Leaders of 'orgasmic meditation' women's wellness company OneTaste convicted in forced labor trial
NEW YORK — The leaders of a sex-focused women's wellness company that promoted "orgasmic meditation" have been convicted of federal forced labor charges.
A Brooklyn jury on Monday found Nicole Daedone, founder of OneTaste Inc., and Rachel Cherwitz, the California-based company's former sales director, guilty after deliberating for less than two days following a five-week trial. The two each face up to 20 years in prison when sentenced later.
Prosecutors had argued the two women ran a yearslong scheme that groomed adherents — many of them victims of sexual trauma — to do their bidding.
They said Daedone, 57, of New York, and Cherwitz, 44, of California, used economic, sexual and psychological abuse, intimidation and indoctrination to force OneTaste members into sexual acts they found uncomfortable or repulsive, such as having sex with prospective investors or clients.
The two told followers the questionable acts were necessary in order to obtain "freedom" and "enlightenment" and demonstrate their commitment to the organization's principles.
Prosecutors said OneTaste leaders also didn't pay promised earnings to the members-turned-workers and even forced some of them to take out new credit cards to continue taking the company's courses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Nina Gupta, in her closing statement last week, said the defendants "built a business on the backs" of victims who "gave everything" to them, including "their money, their time, their bodies, their dignity, and ultimately their sanity."
"The jury's verdict has unmasked Daedone and Cherwitz for who they truly are: grifters who preyed on vulnerable victims by making empty promises of sexual empowerment and wellness only to manipulate them into performing labor and services for the defendants' benefit," said Joseph Nocella, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Daedone's defense team cast her as a "ceiling-shattering feminist entrepreneur" who created a unique business around women's sexuality and empowerment.
Cherwitz's lawyer, Celia Cohen, argued that the witnesses who testified weren't forced to do anything. When they didn't like the organization anymore or wanted to try other things, she said, they simply left.
"No matter what you think about OneTaste and what they were doing, they chose it. They knew what it was about," she said in her closing statement last week. "The fact they are regretting the actions that they took when they were younger is not evidence of a crime."
Lawyers for the defendants said their clients maintain their innocence and intend to appeal.
"We are deeply disappointed in today's verdict," the lawyers said in a statement Monday. "This case raised numerous novel and complex legal issues that will require review by the Second Circuit."
Daedone co-founded OneTaste in San Francisco in 2004 as a sort of self-help commune that viewed female orgasms as key to sexual and psychological wellness and interpersonal connection.
A centerpiece was "orgasmic meditation," or "OM," which was carried out by men manually stimulating women in a group setting.
The company enjoyed glowing media coverage in the 2010s and quickly opened outposts from Los Angeles to London. Portrayed as a cutting-edge enterprise that prioritized women's sexual pleasure, it generated revenue by providing courses, coaching, OM events, and other sexual practices for a fee.
Daedone sold her stake in the company in 2017 for $12 million — a year before OneTaste's marketing and labor practices came under scrutiny.
The company's current owners, who have rebranded it the Institute of OM Foundation, have said its work has been misconstrued and the charges against its former executives were unjustified.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Pentagon investigator admits to faking dozens of Top Secret security clearance background checks
A federal contractor tasked with performing background checks on Department of Defense employees seeking high-level security clearances copped to submitting reams of bogus reports when she claimed to have thoroughly vetted candidates who, in fact, had not been properly checked out. Of 39 allegedly fraudulent investigations Nousheen Qureshi carried out over the course of more than a year for the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency, at least a half-dozen included fabricated 'interviews' with people who later said they had never even heard from her at all, according to a plea agreement obtained first by The Independent. 'The results of the background investigations conducted by [Qureshi] were used to determine whether to grant security clearances to individuals at various levels, including and up to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information ('TS/SCI') access,' states the plea agreement, which was unsealed Tuesday in Santa Ana, California federal court. 'To conduct the investigations, [Qureshi] herself had TS/SCI clearance.' Qureshi, a Mission Viejo, California, resident, worked at the time for CACI International, a $7.7 billion Virginia-based conglomerate that bills itself as being 'ever vigilant in helping our customers meet their greatest challenges in national security.' Each of the 299 background investigations she turned in between July 2020 and August 2021 had to be re-worked by the agency, costing taxpayers nearly $250,000 extra, according to the plea agreement. Qureshi was subsequently hired by two other companies to run background checks for the Department of Homeland Security, doing more than 600 of them until her past finally came to light and she was removed from all DHS projects, the plea agreement says. Tucker Atkins, Qureshi's court-appointed lawyer, did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. Since the September 11 terrorist attacks there has been a tremendous increase in the number of security clearances issued by the federal government, according to attorney Dan Meyer, a former U.S. Navy officer who is now a national security partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Tully Rinckey, PLLC. As the system has become more and more overloaded, investigators have seen their workloads double, triple or even quadruple to as many as 40 cases a week, Meyer told The Independent. Along with this, the incentive to cut corners has also increased, said Meyer. 'And once they start falsifying documents, there's a greater incentive to falsify documents because you've got to hide it once you've done it,' he said. Further, Meyer pointed out, the Trump administration has publicly undercut the importance of rigorous security clearances, where he said sends a message out to the rank-and-file, 'who start to think, 'Hey, maybe this isn't so important.'' A sham background report such as those generated by Qureshi can lead to extremely serious counterintelligence issues, according to Seamus Hughes, a senior researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, a partnership between the University of Nebraska at Omaha and DHS. 'Intelligence officials are trusted with some of the nation's most important secrets. Fabricating background interviews and gaming the process has the potential to put those secrets at serious risk,' Hughes told The Independent. 'There's been an increasing number of criminal cases recently against government employees with high-level security clearances leaking classified information. A thorough security clearance review is paramount to preventing such disclosures.' The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency is responsible for ensuring U.S. government job candidates, as well as those already on the payroll, can be trusted with, among other things, classified information. As 'America's gatekeeper,' the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency conducts over two million background checks each year on people applying for both civilian and military roles, and reinvestigates current employees' security clearances at regular intervals. Qureshi began working at CACI in June 2018, and was assigned to the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency security clearance investigations, according to her plea agreement. 'In that capacity, [Qureshi] conducted background investigations for the Department of Defense,' the plea agreement says. 'The investigations included applicants for DoD employment, DoD employee background reinvestigations, and investigations for security clearances of defense contractors' employees.' Qureshi was responsible for interviewing friends, acquaintances, and associates of those under investigation, and writing reports on her findings, according to the plea filing. It says the clearances in question went all the way up to the TS/SCI level, which allows individuals with a demonstrated 'need to know' to access highly classified materials. To ensure security clearance investigations are being done properly, the agency's Quality Management Oversight Group randomly selects reports to review and re-contacts the individuals interviewed with written questionnaires about the process, the plea explains. In June 2021, amid a routine probe into one of Qureshi's reports, the agency heard from 'J.F.,' a person she had spoken to as part of background investigation into a Top Secret security clearance candidate identified in the plea filing as 'M.C.' 'J.F.'s response to DCSA stated that he provided information to [Qureshi] about M.C.'s drug use,' the plea states. '[Qureshi's] report of J.F.'s interview did not contain this derogatory information.' It also says that Qureshi 'willfully falsely reported that she had interviewed M.C.'s landlord, S.R., and that S.R. stated that M.C. had lived at a Lancaster, California residence alone.' However, the plea filing goes on, Qureshi 'well knew' that she had not interviewed S.R., and S.R. 'had not stated M.C. lived alone.' 'In a subsequent interview with S.R., DCIS Special Agents learned that M.C. lived at the Lancaster residence with four roommates and that two rooms at the residence were used as vacation rentals,' the plea continues, adding that Qureshi's 'false statements were material to the decisions' that followed by DCSA as to granting M.C. a security clearance. The plea agreement, which does not specify if M.C.'s clearance was ultimately approved or not, says CACI then pulled a sample of Qureshi's other background investigations, to recheck her work. Of the cases CACI reviewed, it came to find out that 'six individuals claimed they had not been interviewed' at all by Qureshi, who, the plea maintains, 'submitted six separate reports stating that she had interviewed those individuals and provided factual narratives of their conversations.' As a result, the plea says CACI fired Qureshi in August 2021. Once she was gone, the Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency 'reworked the 299 background investigations' Qureshi had conducted over the prior year, for which she had spoken to 1,025 sources, according to the plea. In all, it says special agents discovered no fewer than 39 false reports, and pegs the cost of redoing them at $240,306.04. Two months later, Qureshi hired on as an investigator at a pair of other federal contractors, Omniplex World Services Corporation and ADC Ltd., the plea filing states. It says the two companies had contracts with DHS to perform background checks on prospective employees applying for jobs at the agency. Between late October 2021 and February 2024, when the DHS Office of Inspector General connected the dots and had Qureshi removed from all assignments connected to the agency, she conducted 608 background investigations on applicants to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to the plea. Messages seeking comment sent on Wednesday to CACI, Omniplex and ADC went unanswered. In 2020, another CACI employee conducting security clearance investigations for DCSA pleaded guilty to fabricating nearly 70 reports in 11 months. Two years later, a Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency staffer pleaded guilty to falsifying reports as part of security clearance investigations. In 2024, another agency investigator pleaded guilty to near-identical charges, admitting to having made up more than 40 security clearance interviews that never actually took place. Qureshi pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements, a charge that carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. In Qureshi's case, however, prosecutors are recommending she be sentenced to probation and home detention. Qureshi is due to appear in court on June 16.
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Oracle beats quarterly revenue estimates
June 11 (Reuters) - Oracle (ORCL.N), opens new tab surpassed fourth-quarter revenue estimates on Wednesday, boosted by growing demand for its cloud offerings from companies deploying artificial intelligence. Revenue for the quarter stood at $15.90 billion, compared with the analysts' average estimate of $15.59 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
CoreWeave to offer compute capacity in Google's new cloud deal with OpenAI, sources say
June 11 (Reuters) - CoreWeave (CRWV.O), opens new tab has emerged as a winner in Google's newly signed partnership with OpenAI, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters, in the latest example of the voracious appetite for computing resources in the artificial-intelligence industry and the formation of new alliances to meet them. The so-called neocloud company, which sells cloud computing services built on Nvidia's (NVDA.O), opens new tab graphics processing units, is slated to provide computing capacity to Google's cloud unit, and Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google will then sell that computing capacity to OpenAI to meet the growing demand for services like ChatGPT, the sources said. Google will also provide some of its own computing resources to OpenAI, added the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters. The details of the arrangement, first reported by Reuters on Tuesday, highlight the evolving dynamics between hyperscalers like (AMZN.O), opens new tab, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab and Google and so-called neocloud companies like Coreweave. Hyperscalers are large cloud service providers that offer massive-scale data centers and cloud infrastructure. The insatiable hunger for computing resources has generated major investment commitments and turned rivals into partners. Backed by OpenAI and Nvidia, Coreweave signed up Google as a customer in the first quarter. CoreWeave, Google and OpenAI declined to comment. CoreWeave, a specialized cloud provider that went public in March, has already been a major supplier of OpenAI's infrastructure. It has signed a five-year contract worth $11.9 billion with OpenAI to provide dedicated computing capacity for OpenAI's model training and inference. OpenAI also took a $350 million equity stake in CoreWeave in March. This partnership was further expanded last month through an additional agreement worth up to $4 billion, extending through April 2029, underscoring OpenAI's escalating demand for high-performance computing resources. Industry insiders say adding Google Cloud as a new customer could help CoreWeave diversify its revenue sources, and having a credible partner with deep pockets like Google enables the startup to secure more favorable financing terms to support ambitious data center buildouts across the country. This could also boost Google's cloud unit, which generated $43 billion in sales last year, allowing it to capitalize on the growth of OpenAI, which is also one of its largest competitors in areas like search and chatbots. It positions Google as a neutral provider of computing resources in competition with peers such as Amazon and Microsoft. CoreWeave's deal with Google coincides with Microsoft's re-evaluation of its data center strategy, including withdrawing from certain data center leases. Microsoft, once Coreweave's largest customer, accounting for about 62% of its 2024 revenue, is also renegotiating with OpenAI to revise the terms of their multibillion-dollar investment, including the future equity stake it will hold in OpenAI. CoreWeave, backed by Nvidia, has established itself as a fast-rising provider of GPU-based cloud infrastructure in the AI wave. While its public debut in March was met with a lukewarm response due to concerns over its highly leveraged capital structure and shifting GPU demand, the company's stock has surged since its IPO price of $40 per share, gaining over 270% and reaching a record high of $166.63 in June.
