing ethics information lays out a number of guidelines, together with “no commerce” and “nothing additional,” that means “no romantic gestures, added or subtracted steps, and many others.”
OMing and its related philosophy had been taught by OneTaste workers and coaches, who within the firm’s early years had been based mostly out of two adjoining San Francisco buildings referred to as One Style, an City Retreat Middle.
In a single, workers provided lessons in OMing, yoga, and “connected living,” in addition to massages and a café that offered “macrobiotic, vegetarian and uncooked meals choices.” Within the different—the “warehouse”—OM fans lived in a extremely communal area.
Value was an early resident of the warehouse. Already a practitioner of meditation and yoga, she got here to OneTaste in 2006. “It instantly felt like a proper match for me,” she says, calling her first time OMing a “profound expertise.” So she saved at it, later instructing OneTaste lessons and finally changing into a OneTaste worker.
“You did not have to stay at OneTaste to work at OneTaste,” Daedone explains. Within the early years, nonetheless, many did, as a result of it was a tight-knit group with a shared mission. “When it began, we had been only a bunch of pals,” she says. “We did not have an entire lot of cash.” All the things was performed communally. “I cooked….All of us did no matter was essential.”
OneTaste was a enterprise, however for some it was additionally a life-style.
Value went on to stay in one other communal OM area, referred to as the 1080 home, on San Francisco’s Folsom Road. “I bear in mind falling asleep in my room of 1080 in the summertime,” she posted to Fb in January. “Home windows open listening to the individuals I lived with chatting and laughing with one another. Somebody enjoying guitar. They might actually play. A pair fucking in one other room. It was good intercourse too, actual and deep. Loving and sensational.”
Eli Block, now a lead orgasmic meditation teacher with OneTaste, first received concerned round 2007, attending a communications video games occasion the place the ladies had been so “unapologetically erotic” that he was postpone—at first. He got here again a few yr later and “it simply clicked,” partly as a result of Daedone had began mixing extra Buddhist philosophy into the expertise. Block had grown up round Zen philosophy—he jokes that when some children went to the lake, “I went to a meditation monastery”—however this was one thing totally different, and never simply due to all of the clitorises concerned. “Nicole had this very rapid, relevant, actually blue-collar method of chopping via the veneer,” Block says.
To listen to the federal government inform it now, disgrace was wielded like a weapon towards individuals in OneTaste residences, used to regulate them and extract free labor. However Block—one of many first residents of the “city monastery” at 1080—paints a a lot totally different image, describing the ambiance as deliberate, enjoyable, permissive, and secure. It was a spot the place you may be “unguarded” and “take a threat and never fear that you simply’d be endlessly shamed,” he says. “Folks had the liberty to find” who they had been, he says, and this prolonged to creative expression, sexual expression, and new roles inside the group or the group. On the identical time, authenticity was anticipated. “Folks paid,” says Block, to have OneTaste workers “reveal that we will see via your facade.”
Many individuals took an OM class or a couple of after which moved on. Others went deeper.
Former OM coach and OneTaste worker Jennifer Slusher first received concerned with OneTaste in 2008 and went on to stay in OM homes in San Francisco and New York. She says she saved coming again “as a result of it was essentially the most highly effective factor that I had skilled.”
Like Value, Slusher would later be contacted by the FBI and really feel pushed by McGinnis to establish as a sufferer when she didn’t, she advised Cause. (McGinnis didn’t reply to Cause‘s request for remark.)
OneTaste was staffed by a mixture of staff, unbiased contractors, and volunteer staff. A “again of home” program allowed volunteers to trade occasion work for entry to lessons—a program the feds would later use to help the “conspiracy to commit compelled labor” cost.
“If you did not have any cash, I needed it to be that you may take the category, that something was accessible,” says Daedone.
By 2013, OneTaste had workplaces in Manhattan and San Francisco, and it provided not solely web-based and in-person instruction however an OM coach certification program, personal instruction, and a web-based hub.
There have been OM Circles or lessons in additional than a dozen cities, together with Austin, Boulder, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Daedone revealed a e-book, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. In 2014, the corporate would maintain a serious convention, with such scheduled speakers as authors Neil Strauss and Naomi Wolf and neuroscientist Reef Karim. OneTaste and orgasmic meditation had been featured in all places from Vice to Deepak Chopra’s YouTube channel. Daedone appeared on actress and wellness maven Gwyneth Paltrow’s podcast.
However there have been indicators of hassle. The tight-knit nature of the OM group, and the taboos round its central follow, tended to forge each bonding and emotional volatility. This was “not, like, rainbows and sunshine form of work,” says Slusher. “Tapping into your sexuality—it may be extremely triggering.” Some individuals displaced their anger at issues that arose from the follow onto OneTaste’s leaders, she suggests.
Block echoed this sentiment. Sure individuals would come “up towards a actuality they did not like” and blame their discomfort on Cherwitz and Daedone, he says.
In 2015, the corporate privately settled a lawsuit introduced by a former worker, Ayries Blanck, who alleged a “hostile work setting, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimal wage and intentional infliction of emotional misery.” As a part of an out-of-court settlement, Blanck obtained $325,000 and agreed to not “disparage OneTaste or its officers, or incite others to take action.” OneTaste denies the allegations however determined that “the price of defending the case would exceed the quantity” of settling, the corporate mentioned in an ongoing breach of contract lawsuit it filed towards Blanck in California in 2022.
The 2015 go well with wouldn’t be the final time Blanck would play a job in a authorized motion towards the corporate. As a decide made clear in a December listening to, she’s now Jane Doe #1 within the federal case.
‘What Do You Guys Assume We Did, Simply Stroll Round with Snakes?’
After the 2018 Bloomberg article accused OneTaste of “resembl[ing] a form of prostitution ring,” the media hits saved coming—at the same time as one of many article’s most outstanding sources, Ruwan Meepagala, tried to distance himself from this characterization. In plenty of podcast appearances, Meepagala confused that no “literal prostitution” was concerned. “There is no level the place anybody says, like, go and sleep with this particular person for cash,” Meepagala advised the Tremendous Journey Speak podcast in 2019.
The feds weren’t deterred. In 2020, the BBC launched a 10-part podcast about OneTaste, titled The Orgasm Cult, and reported that “the FBI is making enquiries into One Style over allegations together with intercourse trafficking, prostitution and violations of labour regulation.”
Then got here Orgasm Inc, the Netflix movie chronicling the rise and fall of OneTaste. A lot of the movie revolves round interviews with a handful of individuals beforehand related to the group.
“It was all faux,” says Slusher, the previous OneTaste coach, in regards to the movie. “I might actually watch that with you and level out, like, OK, I do know that particular person, I do know what they really mentioned. I do know that they sliced this footage to chop out phrases to make Nicole look actually unhealthy. They added darkish music results.”
Then there was the occult footage.
A lot of the film’s background imagery options archival footage and images from OneTaste happenings. It is all fairly normie-looking, even at occasions with OMing. The events might be workplace blissful hours. The talks appear to be your common convention seminar. Even a scene with Cherwitz and a snake seems to be extra like a university play than Eyes Vast Shut.
However at a turning level within the movie’s narrative—depicting OneTaste’s alleged shift from a unusual however largely benign group of intercourse and wellness weirdos to one thing scarier and probably prison—comes one thing extra unsettling.
A person in an animal masks stands by as largely nude girls with witchy hair kiss and grope one another on an opulent pink sofa, ornate chalices earlier than them. One other lady dances with and smooches a slithering snake. Somebody reads tarot playing cards. Somebody wears a hooded gown. It is each opulent and cartoonish, evoking hedonism and a sinister sexuality. And all of it was created by the documentarians.
“Dramatized” footage in documentaries is widespread. However mixing actual documentary footage with salacious, filmmaker-created materials left the incorrect impression.
“They managed to place extra snakes in that Netflix [film],” Daedone laughs. “Like, what do you guys suppose we did, simply stroll round with snakes? I by no means did that.”
OneTaste did have thematic programs—88 through the years, in line with Daedone—and “one was about form of esoteric practices,” she says. “And so, you already know, I’d invite form of theatrical explorations. However there was by no means, ever one other snake time.”
Probably the most controversial elements of the Netflix movie contain Blanck, the girl with whom OneTaste had settled the 2015 lawsuit.
Blanck and her then-boyfriend received concerned with OneTaste in 2012. She would later stay with fellow OM practitioners in New York, and work for OneTaste as a gross sales consultant.
Ayries Blanck doesn’t seem within the movie. However her sister, Autymn Blanck, does.
Within the movie, Autymn, who was paid $25,000 for some writings and images of her sister’s, reads from journals purportedly written by Ayries proper after she stopped affiliating with OneTaste.
These picks elevate some damning allegations, together with a declare that folks at OneTaste had been unsympathetic to Ayries when she skilled home violence and that she had been compelled to have interaction in undesirable sexual exercise.
OneTaste denied these allegations in a California breach-of-contract go well with towards Blanck, claiming Ayries has a “vendetta” towards the corporate.
Longer picks of Blanck’s purported journals, filed as a part of the California and federal circumstances, illuminate private grievances with people at OneTaste, together with complaints about being anticipated to sexually share her boyfriend-turned-fiance with different OneTaste group members and emotions of betrayal after he married another person at a OneTaste retreat and he or she wasn’t advised till afterward. There’s additionally a lot second-guessing of OneTaste teachings she previously accepted and wrestling with discomfort over sexual encounters she admits she went together with “willingly” on the time.
In a number of authorized filings, attorneys for Daedone, Cherwitz, and OneTaste have raised severe questions in regards to the provenance and veracity of those journal entries. They had been allegedly handwritten by Ayries in 2015, left along with her sister not lengthy after, and easily typed up for Netflix by Autymn in Could 2022. But the journal entries say Ayries was studying a e-book—The Publish-Traumatic Progress Guidebook—that wasn’t revealed till 2019.
In the meantime, Autymn’s Google doc “transcription” of the journals had been revised myriad occasions, going via greater than 50 drafts and a whole lot of minor edits, in line with Jason Frankovitz, a software program engineer enlisted by attorneys representing OneTaste to research the paperwork.
Autymn, somebody listed solely as “A,” and filmmaker Sarah Gibson all had entry to the paperwork, in line with Frankovitz. Ayries reportedly advised prosecutors final October that she hadn’t seemed on the journals in over a decade, and had solely realized her sister transcribed them “once I watched the Netflix documentary,” in line with a December 30 letter to Gujarati from protection attorneys. However final December, Ayries told the government she had opened the Google docs “and made copies and edits” in 2022.
Within the California civil go well with, when OneTaste sought to overview Ayries’ handwritten journals, it discovered Autymn had mailed them to McGinnis in early 2024. Autymn testified that she did this after the FBI agent famous that they could not be subpoenaed from her in the event that they weren’t in her possession. (This wasn’t the one recommendation from McGinnis that raised the defendants’ suspicions: He additionally steered to Ayries, in November 2022, that she “cancel” a gmail account used to speak with OneTaste associates, per materials submitted as a part of discovery within the breach-of-contract go well with and talked about within the prison case. McGinnis was not “beneath any obligation to protect and gather the Electronic mail Account,” prosecutors argued in response, suggesting the protection failed to point out it “contained exculpatory materials that was obvious earlier than it was canceled, that its contents are inaccessible by different means, and that FBI Particular Agent McGinnis or any member of the prosecution group acted in unhealthy religion.” The court docket in the end agreed that defendants did not reveal “exculpatory worth that was obvious earlier than the account was canceled” or “unhealthy religion on the a part of the federal government.” [
In July 2024, the government turned over copies of the handwritten journals to Daedone and Cherwitz’s defense team. Confusingly, portions of these pages nearly perfectly mirrored the final draft of the Google doc journals. “If Autymn was merely transcribing her sister’s 2015 handwritten journals in a google document created in 2022, the first version of the google document should be identical, or nearly identical, to the handwritten journal,” wrote defense lawyers in a December 2 letter to Gujarati. “The only inference to be drawn from this is that the handwritten journals were written after the electronic journals.”
OneTaste sued Netflix for defamation, contending that Blanck’s accusations about it were false and alleging that the streaming service aired “false statements of fact that OneTaste condones violence against women and that a woman was raped and beaten in connection with her employment at OneTaste and participation in its classes and events.” But a judge found Netflix did not act “with malice,” and OneTaste lost. (It has since appealed.)
Blanck’s credibility and her journals’ authenticity aren’t merely a matter of documentarian ethics. Blanck is now the star witness in the government’s case against Daedone and Cherwitz—a case that appears every bit as plagued with dramatic license as the Netflix film.
‘Under the Guise of Empowerment and Wellness’
In April 2023—nearly five years after the FBI reportedly started investigating OneTaste and about five months after the Netflix film was released—a federal grand jury indicted Daedone and Cherwitz.
“Under the guise of empowerment and wellness, the defendants are alleged to have sought complete control over their employees’ lives, including by driving them into debt and directing them to perform sexual acts while also witholding wages,” said Breon Peace, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a press release.
From the beginning, the feds seemed intent on advertising this as a sex trafficking case, despite the fact that no sex trafficking charges were filed.
The scant indictment did little to clear up what a forced labor conspiracy with no underlying crime might mean. Inside its sweeping accusation—that Daedone and Cherwitz conspired to obtain labor by subjecting “OneTaste members” to “economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse; surveillance; indoctrination; and intimidation”—was little specificity and a lot of sleight-of-hand tricks.
For instance, OneTaste didn’t have members. The term seemed designed both to insinuate a cultlike nature and to confuse all categories of people involved in OneTaste. By referring to everyone as “members,” the indictment jumbles up things OneTaste undeniably did in some capacity—like advising practitioners to engage in certain sex acts—and things that would be illegal under other circumstances, like dictating employee sexual activities.
Parts of the indictment take undisputed OneTaste actions—for instance, advertising that OMing could help heal past trauma—and impute nefarious motives, casting them as mere ploys to psychologically destabilize “members” despite the fact that they align with OneTaste’s stated mission.
Other parts portray actions taken by people who chose to live in communal houses—such as eat together and share beds—as if these were conditions forced upon OneTaste employees.
Nowhere did the indictment mention Daedone or Cherwitz using or conspiring to use force, threats, physical restraint, abuse of legal process, or almost any of the other elements of the crime of forced labor, an offense that falls under the umbrella of human trafficking.
Furthermore, the indictment provided no details about when, where, or with whom the alleged violations took place, nor any specific acts they involved.
How could Daedone and Cherwitz mount a defense if they didn’t even know what conduct was at issue?
In July 2023, they informally asked prosecutors to provide a “bill of particulars” describing what, exactly, the defendants were accused of doing, when, and with whom. They didn’t get it. Six months later, they formally asked the court to either dismiss the indictment or direct the government to provide a bill of particulars. “During the period of the Indictment, OneTaste Inc. employed at least 150 employees and more than 350 independent contractors,” their motion noted. “At least 600 people participated in the Back of the House program,” and OneTaste affiliates also employed their own staff and contractors. Additionally, “there were over 30 OM houses throughout the United States and the U.K.,” mostly operating independently from the company.
Still nothing.
Finally, in October 2024—more than 16 months after the initial indictment—the government offered more information about their case. But more information didn’t necessarily mean clarity.
The 144-page document initially alleges that there are 24 Jane and John Does whom Daedone and Cherwitz conspired against. But later it says that some of these individuals are merely witnesses. No names are provided. The government has been fighting to keep these witnesses anonymous throughout proceedings, though Gujarati ruled on January 7 that witnesses could not testify anonymously at trial.
Many of the “particulars” offered seem designed to simply muddy the waters, making the defendants appear exotic, callous, deviant, untrustworthy, or otherwise morally deficient.
There’s mention that witnesses may testify about Daedone’s alleged past as “as a prostitute.” (“Nicole has a diverse background that has contributed to the person she is today,” says Daedone’s P.R. representative, Juda Engelmayer, when asked about this. “However, those details are not part of the charges and have no bearing on the case.”) There’s a bit about Cherwitz telling “Jane Doe 13 what she ‘saw in her’…was that Jane Doe 13 was a slut.” There’s an allegation that some OneTaste customers could participate in “experiences tailored to their specific desires,” and that some of these “included BDSM,” such as Daedone whipping an investor “while he was bound up in the middle of a room.” There’s mention of a OneTaste course in which students “submitted sex tapes that were subsequently displayed during class and critiqued.” There’s a lot about OneTaste teaching that more sex or shifts in sexual attitude could positively benefit people’s lives. It’s graphic, but it’s unclear what any of this has to do with a forced labor conspiracy.
Moreover, the memorandum makes Cherwitz and Daedone out to be responsible for the acts of multiple unnamed “co-conspirators,” despite no effort to tie these conspirators’ actions with any plan or scheme involving either woman (or any forced labor). For instance, it accuses one co-conspirator of helping someone set up an account on sugardaddy.com, and another of saying insensitive things on a messageboard to someone who posted about being groped.
In the same filing, prosecutors seek to seriously limit what Daedone’s and Cherwitz’s lawyers can talk about at trial. They ask the judge to block them from mentioning anything about “victims’ or other witnesses’ sexual activity” (even though this is at the heart of many of the allegations), from making arguments about the government’s alleged motives for this prosecution, or from impugning the FBI’s investigatory conduct. They ask that the defense be barred from submitting any evidence “of the defendants’ ‘good acts’ or non-commission of ‘bad acts,'” or any evidence on the benefits of orgasmic meditation. They also ask the judge to “limit cross-examination” of victims and witnesses.
“OneTaste was an organization that centered around the concept of consent,” and “everyone had freedom to come and go as they pleased,” the defendants argue in an October 25 reply. “Indeed, the jury will hear from every single witness the government puts on the stand that they did exactly that. When they decided that they did not want to work at or be a customer of OneTaste anymore, they said ‘no’ and they left, freely and without repercussions.”
Oddly, the government does not seem to dispute that people came and went as they pleased, nor that they nominally consented to all activity. Its contention is something weirder: that the defendants were so psychologically manipulative that it rendered people’s consent meaningless—that effectively, yes meant no.
‘Forced Labor’
The federal criminal code defines forced labor as obtaining labor or services by means of 1) force, physical restraint, serious harm, and/or abuse of law and legal process, 2) the threat of any of the above, or 3) “schemes, plans, and patterns” intended to make someone believe “serious harm and physical restraint” would befall them if they didn’t do the work wanted.
Since this case involves no force, restraint, abuse of legal process, or threats of such things, it comes down to the government’s contention that the defendants exerted “coercive control” in an attempt to cause “serious…psychological, financial, and reputational harm.”
Coercive control—a pattern of controlling or intimidating behavior that falls short of physical violence—is a concept popular among advocates for survivors of domestic abuse or sexual exploitation. They have pushed, with some success, to codify it as a crime under state laws.
“Proponents of criminalizing coercive control argue that, if survivors experiencing coercive control are currently unable to achieve redress from the criminal legal system, then the criminal legal system must expand to be able to vindicate these survivors,” explains the UNLV law professor Courtney K. Cross in a 2022 paper titled “Coercive Control and the Limits of Criminal Law.” But the criminal legal system lacks the “agility and insight needed to navigate the idiosyncratic and complex dynamics of interpersonal coercion,” she warns.
Some might add that the criminal legal system has no business litigating interpersonal dynamics. This case certainly highlights how murky and dangerous doing so could become.
In their bill of particulars, prosecutors’ nods to “reputational harm” mostly involve allegations that people would face disapproval within the group if they went against OneTaste practices or teachings. “OneTaste participants were expected to OM or would be shamed,” they write.
Alleged attempts to cause “financial harm” basically boil down to encouraging imprudent financial decisions, such as opening up a credit card or borrowing money from friends to pay for OneTaste courses. There’s little attempt to directly connect any of it to a scheme to extract forced labor: It’s not as if you’d be in debt to the defendants if you defaulted on your credit card payments.
And many odd assumptions underpin the government’s statements about financial harm. Take its critique of Cherwitz for “enroll[ing] Jane Doe 16 in a OneTaste program figuring out she had no cash.” What was OneTaste presupposed to do? Reject individuals who had been probably making poor monetary choices? This is not an onus we placed on different companies.
The memorandum’s most intensive claims relate to alleged psychological hurt. However these claims are additionally amorphous. Prosecutors painting issues intrinsic to OneTaste philosophy—like encouraging sexual exploration as a method for private progress—as crime ways.
In addition they appear to need to make victims out of anybody who did one thing later regretted. As an illustration: “Due to [OneTaste] teachings, Jane Doe 15 as soon as engaged in intercourse with a person who was older and who she didn’t discover bodily engaging,” they write.
A lot of the federal government’s argument appears to be merely placing Daedone’s beliefs on trial.
“Daedone taught that sleeping with new sexual companions was a option to ‘clear vitality,” the federal government says, framing it as a ploy “meant to encourage victims to carry out sex-based companies and labor.” By instructing “OneTaste individuals that OM was no totally different than meditating or consuming tea,” Daedone illegally tried to have “regulated the OneTaste individuals’ sexual actions.” Daedone’s was “an ideology during which victims of sexual assault or violence shouldn’t think about themselves, or be thought-about by others, to be victims,” they are saying, and this “resulted in efforts to precise psychological” hurt.
In line with Daedone, her anti-victimhood thought is not about excusing hurt however serving to those that have been harmed, since adopting “sufferer” as an id may be disempowering. “I feel that in the event you make social drawback or being oppressed central to your id, then what you are really doing is placing the locus of energy outdoors of your self,” says Daedone. “The one advances you may make then are categorizing your oppression after which attempting to amend it. So that you even have to maneuver to a distinct body altogether.”
To the federal government, Daedone’s teachings quantity to makes an attempt at “coercive management.” The defendants name this an “amorphous idea that the regulation doesn’t help, the place…any perceived unfavorable therapy of an alleged sufferer, nonetheless attenuated from performing of labor, might be labeled psychological coercion.”
There are some concrete allegations about labor practices within the authorities’s 144-page missive. The corporate allegedly “misled the OneTaste individuals about their anticipated salaries” and “did not pay staff time beyond regulation in accordance with state and federal necessities.” However even when such claims show true, actions like skirting time beyond regulation pay guidelines or requiring staff to take part in unpaid textual content threads are a far cry from human trafficking.
There are additionally a good variety of claims associated to sexual exercise.
Prosecutors allege that Daedone and Cherwitz “groomed” individuals to spend time—and generally get kinky—with an early investor, together with taking part in “Alice in Wonderland” and “Wizard of Oz” themed “function play and/or sexual exercise.”
They allege that some individuals had been inspired to OM with potential purchasers or interact in intercourse acts with individuals as a part of OneTaste programs. As an illustration, “executives directed Jane Doe 1 to carry out oral intercourse on a male pupil in a OneTaste course when the male pupil didn’t have a associate,” prosecutors say.
However whereas particular in salacious particulars, the allegations on this class get obscure about sure key factors. Have been workers ordered to get kinky as a situation of employment—or had been OneTaste group members doing it for the trigger? Did somebody’s boss say that enacting fantasy scenes with an investor might result in a promotion, or was this recommendation from a coworker? Was “Jane Doe 1” workers on the time of this supposed sexual directive or was she one other pupil? Did she object? Have been Daedone or Cherwitz even there, or conscious in any respect of this alleged occurring?
The federal government is clearly attempting to provide essentially the most unfavorable impression. But when it really had proof that Daedone and Cherwitz had been, say, coercing girls into intercourse with rich buyers to be able to profit financially off their sexual labor, we will surely see intercourse trafficking prices of some type, and we do not. The dearth of sex-related prices casts doubt on what one may learn between the strains.
“The federal government’s memorandum reveals its intent to constructively amend its one-count compelled conspiracy indictment right into a sex-trafficking cost,” Daedone and Cherwitz’s group argued to the court docket in an October 25, 2024, submitting. “It has executed a traditional bait and change, charging one depend all whereas planning to strive a really totally different case.”
In a movement filed in December, Daedone’s and Cherwitz’s protection group argues that the very thought of “nonphysical” coercion goes past the thirteenth Modification’s restrictions on involuntary servitude. In addition they say the definition of “severe hurt” is so obscure that it fails beneath the Structure’s Due Course of clause, which stops the federal government from sanctioning individuals within the absence of clear and established legal guidelines and procedures. Due to this vagueness, they argue, it fails to supply honest discover of what’s illegal, promotes arbitrary enforcement, and leaves it “to the judicial department to provide that means to a statute’s obscure phrases.”
‘Sexuality on a Lady’s Phrases’
The sheer bulk of the documentation produced by the federal government tells its personal story. Prosecutors have arduous drives from Blanck and a number of other others previously concerned with OneTaste, in addition to interviews with at the least 26 witnesses. “The federal government has produced over 400,000 pages of discovery materials, 80,000 pages of presidency reveals, 5,000 pages of [witness statements], and 82 hours of video,” mentioned protection attorneys in a January 18, 2025, letter.
The federal government additionally has copious information supplied by OneTaste in response to requests and subpoenas. Between February 2021 and August 2023, Assistant U.S. Legal professional Gillian Kassner requested—amongst many different issues—employment and rental agreements, supplies regarding Magic Faculty, worker time logs, OneTaste course modules and consumer lists, paperwork “during which people’ breasts and/or public areas are uncovered,” gross sales group Slack messages, all bookkeeping and accounting data, and video and audio of personal gatherings involving clients. (The sequence of requests over time, from a concentrate on potential occult and prostitution proof to extra mundane requests, exhibits how the trajectory of the investigation modified over time and suggests investigators wound up with a a lot totally different case than they had been initially anticipating to seek out.)
The magnitude of the data places the precise prices into perspective. No matter they depart to be desired, it wasn’t for a scarcity of presidency attempting.
The “floor story of why OneTaste was taken down is a canopy for the deeper fact of the place the tradition is at, which is that there’s a conflict on intercourse, and a conflict on girls’s energy,” argued orgasmic meditation coach Aubrey Fuller in a June 2024 Instagram post.
Fuller and colleagues now educate OMing and associated philosophies via the Eros Platform, a web-based media portal run by OneTaste. The corporate—which severely reduce enterprise operations in 2018—has been slowly bouncing again, opening a new educational center in New York Metropolis final fall and starting to supply extra in-person programming once more.
After leaving OneTaste in February 2013, Value not too long ago went again to instructing about OM and adjoining concepts via the Eros Platform. The federal prosecution and the Netflix movie are “an onslaught towards OM itself as a sound follow” and “I’ve to defend it,” she posted to Fb in January.
Daedone says the concept of “sexuality on a lady’s phrases…sexuality to be able to empower her” is “unimaginable to most individuals, the identical method that…yoga and meditation had been seen as bizarre and culty after they first entered as properly. So any new, profoundly therapeutic protocol is seen as darkish.”
It did not assist that the NXIVM prosecution was nonetheless contemporary in individuals’s minds. That case earned ample consideration and maybe helped prime the general public to suspect extra self-help teams had been fronts for intercourse cults. A number of individuals concerned with OneTaste have insisted that this case is nothing like these involving NXIVM.
However in at the least one regard, I feel it’s: the federal government’s quickness to throw round “intercourse trafficking” claims that do not match. No matter else NXIVM members might have been guilty of doing, they weren’t intercourse traffickers because the time period is often understood.
These prosecutions match into a bigger tradition—and authorities—obsessive about the prospect of intercourse trafficking. By the point the FBI began investigating OneTaste, warnings a few supposed intercourse trafficking epidemic had been rampant in American media and halls of energy for at the least twenty years.
A lot of these warnings had been pushed by activists intent on suppressing all intercourse work, and even sexuality within the public sphere extra broadly. For authorities, it supplied a terrific justification for increasing regulation enforcement authority and assets. When the epidemic turned out to be apocryphal, those self same authorities wanted some option to justify their new budgets and to fulfill the general public urge for food for thwarting trafficking that they’d been stoking.
The outcome was an explosion of “intercourse trafficking stings” and “human trafficking busts” that truly goal consenting adults, an onslaught of motion towards girls who interact in or facilitate intercourse work, a conflict on web sites the place intercourse staff promote, and an ongoing push to develop what intercourse trafficking and human trafficking imply.
These are phrases which have gone from referring to using pressure, fraud, or threats to compel labor, sexual or in any other case, to one thing a lot broader—particularly when conspiracy prices are added to the combo. As within the conflict on medication, the vary of prison targets and ways to go after them has expanded, too.
And for what?
Possibly OneTaste’s philosophies and practices aren’t for everybody. And perhaps OneTaste is not a bunch you’d personally wish to affiliate with.
Possibly, through the years, its leaders made errors—pushed too arduous, or promised an excessive amount of. Possibly they had been simply naive, considering enterprise and pleasure and the enterprise of delight might coexist seamlessly.
Possibly its antics generally present how blurry the strains between unlawful intercourse work and permitted relationships are. And perhaps the bitter emotions of some ex-OM fans spotlight how blurry are the strains between liberation and denial, company and remorse.
However the authorities has provided little proof that Daedone, Cherwitz, or any of OneTaste’s leaders had been engaged in a forced-labor conspiracy. For all its wild particulars, the case is lacking each conspiracy and compelled labor components. Prosecutors appear to need this case to relaxation on the concept the corporate’s bigwigs had been imply ladies and intercourse weirdos who used orgasms as instruments of thoughts management.
From the lurid occult associations to the implied intercourse trafficking allegations, there’s valuable little substance to this case—simply salaciousness, scandal, and the all-too-familiar sense that feminine sexuality is one thing to be suppressed and managed by the state.
