The Weak, Weird Case Against a Supposed 'Orgasm Cult'
Snakes. Magic. Orgasmic meditation. And a dubious federal case against the leaders of a supposed sex cult.
When Nicole Daedone co-founded OneTaste in 2004, she presented it as a facilitator of female pleasure and power. OneTaste emphasized "orgasmic meditation," or OMing—a 15-minute partnered clitoral stroking practice meant to foster focus, connection, and mindful sexuality. OMing can help people "discover richer relationships, an embodied sense of self and the uncompromised feeling of wholeness," the OneTaste website advertised in 2009. To OM, "one person strokes another person's clitoris for 15 minutes with no goal other than to feel the sensation," it said in 2018.
There was no mention of snakes. Or magic. Or sex trafficking.
Over the years, OneTaste took off, hosting conferences featuring boldfaced names and receiving friendly coverage in outlets ranging from from Vice to New York to The Atlantic. In 2017, Khloe Kardashian called OMing "the key to ultimate satisfaction."
But as OneTaste's reach expanded, some wondered whether the company was up to more than just mindfulness. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on complaints about the company from disgruntled former employees and alleged occultish activity: a "Magic School," "temporary ceremonial piercings," people being decreed priests and priestesses of orgasm. OneTaste, according to the article, said "the ceremonies were 'play' and compared Magic School to Burning Man."
The media started calling OneTaste an "orgasm cult." A Lena Dunham–produced Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc, cast the group in an occult light, mixing dramatized footage of robed rituals involving snakes with real-life footage from the group's events.
Soon the FBI got involved. A few months after its initial article, Bloomberg reported that the bureau was "making inquiries into OneTaste," asking people "a range of questions, including whether the company pressured workers into sexual encounters to help close a sale."
The agency was fresh from investigating NXIVM, another self-help group accused of being a sex cult. That investigation ended in convictions for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere and five women involved with the group, including actress Allison Mack.
Now the feds were looking for potential OneTaste victims. One name on their list was Alisha Price.
Price, now 49, was working as a hairdresser in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where she'd moved to help take care of her elderly parents. But years earlier, in San Francisco, she had worked for OneTaste, living in a communal space where some employees and OM practitioners chose to reside.
Two FBI agents flew in from New York in April 2021, and they arrived at her door with a subpoena. One of those was Special Agent Elliot McGinnis, a former New York City police officer who had resigned in the midst of an investigation into a complaint about excessive force. McGinnis had also led the investigation into NXIVM.
"When they came to my house, I was like, 'You think this is like NXIVM, don't you?' And they were like, 'Yeah, we do,'" Price told Reason in an interview. At the time, she thought: "They wanted a high profile case that was salacious and had a sexual component and was something that they could, you know, take down a big organization for."
Price recalls them saying she was an important "victim witness." She would need to come to New York to testify in front of a grand jury—or perhaps chat now instead?
Price says she felt "ambushed." So she chatted, stressing that she was not a victim. That did not bring the bureau's interest in her to an end. She was repeatedly told, through her lawyer, that the FBI would need her to testify.
The lawyer put her in touch with two FBI victim specialists, one of whom she says told her the anxiety she felt was just residual "trauma" from OneTaste. This went on for over a year. Price felt like she "had no choice but to be a victim in the FBI's eyes," she says. She calls the victim-specialist system an "institutionalized victim mill" meant to "manufacture victims."
She also thinks she knew what the FBI was after. "Based on the questions they asked me," she says, she believes "they were hoping that I was going to say things on the record and they could turn into a charge of sex trafficking."
Despite Price's refusal to play the role of victim, the feds found a way to bring a charge—albeit one less salacious and ultimately weirder than what they may have originally intended.
Later this year, Daedone will be tried in federal court. The trial was initially slated for January but was pushed back at the government's request. It's now scheduled to start May 5, although the defense has requested the trial be pushed back further, to September.
On trial with her will be Rachel Cherwitz, OneTaste's former head of sales. Like Price, Cherwitz initially got the victim treatment. When she wouldn't participate in the case that way, they took a different approach.
"After Ms. Cherwitz declined to identify as a victim," wrote lawyers Duncan Levin and Jennifer Bonjean in a letter to U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati last summer, "a phalanx of FBI agents in full SWAT gear descended on her home with a helicopter and convoy of SUVs despite her attorney's assurances that she would be available to answer any questions that they had."
The two face a single count of conspiracy to commit forced labor, an offense allegedly undertaken "between approximately 2004 and 2018."
Neither woman is charged with actually forcing labor or engaging in other criminal acts. Their lawyers believe this is the first time the feds have charged forced labor conspiracy without an underlying forced labor charge.
"The Government need not prove that anyone was, in fact, victimized by a conspiracy," U.S. Attorney Lauren Howard Elbert told the court during a status hearing last April. "They need only prove that an agreement existed to victimize somebody."
Leading up to the trial, prosecutors have seemed hard-pressed to prove even this. In outlining the case, they have employed dubious theories of criminality, such as "coercive control," and they have relied on expansive readings of legal terms like "serious harm." Above all, they have exploited rank sensationalism, as though hoping that throwing in lots of details about kinky sex and free love while suggesting cultish behavior will do where evidence of legal wrongdoing falls short.
Underlying the case is one of the Justice Department's catchall justifications: stopping sex trafficking and prostitution. The case isn't explicitly about that, but the feds clearly intend to imply that this is really a sex trafficking case, even if the charges don't go that far.
'Mindful Sexuality'
OneTaste's name is a nod to a line attributed to the Buddha: "Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation."
OneTaste was intended "to help other people get out of suffering," says Daedone. She likes to cite scientific research that she says shows orgasmic meditation's potential range of benefits, including promoting emotional resilience and helping people with sexual trauma feel arousal. "I believe that everything is about sex except for sex—sex is about power," she says. And women will "always be at the mercy of sexuality until we can actually grab it and harness it and drive it."
One solution, she argued, was orgasmic meditation. In an OM session, which can happen in private or in a group, the "stroker" remains clothed while the "strokee," resting in a "nest" of pillows, disrobes from the waist down. OMing is to last for 15 minutes, no more and no less. Gloves and lube are used. An OMing ethics guide lays out a host of rules, including "no commerce" and "nothing extra," meaning "no romantic gestures, added or subtracted steps, etc."
OMing and its associated philosophy were taught by OneTaste staff and coaches, who in the company's early years were based out of two adjoining San Francisco buildings known as One Taste, an Urban Retreat Center.
In one, staff offered classes in OMing, yoga, and "connected living," as well as massages and a café that sold "macrobiotic, vegetarian and raw food options." In the other—the "warehouse"—OM enthusiasts lived in a highly communal space.
Price was an early resident of the warehouse. Already a practitioner of meditation and yoga, she came to OneTaste in 2006. "It immediately felt like a right fit for me," she says, calling her first time OMing a "profound experience." So she kept at it, later teaching OneTaste classes and eventually becoming a OneTaste employee.
"You didn't have to live at OneTaste to work at OneTaste," Daedone explains. In the early years, however, many did, because it was a tight-knit group with a shared mission. "When it started, we were just a bunch of friends," she says. "We didn't have a whole lot of money." Everything was done communally. "I cooked….We all did whatever was necessary."
OneTaste was a business, but for some it was also a lifestyle.
Price went on to live in another communal OM space, known as the 1080 house, on San Francisco's Folsom Street. "I remember falling asleep in my room of 1080 in the summer," she posted to Facebook in January. "Windows open listening to the people I lived with chatting and laughing with each other. Someone playing guitar. They could really play. A couple fucking in another room. It was good sex too, real and deep. Loving and sensational."
Eli Block, now a lead orgasmic meditation instructor with OneTaste, first got involved around 2007, attending a communications games event where the women were so "unapologetically erotic" that he was put off—at first. He came back about a year later and "it just clicked," in part because Daedone had started blending more Buddhist philosophy into the experience. Block had grown up around Zen philosophy—he jokes that when some kids went to the lake, "I went to a meditation monastery"—but this was something different, and not just because of all the clitorises involved. "Nicole had this very immediate, applicable, really blue-collar way of cutting through the veneer," Block says.
To hear the government tell it now, shame was wielded like a weapon against people in OneTaste residences, used to control them and extract free labor. But Block—one of the first residents of the "urban monastery" at 1080—paints a much different picture, describing the atmosphere as deliberate, fun, permissive, and safe. It was a place where you could be "unguarded" and "take a risk and not worry that you'd be endlessly shamed," he says. "People had the freedom to discover" who they were, he says, and this extended to artistic expression, sexual expression, and new roles within the community or the organization. At the same time, authenticity was expected. "People paid," says Block, to have OneTaste staff "demonstrate that we can see through your facade."
Many people took an OM class or a few and then moved on. Others went deeper.
Former OM coach and OneTaste employee Jennifer Slusher first got involved with OneTaste in 2008 and went on to live in OM houses in San Francisco and New York. She says she kept coming back "because it was the most powerful thing that I had experienced."
Like Price, Slusher would later be contacted by the FBI and feel pushed by McGinnis to identify as a victim when she did not, she told Reason. (McGinnis did not respond to Reason's request for comment.)
OneTaste was staffed by a mix of employees, independent contractors, and volunteer workers. A "back of house" program allowed volunteers to exchange event work for access to classes—a program the feds would later use to support the "conspiracy to commit forced labor" charge.
"If you didn't have any money, I wanted it to be that you could take the class, that anything was available," says Daedone.
By 2013, OneTaste had offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, and it offered not only web-based and in-person instruction but an OM coach certification program, private instruction, and an online hub.
There were OM Circles or classes in more than a dozen cities, including Austin, Boulder, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Daedone published a book, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. In 2014, the company would hold a major conference, with such scheduled speakers as authors Neil Strauss and Naomi Wolf and neuroscientist Reef Karim. OneTaste and orgasmic meditation were featured everywhere from Vice to Deepak Chopra's YouTube channel. Daedone appeared on actress and wellness maven Gwyneth Paltrow's podcast.
But there were signs of trouble. The tight-knit nature of the OM community, and the taboos around its central practice, tended to forge both bonding and emotional volatility. This was "not, like, rainbows and sunshine kind of work," says Slusher. "Tapping into your sexuality—it can be incredibly triggering." Some people displaced their anger at things that arose from the practice onto OneTaste's leaders, she suggests.
Block echoed this sentiment. Certain people would come "up against a reality they didn't like" and blame their discomfort on Cherwitz and Daedone, he says.
In 2015, the company privately mediated a dispute with a former employee, Ayries Blanck, who alleged a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wage and intentional infliction of emotional distress.* As part of an out-of-court settlement, Blanck received $325,000 and agreed not to "disparage OneTaste or its officers, or incite others to do so." OneTaste denies the allegations but decided that "the cost of defending the case would exceed the amount" of settling, the company said in an ongoing breach of contract lawsuit it filed against Blanck in California in 2022.
This would not be the last time Blanck would be involved in a dispute with the company. As a judge made clear in a December hearing, she's now Jane Doe #1 in the federal case.
'What Do You Guys Think We Did, Just Walk Around with Snakes?'
After the 2018 Bloomberg article accused OneTaste of "resembl[ing] a kind of prostitution ring," the media hits kept coming—even as one of the article's most prominent sources, Ruwan Meepagala, tried to distance himself from this characterization. In a number of podcast appearances, Meepagala stressed that no "literal prostitution" was involved. "There's no point where anyone says, like, go and sleep with this person for money," Meepagala told the Super Trip Talk podcast in 2019.
The feds were not deterred. In 2020, the BBC released a 10-part podcast about OneTaste, titled The Orgasm Cult, and reported that "the FBI is making enquiries into One Taste over allegations including sex trafficking, prostitution and violations of labour law."
Then came Orgasm Inc, the Netflix film chronicling the rise and fall of OneTaste. Much of the film revolves around interviews with a handful of people previously associated with the group.
"It was all fake," says Slusher, the former OneTaste coach, about the film. "I could literally watch that with you and point out, like, OK, I know that person, I know what they actually said. I know that they sliced this footage to cut out words to make Nicole look really bad. They added dark music effects."
Then there was the occult footage.
Most of the movie's background imagery features archival footage and photos from OneTaste happenings. It's all pretty normie-looking, even at events with OMing. The parties could be office happy hours. The talks look like your average conference seminar. Even a scene with Cherwitz and a snake looks more like a college play than Eyes Wide Shut.
But at a turning point in the film's narrative—depicting OneTaste's alleged shift from a quirky but mostly benign group of sex and wellness weirdos to something scarier and possibly criminal—comes something more unsettling.
A man in an animal mask stands by as mostly nude women with witchy hair kiss and grope each other on a plush red couch, ornate chalices before them. Another woman dances with and smooches a slithering snake. Someone reads tarot cards. Someone wears a hooded robe. It's both opulent and cartoonish, evoking hedonism and a sinister sexuality. And all of it was created by the documentarians.
"Dramatized" footage in documentaries is common. But mixing real documentary footage with salacious, filmmaker-created material left the wrong impression.
"They managed to put more snakes in that Netflix [film]," Daedone laughs. "Like, what do you guys think we did, just walk around with snakes? I never did that."
OneTaste did have thematic courses—88 over the years, according to Daedone—and "one was about sort of esoteric practices," she says. "And so, you know, I would invite sort of theatrical explorations. But there was never, ever another snake time."
The most controversial parts of the Netflix film involve Blanck, the woman with whom OneTaste had settled the 2015 lawsuit.
Blanck and her then-boyfriend got involved with OneTaste in 2012. She would later live with fellow OM practitioners in New York, and work for OneTaste as a sales representative.
Ayries Blanck does not appear in the film. But her sister, Autymn Blanck, does.
In the film, Autymn, who was paid $25,000 for some writings and photos of her sister's, reads from journals purportedly written by Ayries right after she stopped affiliating with OneTaste.
These selections raise some damning allegations, including a claim that people at OneTaste were unsympathetic to Ayries when she experienced domestic violence and that she had been forced to engage in unwanted sexual activity.
OneTaste denied these allegations in a California breach-of-contract suit against Blanck, claiming Ayries has a "vendetta" against the company.
Longer selections of Blanck's purported journals, filed as part of the California and federal cases, illuminate personal grievances with folks at OneTaste, including complaints about being expected to sexually share her boyfriend-turned-fiance with other OneTaste community members and feelings of betrayal after he married someone else at a OneTaste retreat and she wasn't told until afterward. There is also much second-guessing of OneTaste teachings she formerly accepted and wrestling with discomfort over sexual encounters she admits she went along with "willingly" at the time.
In multiple legal filings, lawyers for Daedone, Cherwitz, and OneTaste have raised serious questions about the provenance and veracity of these journal entries. They were allegedly handwritten by Ayries in 2015, left with her sister not long after, and simply typed up for Netflix by Autymn in May 2022. Yet the journal entries say Ayries was reading a book—The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook—that wasn't published until 2019.
Meanwhile, Autymn's Google doc "transcription" of the journals were revised myriad times, going through more than 50 drafts and hundreds of minor edits, according to Jason Frankovitz, a software engineer enlisted by lawyers representing OneTaste to analyze the documents.
Autymn, someone listed only as "A," and filmmaker Sarah Gibson all had access to the documents, according to Frankovitz. Ayries reportedly told prosecutors last October that she hadn't looked at the journals in over a decade, and had only learned her sister transcribed them "when I watched the Netflix documentary," according to a December 30 letter to Gujarati from defense lawyers. But last December, Ayries told the government she had opened the Google docs "and made copies and edits" in 2022.
In the California civil suit, when OneTaste sought to review Ayries' handwritten journals, it found Autymn had mailed them to McGinnis in early 2024. Autymn testified that she did this after the FBI agent noted that they couldn't be subpoenaed from her if they weren't in her possession. (This wasn't the only advice from McGinnis that raised the defendants' suspicions: He also suggested to Ayries, in November 2022, that she "cancel" a gmail account used to communicate with OneTaste associates, per material submitted as part of discovery in the breach-of-contract suit and mentioned in the criminal case. McGinnis was not "under any obligation to preserve and collect the Email Account," prosecutors argued in response, suggesting the defense failed to show it "contained exculpatory material that was apparent before it was canceled, that its contents are inaccessible by other means, and that FBI Special Agent McGinnis or any member of the prosecution team acted in bad faith." The court ultimately agreed that defendants failed to demonstrate "exculpatory value that was apparent before the account was canceled" or "bad faith on the part of the 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 knowing she had no money." What was OneTaste supposed to do? Reject people who were possibly making poor financial decisions? This isn't an onus we put on other businesses.
The memorandum's most extensive claims relate to alleged psychological harm. But these claims are also amorphous. Prosecutors portray things intrinsic to OneTaste philosophy—like encouraging sexual exploration as a means for personal growth—as crime tactics.
They also seem to want to make victims out of anyone who did something later regretted. For instance: "Because of [OneTaste] teachings, Jane Doe 15 once engaged in sex with a man who was older and who she did not find physically attractive," they write.
Much of the government's argument seems to be simply putting Daedone's beliefs on trial.
"Daedone taught that sleeping with new sexual partners was a way to 'clear energy," the government says, framing it as a ploy "intended to encourage victims to perform sex-based services and labor." By teaching "OneTaste participants that OM was no different than meditating or drinking tea," Daedone illegally tried to have "regulated the OneTaste participants' sexual activities." Daedone's was "an ideology in which victims of sexual assault or violence should not consider themselves, or be considered by others, to be victims," they say, and this "resulted in efforts to exact psychological" harm.
According to Daedone, her anti-victimhood idea isn't about excusing harm but helping those who have been harmed, since adopting "victim" as an identity can be disempowering. "I think that if you make social disadvantage or being oppressed central to your identity, then what you're actually doing is putting the locus of power outside of yourself," says Daedone. "The only advances you can make then are categorizing your oppression and then trying to amend it. So you actually have to move to a different frame altogether."
To the government, Daedone's teachings amount to attempts at "coercive control." The defendants call this an "amorphous theory that the law does not support, where…any perceived negative treatment of an alleged victim, however attenuated from performing of labor, could be labeled psychological coercion."
There are some concrete allegations about labor practices in the government's 144-page missive. The company allegedly "misled the OneTaste participants about their anticipated salaries" and "failed to pay employees overtime in accordance with state and federal requirements." But even if such claims prove true, activities like skirting overtime pay rules or requiring workers to participate in unpaid text threads are a far cry from human trafficking.
There are also a fair number of claims related to sexual activity.
Prosecutors allege that Daedone and Cherwitz "groomed" people to spend time—and sometimes get kinky—with an early investor, including participating in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Wizard of Oz" themed "role play and/or sexual activity."
They allege that some people were encouraged to OM with potential clients or engage in sex acts with people as part of OneTaste courses. For instance, "executives directed Jane Doe 1 to perform oral sex on a male student in a OneTaste course when the male student did not have a partner," prosecutors say.
But while specific in salacious details, the allegations in this category get vague about certain key points. Were staff ordered to get kinky as a condition of employment—or were OneTaste community members doing it for the cause? Did someone's boss say that enacting fantasy scenes with an investor could lead to a promotion, or was this advice from a coworker? Was "Jane Doe 1" staff at the time of this supposed sexual directive or was she another student? Did she object? Were Daedone or Cherwitz even there, or aware at all of this alleged happening?
The government is clearly trying to give the most negative impression. But if it actually had evidence that Daedone and Cherwitz were, say, coercing women into sex with wealthy investors in order to benefit financially off their sexual labor, we would certainly see sex trafficking charges of some sort, and we don't. The lack of sex-related charges casts doubt on what one might read between the lines.
"The government's memorandum reveals its intent to constructively amend its one-count forced conspiracy indictment into a sex-trafficking charge," Daedone and Cherwitz's team argued to the court in an October 25, 2024, filing. "It has executed a classic bait and switch, charging one count all while planning to try a very different case."
In a motion filed in December, Daedone's and Cherwitz's defense team argues that the very idea of "nonphysical" coercion goes beyond the 13th Amendment's restrictions on involuntary servitude. They also say the definition of "serious harm" is so vague that it fails under the Constitution's Due Process clause, which stops the government from sanctioning people in the absence of clear and established laws and procedures. Because of this vagueness, they argue, it fails to provide fair notice of what is unlawful, promotes arbitrary enforcement, and leaves it "to the judicial branch to give meaning to a statute's vague terms."
'Sexuality on a Woman's Terms'
The sheer bulk of the documentation produced by the government tells its own story. Prosecutors have hard drives from Blanck and several others formerly involved with OneTaste, as well as interviews with at least 26 witnesses. "The government has produced over 400,000 pages of discovery material, 80,000 pages of government exhibits, 5,000 pages of [witness statements], and 82 hours of video," said defense lawyers in a January 18, 2025, letter.
The government also has copious data provided by OneTaste in response to requests and subpoenas. Between February 2021 and August 2023, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gillian Kassner requested—among many other things—employment and rental agreements, materials concerning Magic School, employee time logs, OneTaste course modules and client lists, documents "in which individuals' breasts and/or public areas are exposed," sales team Slack messages, all bookkeeping and accounting records, and video and audio of private gatherings involving customers. (The sequence of requests over time, from a focus on potential occult and prostitution evidence to more mundane requests, shows how the trajectory of the investigation changed over time and suggests investigators wound up with a much different case than they were initially expecting to find.)
The magnitude of the information puts the actual charges into perspective. Whatever they leave to be desired, it wasn't for a lack of government trying.
The "surface story of why OneTaste was taken down is a cover for the deeper truth of where the culture is at, which is that there is a war on sex, and a war on women's power," argued orgasmic meditation coach Aubrey Fuller in a June 2024 Instagram post.
Fuller and colleagues now teach OMing and related philosophies through the Eros Platform, an online media portal run by OneTaste. The company—which seriously cut back business operations in 2018—has been slowly bouncing back, opening a new educational center in New York City last fall and beginning to offer more in-person programming again.
After leaving OneTaste in February 2013, Price recently went back to teaching about OM and adjacent ideas through the Eros Platform. The federal prosecution and the Netflix film are "an onslaught against OM itself as a valid practice" and "I have to defend it," she posted to Facebook in January.
Daedone says the idea of "sexuality on a woman's terms…sexuality in order to empower her" is "unimaginable to most people, the same way that…yoga and meditation were seen as weird and culty when they first entered as well. So any new, profoundly healing protocol is seen as dark."
It didn't help that the NXIVM prosecution was still fresh in people's minds. That case earned ample attention and perhaps helped prime the public to suspect more self-help groups were fronts for sex cults. Multiple people involved with OneTaste have insisted that this case is nothing like those involving NXIVM.
But in at least one regard, I think it is: the government's quickness to throw around "sex trafficking" claims that don't fit. Whatever else NXIVM members may have been guilty of doing, they weren't sex traffickers as the term is typically understood.
These prosecutions fit into a larger culture—and government—obsessed with the prospect of sex trafficking. By the time the FBI started investigating OneTaste, warnings about a supposed sex trafficking epidemic had been rampant in American media and halls of power for at least two decades.
Many of those warnings were pushed by activists intent on suppressing all sex work, or even sexuality in the public sphere more broadly. For authorities, it provided a great justification for expanding law enforcement authority and resources. When the epidemic turned out to be apocryphal, those same authorities needed some way to justify their new budgets and to satisfy the public appetite for thwarting trafficking that they had been stoking.
The result was an explosion of "sex trafficking stings" and "human trafficking busts" that actually target consenting adults, an onslaught of action against women who engage in or facilitate sex work, a war on websites where sex workers advertise, and an ongoing push to expand what sex trafficking and human trafficking mean.
These are terms that have gone from referring to the use of force, fraud, or threats to compel labor, sexual or otherwise, to something much broader—especially when conspiracy charges are added to the mix. As in the war on drugs, the range of criminal targets and tactics to go after them has expanded, too.
And for what?
Maybe OneTaste's philosophies and practices aren't for everyone. And maybe OneTaste isn't a group you'd personally like to associate with.
Maybe, over the years, its leaders made mistakes—pushed too hard, or promised too much. Maybe they were just naive, thinking business and pleasure and the business of pleasure could coexist seamlessly.
Maybe its antics sometimes show how blurry the lines between illegal sex work and permitted relationships are. And maybe the sour feelings of some ex-OM enthusiasts highlight how blurry are the lines between liberation and denial, agency and regret.
But the government has offered little evidence that Daedone, Cherwitz, or any of OneTaste's leaders were engaged in a forced-labor conspiracy. For all its wild details, the case is missing both conspiracy and forced labor elements. Prosecutors seem to want this case to rest on the idea that the company's bigwigs were mean girls and sex weirdos who used orgasms as tools of mind control.
From the lurid occult associations to the implied sex trafficking allegations, there's precious little substance to this case—just salaciousness, scandal, and the all-too-familiar sense that female sexuality is something to be suppressed and controlled by the state.
*CORRECTION: Blanck's legal action was a demand letter.
