FBI Failed To Spot Faked Evidence in Case Against Alleged Orgasm Cult

Yahoo

19-03-2025

It's not every day you see federal prosecutors admit they were wrong. But the fishiness of evidence from a key government witness could no longer be ignored, it seems.
In February, I wrote about the weird, weak federal case against OneTaste, a company centered around the practice of orgasmic meditation. OneTaste was dubbed an "orgasm cult" and pilloried in the media, including a Netflix documentary produced by actress Lena Dunham, and "conspiracy to commit forced labor" charges have been filed against OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz.
Key evidence in that case included journals allegedly penned by former OneTaste employee Ayries Blanck just after leaving the company. These journals also figured prominently in the 2022 Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc.
The journal entries were always suspect—and now the government apparently agrees.
"Prior to March 2025, Blanck repeatedly maintained to the government that she wrote the Handwritten Journals in and around the time she left OneTaste," prosecutors said in a March 12 letter to U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati. "Her account was corroborated by her sister"—Autymn Blanck, who appeared in the Netflix film to read words allegedly lifted from Ayries' handwritten journals.
But Ayries Blanck recently admitted to prosecutors that she penned the handwritten journals years later.
"The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the Handwritten Journals are authentic," and "does not intend to and will not seek to admit any of Blanck's journals at trial," said prosecutors. They also said they will no longer call Ayries Blanck as a witness at Daedone and Cherwitz's trial, scheduled to start in May.
OneTaste is a wellness company that was founded in San Francisco more than 20 years ago. Its activities have fluctuated some over the years but always included orgasmic meditation, a partnered clitoral stroking practice that practitioners call OMing.
In 2023, former executives Daedone and Cherwitz were charged with conspiracy to commit forced labor. No underlying forced labor charge was filed. (For a much longer dissection of this case, check out my Reason piece from February.)
Ayries Blanck was "Jane Doe 1" in this case—though her identity is now public—and accusations Blanck made in her journals pepper prosecutors' allegations about Daedone and Cherwitz.
But it seems that Ayries Blanck and her sister, Autymn, repeatedly misled the FBI and prosecutors about these journals, per the government's new admissions. And this revelation opens up wider questions about the credibility of the Blanck sisters, whose allegations about OneTaste and its former leaders have been circulated by both the media and the federal government.
Ayries Blanck and her then-boyfriend became involved with OneTaste in 2012 and Blanck went on to work as a sales representative for the company. But she left in 2015, amid some personal drama, and soon sent a demand letter accusing OneTaste of a hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wage, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
OneTaste privately mediated the dispute with Blanck, paying her $325,000 in an out-of-court settlement. While OneTaste has denied Blanck's allegations, it reasoned that the settlement would be cheaper than the cost of defending a potential lawsuit, according to an ongoing breach-of-contract suit filed against Blanck in 2022.
As part of the settlement, Blanck agreed not to "disparage OneTaste or its officers, or incite others to do so." In its breach-of-contract suit, OneTaste argues that Blanck did not uphold her end of this bargain.
A major part of this involves Orgasm Inc, the 2022 Netflix documentary produced by Dunham. Ayries Blanck clearly could not have been in or involved with the film without violating the terms of the settlement. But, in a clever workaround, Autymn Blanck appears on camera to tell her sister's story, reading words allegedly written by Ayries Blanck in 2015. According to Autymn Blanck, Ayries Blanck had left her handwritten journals at Autymn Blanck's house and Autymn Blanck took it upon herself to type up portions of these journals in a Google Doc and share them with Netflix.
It must have seemed like a win-win at the time. Ayries Blanck got to "appear" in the film without violating her nondisparagement clause. Autymn Blanck got a $25,000 paycheck. And Netflix got to air some salacious allegations, including a claim that people at OneTaste ignored or even condoned violence against her and that she had been forced to engage in sexual activity with strangers.
When OneTaste later sought to review the handwritten journals, as part of the civil suit, it discovered Autymn Blanck had mailed them to FBI Special Agent Elliot McGinnis in early 2024.
Federal prosecutors would go on to employ the journals in the case against Daedone and Cherwitz, citing them in an October 2024 motion laying out the case and seeking to have them admitted as trial evidence.
"Jane Doe 1 wrote multiple handwritten journal entries both during and after she served as a student and staff member of OneTaste," the motion stated. "The journal entries, among other things, detail Jane Doe 1's relationships with the defendants and their co-conspirators, financial condition, and psychological state during and shortly after the time she performed labor and services in connection with the charged conspiracy."
Lawyers for Daedone, Cherwitz, and OneTaste weren't having it. In both the breach-of-contract suit and the federal case, they pointed to credibility issues concerning both the handwritten journals and the Google Doc typed from them, including handwriting differences in physical journals and a reference to a book that wouldn't be released until years after the journals were allegedly written.
The Google Doc in which Autymn Blanck supposedly simply transcribed the handwritten journals had more than 50 drafts and hundreds of minor edits, according to Jason Frankovitz, a software engineer enlisted by OneTaste to analyze the documents. Autymn Blanck, filmmaker Sarah Gibson, and someone listed only as "A" had access to them.
And it got fishier. Parts of the handwritten journals—copies of which the government shared with the defense last summer—nearly perfectly matched the final draft of the Google Doc, not the earliest versions.
"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," defense lawyers said in a December 2, 2024, letter to Gujarati. "The only inference to be drawn from this is that the handwritten journals were written after the electronic journals."
Federal prosecutors continued to defend the journals…until recently.
"In light of information obtained since [a February 26, 2025] status conference, the government no longer maintains that the disputed portions of [Ayries] Blanck's handwritten journals are authentic," wrote U.S. Attorney John J. Durham in the March 12 letter, which was co-signed by other federal prosecutors on the Daedone and Cherwitz case. "This letter therefore affirmatively corrects any statements to the contrary previously made to the Court and defense."
The letter was heavily redacted before being made publicly available. But it still says enough to suggest that the Blanck sisters hoodwinked a whole lot of people.
Durham notes that Ayries Blanck was first interviewed by the FBI in July 2018 and again interviewed in May 2022. On neither occasion did she mention her journals. It was only in June 2022—after production of the Netflix film was underway—that she said anything about any journals at all.
And it wasn't until March 9, 2023, that Black gave the FBI "copies of typewritten journals pertaining to her time at OneTaste," according to prosecutors. On April 15, 2024, over a year later, the FBI received a package—sent by Autymn Blanck—with handwritten journals and a hard drive that Ayries Blanck had purportedly left with her sister in 2015.
Autymn Blanck testified to the court in the breach-of-contract case against her sister that she sent the package to the FBI after Agent McGinnis noted that OneTaste couldn't subpoena the journals from her if she didn't have them.
After the defense began raising questions about the provenance and authenticity of Ayries Blanck's journals, she was questioned multiple times by the FBI and federal prosecutors—once in October, once in November, and twice in December, according to Durham. Most portions of the letter pertaining to these interviews are redacted, but whatever was revealed, it did not prompt the government to abandon its embrace of the journals just yet.
The FBI and prosecutors again interviewed Ayries Blanck on March 7, 2025, and Autymn Blanck on March 10 and 11. Portions of the March 12 letter pertaining to these conversations are largely redacted. But by March 12, the government had changed its tune about the journals.
"The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the Handwritten Journals are authentic 'in terms of [being] contemporaneous[ly] [written]'" prosecutors told Judge Gujarati.
Until March 2025, Ayries Blanck said that the handwritten journals were penned around the time she left OneTaste in 2015 and that the electronic journal entries had been typed up later based on these handwritten journals, prosecutors said. She stuck to this story "even when pressed by the government on multiple occasions," and "her account was corroborated by her sister."
"However, upon continuing to be pressed by the government regarding the journals, [Ayries] Blanck has since acknowledged that she physically copied the relevant portion of the Handwritten Journals after typing the Typewritten Journals," prosecutors stated.
Blanck now claims that the typed journal entries that later became the "2015" hard-copy journals were based "at least in part on contemporaneously-written journal entries," according to the government. These contemporaneous writings supposedly encompass both typed and handwritten entries. But if such journal entries really do exist, why didn't the Blanck sisters share the real 2015 entries with the Netflix filmmakers and the FBI?
The path they chose suggests there are either details of Ayries Blanck's actual journals that they wanted hidden, or things not in the actual journals that they wanted added. Perhaps both.
In any event, it doesn't leave the impression that any journals the Blanck sisters have produced or will produce can be trusted, nor does it reflect well on their overall veracity. Per prosecutors' admissions, Ayries Blanck not only made misleading statements to FBI agents on multiple occasions but actively engaged in subterfuge to cover her tracks, physically copying what was typed in the 2022 Google Doc to pass it off as a journal handwritten in 2015.
Lawyers for Daedone and Cherwitz are seeking to have the full March 12 letter from prosecutors unsealed, along with other statements Blanck has made about her journals and the unauthentic journals themselves.
"Since the defense first raised the falsity of the journals in September 2024, the government has consistently misrepresented facts about these fake journals in open court, in various filings, and even in a motion in limine claiming their authenticity," wrote attorneys Celia Cohen and Michael P. Robotti in a March 14 letter to Judge Gujarati. "In that lengthy motion, the government devoted eight pages to the admissibility of these journals, and it specifically asked the Court to find them admissible, based on their 'high degree of trustworthiness.'"
The lawyers also suggest in the letter that "the government should immediately drop the charges against the defendants" and also "investigate and prosecute Blanck for manufacturing evidence for this trial."
In another March 14 letter, attorney Jennifer Bonjean points to a potential departure from protocol when it came to the handling of Ayries Blanck's alleged journals and hard drive, which Special Agent Elliot McGinnis received in a package from Autymn Blanck on April 15, 2024. "Autymn testified under oath at a civil deposition that she sent McGinnis six to eight journals," but "the government has produced only three journals to the defense," they write. "Inexplicably, McGinnis did not put the journals into evidence until May 21, 2024 – over a month after receiving them." McGinnis also took two months to enter the hard drive into evidence, they say.
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The post FBI Failed To Spot Faked Evidence in Case Against Alleged Orgasm Cult appeared first on Reason.com.