Orgasm 'cult' OneTaste founder's shocking explanation for 'coercing staff into sexual slavery'
OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone and Head of Sales Rachel Cherwitz were charged with forced labor conspiracy in 2023 for coercing volunteers, employees and contractors to perform sex acts, according to the Department of Justice.
The California natives both pleaded not guilty, claiming their work promoted female empowerment through orgasms.
During opening statements of their highly-anticipated trial, which kicked off this week, the women's legal team fiercely denied accusations that anything about their activities was predatory or exploitative.
'It was like yoga with a twist,' Daedone's attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, bluntly declared in Brooklyn's US District Court on Tuesday.
She added that the reason for any unflattering accusations made against OneTaste stem from shame felt from former participants.
'Now they're married and have kids and don't want their neighbors to know what they were doing in their 20s,' Bonjean said about former members.
'At the time, they were having a blast. Grown people made grown decisions they don't want to stand by.'
Bonjean described Daedone as a spiritual and educated businesswoman who developed 'a scientific-based practice with proven benefits,' according to The New York Times.
This scientifically-driven practice: a ritual involving a woman lying down without any pants or undergarments as someone rubbed her genitals for about 15 minutes, according to the indictment.
Wrapping up on Tuesday, Bonjean accused the court of trying to criminalize a sex-positive lifestyle and said people were free to leave whenever they pleased.
'That's not force, that's not coercion. It may even be growth,' Bojean said.
At one point, OneTaste operated centers in cities including New York, San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, Boulder, Los Angeles, Austin and London.
In New York City, OneTaste leased residences and hosted events in several different locations, including in Brooklyn and the Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Hell's Kitchen, Soho and the West Village.
Between 2006 and 2008, OneTaste allegedly subjected members to 'economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse; surveillance; indoctrination; and intimidation,' the indictment reads.
Prosecutors said they preyed on traumatized women and told them their 'orgasmic meditation' could heal them.
Daedone and Cherwitz have been accused of forcing members to become dependent on each other - making them share beds and travel in groups.
Financially, they allegedly urged people to go into debt so they had nowhere else to go.
In August of 2015, former employee Ayries Blanck filed a lawsuit against the company.
Blanck started working for the firm in 2012, but left in 2014.
She then signed a non-disclosure agreement and settled out of court with OneTaste for $325,000 after alleging she was manipulated into having sex.
In the lawsuit, she claimed she was subjected her to a 'hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wage and intentional infliction of emotional distress.'
Five months before Daedone and Cherwitz were indicted, Netflix aired Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste.
Blanck was featured in the bombshell documentary, in which she shared her journal entries that painted a dark picture of the workplace.
But in March, Blanck's journals were thrown out of the Brooklyn court under defense pressure – and prosecutors said she was no longer considered a key witness.
'The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the handwritten journals are authentic,' prosecutors wrote to the judge.
They said the diaries were transcribed years later.
In April, an FBI special agent, who was also involved in the Netflix hit, was accused of fabricating evidence by a member of Congress.
DailyMail.com obtained a letter to FBI director Kash Patel 'seeking answers' about the special agent in the case.
The representative, whose name is redacted, alleges a special agent of the New York City division has 'a long and extremely troubling list of alleged investigative abuses which demand accountability.'
DailyMail.com has decided not to name the agent in the letter, whose 'actions appear to represent a fundamental corruption of the investigative process and a failure of agent accountability,' it reads.
The letter accuses the special agent of 'participating in Netflix productions while investigating targets' plus making up evidence 'through entertainment media.' filing misleading affidavits, directing witnesses to destroy evidence and using personal email to avoid official scrutiny.
'Most disturbing is the systematic effort to transform Netflix-created content into federal evidence,' it states.
'This isn't just overreach – it's deliberate fabrication of a criminal case through entertainment media.'
Adding to the convoluted nature surrounding Daedone and Cherwitz's legal situation, they sued Netflix for airing 'completely false' accusations against them.
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It was not merely that Ghislaine was a product of an elite unburdened by principle, who often reduce their daughters to mere ornaments. It is that an ornament, it seems, is all that Ghislaine Maxwell ever aspired to be. It was not her charity, or her father's publishing, that were Maxwell's great passions. Her great passion appears to have been for the romantic attention of men – and specifically, her life's greatest animating goal seems to have been to achieve, and keep, the attention of Jeffrey Epstein. From those accounts we have of their relationship – and admittedly, these are not always reliable, given how intense, widespread, and prurient the attention on their activities has been – it appears that Maxwell's devotion to Epstein was intense. At her trial in 2021, prosecutors entered into evidence a photo of a cleavage-bearing Maxwell with Epstein, massaging his foot. This seems to have been her posture toward Epstein for the entire time she knew him: slavish, nearly worshipful. The pair met sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Maxwell's father, Robert, died in an apparent suicide in the ocean off the coast of the Canary Islands – aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine – in late 1991. Soon thereafter, it was discovered that millions of dollars were missing from pension funds that he managed; two of Maxwell's brothers were charged for their alleged role in the fraud. (They were later acquitted.) It was during this moment of rupture and imperiled status that Maxwell was romantically involved with Epstein. Her boyfriend would have served as a meal ticket as well as a source of validation: Maxwell is alleged to have received payments from Epstein totaling more than $30m; she told one of her victims that he bought her her New York City townhouse, just a few blocks from his own. By 1994, she was recruiting and grooming teenagers for his sexual abuse. Maybe Maxwell justified what she did for Epstein as kink – a kind of sexual libertinism that shrugged off the regressive, prurient mores of the lower classes. The 90s were the peak of a kind of reductive heterosexual sex-positivity: lots of women were telling themselves, and being told, that sexual submission was a mark of sophistication – that the more liberated they were, the more of men's desires they would grant. But this is all speculation: trying to provide a rationalization for Ghislaine Maxwell's actions evades the true terror of her, which is her seemingly profound and horrifying vacancy. To such a person, obedience does not require a justification. Unequal desire in love – particularly when the suffering lover is a woman – tends to elicit a kind of pity. Feminists, too, often depict women's outsized desire for men as a form of gendered victimization. Generally, it is not seen as serious – women's limerence, romantic obsession, and striving for men's attention is broadly relegated to the realm of the adolescent and the vulgar, the embarrassing and the silly. But Maxwell's case suggests such desire can breed not just frustrated vanity but also a kind of monstrousness. Untempered by principle or self-respect, it can contain in it the seed of the grotesque. In her efforts to please Epstein, and to make herself useful to him, Maxwell became something hideous and unforgivable. In her deficient, warped soul, it seems she lacked something that every woman must have: a morality that she valued more than male approval. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
