Founder of Sexual Wellness Company “OneTaste” and Former Head of Sales Convicted of Forced Labor Conspiracy

Press Release

Monday, June 9, 2025

For Immediate Release

U.S. Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York

Defendants Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz Used Deception and Abuse to Obtain Their Victims’ Labor and Services

Earlier today, in federal court in Brooklyn, a federal jury convicted Nicole Daedone, the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of OneTaste, Inc. (OneTaste), a sexual wellness education company, and Rachel Cherwitz, the company’s former head of sales, of forced labor conspiracy in connection with their coercive scheme to obtain the labor and services of certain OneTaste employees.  To achieve their goal, the defendants and their co-conspirators subjected the victims to economic, sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse, as well as surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation.  The verdict was returned after a five-week trial before United States District Judge Diane Gujarati.  When sentenced, Daedone and Cherwitz each face up to 20 years in prison.

Joseph Nocella, Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and Christopher G. Raia, Assistant Director in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the verdict.

“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,” stated United States Attorney Nocella.  “I commend the witnesses who testified at trial notwithstanding the trauma that they experienced at the defendants’ direction.  It is my hope that the just conclusion of this process will bring them closure, and that future charlatans think twice about exploiting human beings in this manner.”

“Today's verdict sends a clear message— controlling your labor force by relying on lies, manipulation, and abuse is a crime. The victims in this case were offered sexual empowerment and wellness as a pathway to healing past trauma, but instead received various forms of abuse and manipulation on behalf of Daedone and Cherwitz for the financial benefit of OneTaste. The FBI will continue to ensure those responsible for forced labor schemes are made to answer for their crimes,” stated FBI Assistant Director in Charge Raia.

OneTaste was a privately held company founded by Daedone in 2004.  Its principal place of business was San Francisco, California, and it operated at various locations within New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, and London.  OneTaste promoted itself as a sexually focused wellness education company that offered hands-on classes on “orgasmic mediation” (OM), which involved stroking a woman’s genitals for 15 minutes.  OneTaste generated revenue by providing courses, coaching, OM events, and less-publicized courses in other sexual practices in exchange for a fee.  

As proven at trial, between 2006 and May 2018, Daedone and Cherwitz obtained the labor and services of multiple young women who had turned to OneTaste for healing and spirituality by coercing them to perform labor, including sexual labor, for the defendants’ benefit.  OneTaste advertised that its courses and teachings could heal past sexual trauma and dysfunction.  Daedone and Cherwitz used abusive and manipulative tactics designed to control OneTaste members by making them emotionally and psychologically dependent on OneTaste, including encouraging them to incur debt by opening lines of credit to finance the expensive courses, subjecting them to constant surveillance in communal homes, collecting sensitive information about their prior trauma and sexual histories, depriving them of sleep, and subjecting them to sexual abuse.

Once they had secured the loyalty and indebtedness of certain OneTaste members, Daedone and Cherwitz engaged in abusive employment practices.  They directed OneTaste members to work long hours seven days per week with little or no compensation; that work included manual labor and the provision of sexual services.  For example, Daedone and Cherwitz coerced their victims to sexually service OneTaste’s current and prospective investors, clients and employees for the financial benefit of the company.  Three witnesses testified about how they were coerced into becoming a “handler” for OneTaste’s initial investor, who was also Daedone’s boyfriend, which required them to live with him, perform demeaning sex acts at his direction, and cook for him.  Multiple other witnesses testified that they were coerced under threat of termination, demotion, ostracism, and financial and spiritual ruin by Daedone and Cherwitz into performing various sex acts with OneTaste’s potential clients and investors. In 2017, Ms. Daedone sold OneTaste—a company built on the backs of coerced and unpaid or substantially underpaid labor—for $12 million.

The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s Human Trafficking and Civil Rights Section.  Assistant United States Attorneys Kayla C. Bensing, Kaitlin T. Farrell, Nina C. Gupta, and Sean Michael Fern are in charge of the prosecution with assistance from Paralegal Specialists Liam McNett and Marlane Bosler.

The Defendants:

NICOLE DAEDONE

Age:  57

New York, New York

RACHEL CHERWITZ

Age:  44

Philo, California

Contact

John Marzulli

Denise Taylor

United States Attorney’s Office

(718) 254-6323

CultNEWS101 Articles: 11/21/2024 (Chanel Maya Banks, Charles Manson, OneTaste, Legal)

Chanel Maya Banks, Charles Manson, OneTaste, Legal

ABC 33: Family insists Chanel Maya Banks is unsafe despite police claims, says she joined cult

"Loved ones of actor Chanel Maya Banks, who is most known for her roles in "Gossip Girl" and "Blue Bloods," said they are convinced the 36-year-old is in harm's way despite the fact that police said they found her unharmed in Texas a few days ago.

Banks' cousin Danielle-Tori Singh on Friday insisted the actor was brainwashed by a religious cult and is in danger. She also said she believes authorities mistakenly identified another woman as Banks.

"We know she's a part of a cult," Singh said during a news conference Friday. "We know that this organized group is not allowing her (to use) her phone."

Singh also said she thinks the cult has been posting on Banks' Instagram account. The account, Singh said, includes photos of a woman who claims to be Banks and that the actor is fine.

The woman also wrote that she just wants "to be free of a toxic woman and her family." The posts included a statement laced with inflammatory allegations, with the woman indicating she willingly left "to escape my cage" and to find spiritual renewal.

"The things that she is posting on her social media are not true and it's not her," Singh said, adding that all photos of Banks and her husband, Carlos, appeared to be deleted. "The only facial recognition that she provided is a little clip that she posted -- or whoever posted -- of her where she's getting her makeup done last night.

Singh added that she saw a separate video on YouTube of a woman in Texas during a retreat. She said while she believes the woman is Banks, she's still uncertain her cousin is safe.

In fact, she thinks Banks deliberately walked across the view of the camera and looked at the lens as a way to send her family a message."

Fox11: Cult leader Charles Manson confessed to additional murders in newly revealed phone call

"Hippie cult leader Charles Manson, who was the mastermind behind one of Hollywood's most gruesome slayings, confessed to additional murders before becoming the leader of the Manson Family cult, as featured in chilling audio that will be included in a new docuseries on Peacock.

The confessions were featured in a teaser clip of the new series, "Making Manson," in which Manson could be heard talking from a prison phone about his time south of the U.S. border.

"There's a whole part of my life that nobody knows about," Manson is heard saying in the clip. 'I lived in Mexico for a while. I went to Acapulco, stole some cars.

"I just got involved in some stuff over my head, man," he continued. "Got involved in a couple of killings. I left my .357 Magnum in Mexico City, and I left some dead people on the beach."

The docuseries premieres Nov. 19 on streaming service Peacock.

In 1971, Manson was convicted of nine murders, including the 1969 slaughter of actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant at the time.

Prosecutors said he was attempting to foment a race war, an idea he supposedly got from a misreading of the Beatles song, "Helter Skelter."

The Manson murders were brutally horrific. Tate, who was 26 at the time of her death, was stabbed and hung from a rafter in her living room. The intruders used the victim's blood to write, "Pigs," while also misspelling "Healter Skelter."

While Manson did not carry out the murders himself, he was the master manipulator who persuaded others to kill for him.

Members of the Manson Family, as his followers were called, slaughtered five of its victims on Aug. 9, 1969: Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, Polish movie director Voityck Frykowski and Steven Parent, a friend of the property's caretakers. The murders took place at Tate's home while her husband, director Roman Polanski, was out of the country at the time.

The next night, a wealthy grocer and his wife, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, were stabbed to death in their home across town."

NBC: OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone says she plans to testify at her trial

"Nicole Daedone, the founder of OneTaste, a wellness company centered on the practice of "orgasmic meditation," said she will "absolutely" testify at her trial next year.

The former CEO is scheduled to stand trial in New York in January on one count of forced labor conspiracy. Prosecutors allege that she and former OneTaste executive Rachel Cherwitz, who is facing the same charge, targeted victims of trauma to become members and manipulated them into performing sex acts and going into debt, among other things. Cherwitz has denied any wrongdoing.

"It's not true," Daedone said of the allegations against her in an exclusive interview with NBC News NOW's "Top Story." "It's definitely not true. And as much as any human being, as this woman, this person, would not want to go to court because it's grueling, just even going to small hearings, I want to go to court because I want all of this transparent. I want it to be exposed. I want everything that I didn't say to be said."

Daedone rose to fame by teaching the practice of orgasmic meditation, or OM, as a key to women's well-being. She founded OneTaste in 2005 and grew it into a $12 million business with thousands of followers, including celebrity fans like Gwyneth Paltrow and Khloe Kardashian.

But it all came crashing down after a 2018 Bloomberg article and the 2022 Netflix documentary "Orgasm Inc." featured former employees who said they were subjected to a toxic environment that included emotional and physical abuse.

Daedone and Cherwitz were charged in a 2023 indictment that alleges they preyed on people who had been victims of previous trauma; forced One Taste members into debt by opening lines of credit to finance courses; subjected members to surveillance; had them sleep in communal homes and beds; and encouraged members to engage in sexual acts with investors and clients."

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OneTaste isn’t an ‘orgasm’ sex cult — but a ‘wellness’ company like SoulCycle, Crossfit, attorney claims despite bombshell grooming allegations

Kyle Schnitzer

NY Post

April 4, 2024

Alleged “orgasm cult” OneTaste is actually just a “wellness” company like SoulCycle and Crossfit, an attorney for the controversial group’s glamorous founder argued in Brooklyn federal court Thursday.

Lawyer Julia Gatto claimed the feds don’t have a case against her client Nicole Daedone — accused of grooming members into having sex with investors and clients for more than a decade — because her “scientifically backed” business was totally legitimate.

“People who take the classes do the training. Many of them become practitioners,” Gatto told Judge Diane Gujarati about the company, which promoted “orgasmic meditation” for women.

“Many of them become practitioners, and then just like any other successful wellness business like SoulCycle or Crossfit, they meet, and they’re like-minded people. They’re elevating their practice — they join together.”

The attorney also claimed that OneTaste occupies the same “space” as yoga and meditation by helping people hone their craft.

Prosecutors have argued that Daedone and her former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, ran the business like a cult by recruiting victims with prior trauma and promising to fix their sexual dysfunction.

The duo allegedly forced members and employees into debt and subjected them to “economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse” through “surveillance, indoctrination and intimidation” to get free work out of them, according to the indictment.

In her effort to persuade the judge to toss the case, Daedone’s attorney on Thursday argued prosecutors misrepresented the business — and that the alleged victims joined of their own accord.

“This isn’t membership in some secret society,” Gatto quipped. “This is a community developed around like-minded people who are introduced.”

She accused the feds of “conjuring up victims” to bolster was she argued was a weak case, claiming case agents had started re-interviewing people who had previously said they weren’t victims of the alleged scheme.

“There is actually is no meat to the bones of this case,” Gatto later said.

Daedone and Cherwitz have been charged with forced labor conspiracy for the alleged scheme, which purportedly ran for 14 years until it ended in 2018.

The pair, who pleaded not guilty last year, were present for the hour-long hearing, but didn’t comment.

Cherwtiz’s attorney, Jenny Kramer, argued that the brevity of the indictment — a mere 14 paragraphs — was light considering it took five years before the charges were unselaed in June 2023.

Federal prosecutor Lauren Howard Elbert told the court that Daedone and Cherwitz’s alleged manipulative tactics and techniques will be presented as evidence through witness testimony at trial, which is slated to begin in January 2025.

Elbert wrote in court papers the feds had “summaries of portions of witness statements given by over 20 witnesses and identified each of the witnesses.”

The judge didn’t rule on the defense’s motion to dismiss the case but ordered Daedone and Cherwitz to return to court for a status conference on it.

If convicted, the pair face a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

OneTaste — founded in San Francisco in 2004 with operations in New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Denver — was the subject of the 2022 Netflix documentary called “Orgasm Inc.” which chronicled the rise and fall. of the company.

https://nypost.com/2024/04/04/us-news/onetaste-isnt-an-orgasm-sex-cult-but-a-wellness-company-like-soulcycle-crossfit-attorney-claims-despite-bombshell-grooming-allegations/

Inside OneTaste: my stay at Nicole Daedone's 'orgasm commune'

OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone is accused of running an ‘orgasmic meditation cult’ involving abuse and forced labour — and faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty. Here’s what happened when she invited Megan Agnew into her California HQ

Megan Agnew
THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
January 28 2024

One hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco is a town called Philo, population 319. If you were driving through one Wednesday evening in December you might have spotted two British women, a photographer and a journalist, sitting in a car outside the minimart, trying to process what had just happened.

We had spent two days on the Land, a 160-acre “monastery” nearby, home to an organisation some have called an orgasm cult. They were two of the most unsettling, disorientating days of my life. Rachael, the photographer, and I were separated from the moment we arrived and escorted everywhere we went. People I met on the Land were glassy-eyed, blissed-out and grinning. Many talked about a “practice” that will save us, invented by their guru, Nicole Daedone — who, in June, was charged with running a conspiracy involving forced labour. She faces 20 years in a US prison if found guilty.

Daedone, 56, founded the sexual wellness company OneTaste in 2004 in San Francisco. She wrote instructions for “orgasmic meditation” (OM) — a woman lies back and has her clitoris stroked by a man wearing latex gloves for 15 minutes — trademarked the technique and sold courses for thousands of dollars. OM, she said, will one day be as mainstream as yoga.

The company quickly grew, making $9.4 million in 2016. Daedone received praise from Gwyneth Paltrow and Khloé Kardashian. By 2018, 35,000 people attended events in cities including London. Hundreds moved into “OM houses”, communes where they could OM twice in the morning and twice in the evening. Many gave up their jobs to sell courses.

According to federal prosecutors, however, it wasn’t a “wellness” company at all. Instead, they allege Daedone and her former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, 43, targeted vulnerable people by advertising that the company’s teachings could repair sexual trauma, “induced” members to take on debt to pay for OM courses, withheld wages and isolated them from the outside world while demanding “absolute commitment”. It alleges they used abusive employment practices, subjecting members to “economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination and intimidation”. Members were “groomed” and pressed to have sex with other members and prospective investors, prosecutors allege.

OneTaste imploded in 2018 when Bloomberg published an investigation accusing the organisation of resembling a “prostitution ring”. “It was a religion,” one former employee told Bloomberg. “Orgasm was God and Nicole was like Jesus.”

OneTaste went quiet. It shut down all centres, courses and houses. A group of about 30 “senior practitioners”, including Daedone, retreated to the Land. Then came a BBC podcast, The Orgasm Cult; a Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc; a Vice documentary and a Playboy investigation.

In June 2023 the FBI stormed the Land. Daedone and Cherwitz were arrested. The company has since spent about $15 million on legal fees: suing the BBC, suing Netflix, suing a former member, being sued by another former member for alleged sex trafficking and fighting the criminal trial.

There is no trial date yet. The company denies all allegations and on January 16 submitted a motion to dismiss the indictment, saying they “remain in the dark as to how the government alleges they might have violated the law”.

Now, for the first time, OneTaste has agreed to let a journalist through the gates of the Land and promised me an audience with Daedone, her first interview since the indictment. She wants to tell her side of the story — to demonstrate her innocence.

And so, one Tuesday morning in December, we drove through Philo, past the minimart and turned left.

Day one

Arrival

“Hey,” says a man wearing wooden beaded bracelets as he gets out of an SUV. Rachael and I had just driven down a long track and found ourselves at a dead end. “I’m Bob,” he says, grinning. “You’re in the wrong place, I’ll show you in.” Rachael looks at me and says: “How did he know where we were?”

We follow Bob through some electric gates and over a bridge, the same route taken by the fleet of FBI vehicles last summer. We pass a vegetable patch, chickens, turkeys and a meadow that sits beneath ancient oak trees, alongside the rumbling Navarro River. We are in the Anderson Valley: Californian wine country.

At the top of a hill is a collection of chalets where the remaining OM group live, swapping between dorms and shared houses, with just a few belongings between them. No one can tell me exactly how you qualify to live here. The 26 people who do are on what is called the “retreat programme” and work for the company as lawyers, publishers, videographers, marketers, OM teachers, gardeners or at the non-profit outreach programme feeding the homeless. Some live here part-time, for others it is their permanent home. They pay $1,700 a month in rent, which covers food, board and “practice”: yoga and spiritual guidance from Daedone, who lives in her own house, set apart — and four sessions of orgasmic meditation a day.

Most appear to be wealthy. One man used to work at Apple, another was an executive at the international gym franchise CrossFit. There are millionaire entrepreneurs, the daughter of the inventor of the Polly Pocket toy, former lawyers from “magic circle” firms and a Hollywood actress. Members of the public can also book to stay for days, weeks or months, from about £500 a night.

We arrive at a converted barn. The upstairs is for OM sessions, downstairs is where the company broadcasts hours and hours of its teaching. This morning in front of an audience of about 20 — residents on the Land — stands Vanessa Lengies, 38, an actress who appeared in the US comedy drama Glee. “Without further ado,” Lengies says, livestreaming onto YouTube, Instagram and Zoom. “I give you Nicole Daedone!” And there she is, walking onto the stage in a fitted orange cocktail dress, her hair tonged and shiny, lips glossed and pillowy. The audience is beaming. She is the reason they are all here — and the reason I am too.

This is her weekly “sutra session” in which she delivers a sermon inspired by The Eros Sutras, the scriptures she wrote that lay out the OM principles, a “blueprint” for how to live a life of intimacy, connection and eroticism. Soulmaker Press, the group’s in-house publisher, has produced ten books to date. They are all written by her.

Daedone is a practised speaker, leaving long, pregnant pauses that everyone waits for her to fill. “I broke open into that silence,” she says. “Suddenly it was, like, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is what I feel like in my own body on my own terms.” The room laughs and nods as she continues in this vein. It’s time for questions. Hands shoot up. One woman says the talk made her cry. I watch it again later on YouTube. I still don’t understand a word she said.



Lunch

We eat tacos and black beans at three long tables in a dining hall. There is a seating plan and bottles of San Pellegrino. Residents take it in turns to do chores — cooking, laying the table, doing the washing-up.

Daedone arrives. She seems reserved though confident, her stance solid, her shoulders square, coy, a little removed. People approach her and she looks them deep in the eyes, touching their hands gently and not looking anywhere else. She gives me a shy wave as she sits down and I’m told by her publicist I’ll interview her tomorrow.

Daedone was born in Los Gatos, California, into a bohemian political household and brought up largely by her single mother. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in gender communications and semantics in 1994. San Francisco at the time was an orgy of dotcom cash. In a much-repeated story where details vary, she claims she met a man (in some tellings a Buddhist monk) at a party who persuaded her to try an “ancient sexuality practice” known as “deliberate orgasm”. “Something happened,” she said. “The big traffic jam in my head stopped.”

She took classes with Victor Baranco, an entrepreneur from Oakland, California, who practised public “clitoral stroking” and founded the northern Californian commune Lafayette Morehouse, labelled by journalists as a sex cult — though the group insists all “research” has been carried out between consenting adults. In 1998 she joined a splinter group in the Bay Area, the Welcomed Consensus, that also promoted “deliberate” orgasm. There she met Robert Kandell, a Silicon Valley financier.

Kandell and Daedone decided to give orgasms the start-up treatment, to take the practice mainstream — and so founded OneTaste. For the method to be trademarked and marketable, it needed to be formulaic: the woman asks a man if he wants to OM. He does not have to be her sexual or romantic partner. She lies down, unclothed from the waist down, her legs butterflied. The man is fully clothed, wearing latex gloves. His right index finger strokes the top left quadrant of her clitoris. Both people’s attention must be focused wholly on the “stroke”. It lasts exactly 15 minutes. The founders insisted, as they still do, that this wasn’t sex but an everyday spiritual “practice” such as yoga.

The first OneTaste members moved into a warehouse in San Francisco, sheets hanging between each bed. Daedone was at its centre. “Everybody treated me like a guru,” she said. “I’d wake up and people would come sit on my bed.”

Persephone (not her real name) joined the group in 2003, having recently quit her job and marriage. “I was mesmerised by Nicole when I first met her,” she tells me on the phone from the US. “But she’s a master manipulator. She can read a person and know exactly how to play them.”

She became addicted to the “continuous buzz” of orgasms and soon moved into a commune. “People were high all the time, not from drugs but from being stroked,” she says. “It was used as a way to control people,” she believes.

Members weren’t told to cut off ties with family, Persephone says, but “family members can’t relate to you. They’re, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ The longer you were there, the harder it was to think yourself out,” she adds. “Nicole talks about all these grandiose things, about how they’re changing consciousness, so you think, ‘Maybe I’m really doing something important here.’ ”

Persephone says she eventually “woke up”, feeling she was being “used”. She left the community. “This is what Nicole does,” she says. “She makes you think you want to live there, that it’s your choice. But it’s not — it’s grooming.” Daedone said in response to the allegations of manipulation, “that is the antithesis of everything I believe in and worked for”.

In 2014 Daedone bought out Kandell and became sole shareholder of OneTaste. The company spread across 39 cities globally. Every morning employees had a “sync up” — an online meeting where each city would compare sales of OM courses. Targets were met only 36 per cent of the time.

Back at lunch on the Land I am placed opposite Rachel Caine, a 34-year-old with dark hair in tight natural curls. She worked at the law firm Clifford Chance in Sydney until 2016, when she attended an OM workshop. She signed up for the coaching programme and every month flew 14 hours to San Francisco. She quit her law job and moved into an OM house. Now she is one of the company’s lawyers. “Everything that’s changing the world is seen as being weird at first,” she tells me.

Next to me is Anjuli Ayer, 42, who went even further. She bought the company from Daedone in 2017, less than a year after attending her first OM, and is now the CEO. Ayer, who has a short pixie crop and wears military boots and a parka, says OM-ing rid her of the symptoms of an autoimmune disease. “So I started taking courses and did as many as I could,” she says. “Then Nicole just happened to be looking not to be the owner of the company any more, because she’s a visionary and she was never really meant to run a big business It was awesome,” continues Ayer, grinning. “Awesome!”

Daedone sold OneTaste for $12 million to Ayer, her brother, Austin Ayer, 39 — who seems only to serve people food — and Amanda Dunham, 34, who chops apples. All three are OM practitioners and all three invested “family money”. They also bought the Land for $4 million and two properties in New York.

Within months of the acquisition the allegations began. Former employees told Bloomberg they were encouraged to use sex to “hook” customers; that they were made to take out huge loans to pay for courses to ascend, spiritually. Other media investigations termed OneTaste a “destructive sex cult”. In a claim fully denied by the company, the BBC podcast alleged that the group arranged for men to have sex with one member in order to somehow “clear” her history of childhood sexual abuse. It is alleged they told her her tears were “just the orgasm coming out”.

“OneTaste was not a ‘destructive sex cult’ or any sort of ‘cult’ as the term is commonly understood,” the claimants submitted in their legal case against the BBC. “It was a collaborative organisation that promoted wellbeing and practices of self-care and empowerment for modern women with decision-maker power decentralised among the senior leaders.”

It continued that all residency in OM houses was voluntary, with “informed consent” and “safe words” at the centre of the instructions, with no one “exploited or manipulated” into having sex with anyone else. No one “sought to cut off” staff or practitioners from friends or family.

Among the chaos the OneTaste company was disbanded and reassembled as various companies and non-profits. The Institute of OM Foundation runs the online learning platform. Daedone is, on paper, divorced from it entirely. The word “OneTaste” is, almost everywhere, gone.

The Institute of OM has started hosting introductory sessions in hip event spaces in London, New York and Los Angeles. Alongside free content it is also selling memberships to the online platform — $149.99 a year or $695 for four sessions. In 2023 the Institute of OM’s revenue was $32,000. In 2022 it was $377. “We’re much more mission-based,” Ayer says. “None of us are here to make money.”

Afternoon

Ayer shows me into my cabin overlooking a river valley heavy with fog. She and Kevin Williams, 47, a former corporate lawyer in London and now the company’s general legal counsel, follow me inside — to my slight surprise. They sit down at my table.

They want to brief me before my meeting with Daedone tomorrow. What is her role, I ask, now she is not an owner, shareholder or CEO. “She’s the author of the sutras, she’s the inspiration for everything, she’s the source of all of the principles and the foundation of what we’re doing right now,” Ayer says. “She advises us as a visionary. We’re deeply inspired by every single book and every single thing she creates.”

“She’s a great finder,” Williams says, grinning. “She’ll be, like, check out Bob Thurman’s podcast [a Buddhist academic] and that was my favourite podcast of last year. I was, like, Bob Thurman is awesome!” Later I find Williams’s blog posts from when he first joined OneTaste in 2014. “I am getting a lot of ass,” he wrote. “People seem to enjoy being violated on a Friday night!”

What is this group, I ask. A religion, a cult, a company, a group of friends getting off? “We’re not a religion,” Ayer says. “We are a movement.” Williams picks up: “We are also plural. I’m one person but I have a job doing what I love for a company that I love and I live in a monastery where I get to practise, and I really do feel those separate but connected things. It’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ environment. And a lot of us choose a lot of depth in it.”

Ayer gives it another go: “This whole thing is a movement of a certain number of people core to it, who are furthering these principles.” So it’s a belief system, I say. “Yes, it’s a set of principles.” But it’s also something that’s scaled and monetised like a company, I say. “Uh-huh. Did we answer your question?”

Why is the word “cult” used so often, I ask. “I mean ” Ayer pauses. “To see it labelled something that people think is negative it’s just completely misunderstood. Then in another way I’m, like, OK, Apple is a cult. CrossFit is a cult. These other things get called cults because people love them and deeply benefit from them and then they get labelled something that’s seen as negative, when it’s really just people devoted to something that they believe in.” A spokesperson later told us, “OneTaste was not, is not, and never has been a cult.”

They slide across a pack of paper, seven pages of text, that they say I should read before I meet Daedone. “Nicole really took a lot of care writing this,” Ayer says, her voice quiet. “This is her vision.”

Evening

Ayer walks me back to the dining hall, where I see Rachael, the photographer, from afar. (After we leave the Land, Rachael tells me she kept getting picked up by people taking her to different locations to photograph — and was surprised to find them often driving her car.) Dinner is roast beef, chimichurri, potatoes and gem lettuce. Austin offers chocolate-chip cookies. “We’re pretty self-contained,” Ayer says. The week’s food arrives in huge deliveries, stored in a walk-in fridge-freezer.

The seating plan ensures Daedone is not near me. Opposite me is Joanna Van Vleck, 40. She grins with skin flushed — she has just OM-ed, her fourth orgasm of the day. A decade ago she sold her retail company for $350 million to the American department store Nordstrom and, hearing that orgasmic meditation was going to be huge, asked Daedone for a role as her head of marketing. “I didn’t OM for the first six months,” she says. “But the joke was on me, because it changed my life.”

Van Vleck then served as the company’s president for several years. It is alleged that during this time OneTaste used “predatory” tactics, telling people that they could reach a sort of spiritual enlightenment by purchasing more courses. Today she tells me that refunds were given whenever anyone asked.

“The most difficult part is feeling so misunderstood,” she says. “It’s, like, I’m trying to be an apple. And someone’s, like ” She pauses. “Oh, you’re an asparagus! And you’re, like, that’s not it at all.”

There are no children allowed here. From my conversations with people, their children are either grown up or they don’t have children at all. Many of these people seem to have dated or been engaged to each other. I ask about the members who have said they became estranged from their families. Ayer, sitting next to me, tells me that it is “part of the practice” to stay “connected and work through” any issues. “All of us have had different experiences,” she says. “My family has been incredibly supportive… Shall we take you back?”

We walk in the dark. Where’s my photographer Rachael’s cabin, I ask. “She’s near you,” is all they say.

I shut the door behind me — there is no lock and no blinds on the windows. One kitchen cupboard is empty except for a box of latex gloves. The mugs have been cleared, the fruit platter taken away.

Day two

Morning

My alarm goes off at 5.30am. Ayer comes to collect me, driving us 45 seconds to the converted barn. Upstairs in the loft there are seven yoga mats, laid out next to one another in two rows on the floor. It’s warm, a cave in the wooden eaves. I sit on a chair, observing only, worried I’m going to get the giggles. I’m tense, full of caution.

The OM session begins at 6.15am on the dot. Seven women are lying down on pillows — including the actress, Lengies, and the women I spoke to at dinner. The men sit alongside them, latex gloves on — Eli, who used to work at Apple; Bob, the manager of the Land, who showed us in; and Hesham, the company videographer. Daedone is absent. She doesn’t practise with the group any more, only privately with her one OM “partner” in New York.

Sitting at the front, the senior practitioner Aubrey Fuller instructs the men on how to amend their “strokes”, whether to go faster, slower, shorter, longer. Eli keeps looking me in the eye, which is unsettling. It’s quieter than I thought, more like being in a yoga class than at a sex party — toes scrunched up, heavy breathing, women asking for “adjustments” from their partner. It is a strikingly intimate act: men looking straight into a woman’s genitals, stroking them. So it unnerves me that everyone here insists that it’s not a sexual experience at all — that you can do it with anyone at any time. The alarm goes off after 15 minutes. I can’t tell if they reached climax or not.

I’m driven back to my chalet through the drizzle. Someone has left three umbrellas for me, leaning against the door.

Afternoon: the interview

After a lunch of spiced chicken and bean salad, Ayer walks me to the converted barn where there are two chairs and two side tables, a cheese platter on each. “It’s not bad, huh?” Daedone says as she walks in. The room is emptied of helpers; just her publicist, Ian, and lawyer, Julia, remain. She’s tall and wears a big knitted cardigan over a silk dress. She crosses her arms into her lap and looks up through her eyelashes, seeming to pull herself away out of shyness — it is a noticeable shift from when she was last in this room, preaching her sutras.

Daedone splits her time between here and Harlem, New York, she tells me, and her “friends” pay for her living costs since her assets were frozen by the government in June 2023. Marcus Ratnathicam, a member who lives part-time on the Land, secured her bail by putting up his $2 million property in California as collateral.

“I love it here,” she continues. “When we first stepped foot on [the Land], I had a vision. I always have these visions and they sound crazy, and then over a period of time they happen.”

Why was it so important to have the Land? “So, I have this idea.” There is a seven-second pause. “We’re going to have to figure it out, as a world, in a way that’s sustainable. If the whole idea is to get out of suffering and hit a state of flourishing, then you have to take a different approach.”

I must look lost. “When we talk, everything is going to be up here,” she puts one hand level with her eyes, “but then it has really deep roots.”

Throughout the two-hour interview, Daedone chases herself through thoughts, moving on without quite finishing the last one. She compares herself to the Buddha and Elon Musk. She describes her role in the group as “the older person who inspires” and her teachings as central to the community. “That’s why I was so determined to write the sutras,” she says. “I’d like to see this alive in 500 years and I’m gonna die at some point. It has to be written [down] for that to happen.”

The group, she says, is “about as far from religion as you can get”. “Religions have prescriptions. There’s a dogma and belief system.” But aren’t the sutras dogma? “Have you read them? Nobody has to read the sutras. But if you do read the sutras… read them, if you would, because the way they’re laid out is how to use the practice as a scientific method for personal inquiry.”

Daedone was an only child, a natural leader who says she didn’t want to be followed. At 27, she received a call from her father, from whom she was estranged, and found out he was dying of cancer in prison — he had been convicted of molesting girls. All of it, Daedone says, was news to her. “I thought, OK, I have this pain, how can I use it to bring benefit [to others]? I’ve been on that path since.”

Daedone trained in Zen Buddhism and nearly became a nun. She also worked for six months as a stripper and escort — “I wanted to know things I didn’t understand” — before combining the two fields of research to make OneTaste.

There is “nothing” similar to sex about OM-ing, she claims. “I said it yesterday, sex is the instrumentation and OM is the silence. It’s an attention-training practice.” Isn’t it dangerous, I suggest, to pretend that something that is physically the same as sex, isn’t sex? “How would that be dangerous?” Because people underestimate its potential to cause harm. “In most sexual activities I’m familiar with, it does not have a rigorous protocol. [OM-ing] is taking sexual energies and repurposing them for consciousness or attention. It’s hard to decouple, I know.”

Daedone stands by her innocence. She describes her predicament as being “cancelled”. She denies the allegations of forceful sales tactics, saying it is “batshit” that women were encouraged to look sexy in order to sell courses to rich men. Is she interested in money? “I dated rich men in my life, so if I wanted to be rich I would have just got married.”

She also distances herself from what allegedly happened in the OM houses. She claims the houses were set up by “licensed OM practitioners” and were not the company’s responsibility. “I know what I saw. But I don’t know what I didn’t see,” she says. “A group of meditators who decide that they want to live together? I don’t know that Buddhism is responsible for what happens in that house.” She continues: “I think people go nuts when a clitoris is involved.”

We need to talk about the c-word, I say. Cult. How does she feel about it being used? “Oh, I love it!” Then she laughs. “I’m joking! I mean,” she sighs dramatically, “I don’t know if you can feel who I am over here,” she softens her voice, “just a human. But if not I’ll explain. This is my life’s work. I’ll take my last breath during this. And then to have it reduce It was devastating. It was terrible. We could not have been more out in the open in the world, as a business.”

Daedone believes that one day everyone will realise the persecution of OneTaste was all some huge mistake. “I’m in the deep-seated belief that OM will be seen as a very powerful modality. And that will come clear. A lot will come clear.” It sounds as if she sees herself as the martyr. “Well, we hope that’s not the case — that I am sacrificed. We’ll see. I believe that the truth prevails.”

She pauses. “There wasn’t a lot of profile in this,” she says with a smile. “I thought this was a profile about my work? That was what I heard.” By which I think she means she wanted to talk about the content of the sutras, her belief systems, Daedone as a theologian rather than the charges that will put her in the dock of a federal court.

Departure

It’s getting dark. For the first time I’m allowed to walk by myself back to my chalet. I text Rachael and she comes to pick me up. As we’re reversing, a guy I don’t recognise turns up in a truck. “I’ll show you out!” he says. He leads us down the single track and through the gate, which shuts behind us, seeing us on to the main road.

We pull over at the minimart in Philo and walk in. The door clangs. Its customers are in old, beaten-up jeans, plaid coats and caps. I ask people in there if they know the people on the Land. “We don’t see them,” says one woman. “No contact with them. Nothing.”

The further away we drive, the more it feels like a different world, a place where I was given everything, where I had to give up all control, where people arrived and disappeared, giving me answers I never really understood about why they were there and what it all meant. It felt like a monastery run like a start-up, a religion with sales targets, a mix of money, ecstasy, intimacy, community and — according to the FBI’s case — coercion and crime.

But the gates are open and there are no locks on the doors, so why do people stay, I ask Persephone, the former member. “Because it’s a cult,” she says. “They’ve been brainwashed. It unmoors you from your own instinct. And so people get lost. Really, really lost.”

For Megan Agnew’s audio diary of her stay, listen to the Stories of Our Times podcast on Monday



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-onetaste-my-stay-at-nicole-daedones-orgasm-commune-39vn85bg9

A Silicon Valley 'Orgasm Cult' Has Been Sued for Sex Trafficking

A former employee for OneTaste alleges she was forced to have sex with potential investors and other members of the group

 

Rolling Stone

EJ DICKSON

NOVEMBER 21, 2023

 

THE LEADERS OF OneTaste, a sexual wellness organization and so-called “orgasm cult” that briefly enjoyed popularity in the mid-2010s, have been charged with sex trafficking, according to court documents.

Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, the former CEO and head of sales for the now-defunct startup OneTaste, are being sued by a former employee in the Southern District of New York for allegedly “[using] means of force, threats of force, fraud, and a variety of other forms of coercion” to compel the employee to “engage in commercial sex acts as a form of forced labor for Defendants.”

The former employee, who is named in the suit only as Jane Doe, alleges that she was “forced to participate in unwanted commercial sexual acts with her co-workers, as a ‘requirement’ for her employment” and to have sex with potential customers to entice them to give money to the company. The suit alleges that Daedone and Cherwitz subjected OneTaste members and employees to “economic, sexual, emotional, and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation.”

Founded in 2004 by Daedone, OneTaste was marketed as a sexual wellness company that peddled the benefits of orgasmic meditation, or “OM-ing.” OM-ing, as defined by Daedone and OneTaste, involved stroking a woman’s clitoris and vulva in a specific fashion for fifteen minutes. Courses were pricey, with some costing upwards of about $7,500; men were also charged extra. According to Daedone, the practice was intended to strengthen women’s sexual lives, allowing them to connect more easily with their sexual partners.

OneTaste received a great deal of press in the early 2010s, including a viral TEDTalk by Daedone and a 2013 longform Gawker investigation by Nitasha Tiku, called “My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult.” Media coverage of OneTaste largely painted it as a bizarre, if not largely innocuous, organization on the fringes of Silicon Valley, and it ultimately expanded to various major cities across the United States, reportedly pulling in an estimated $12 million in revenue by 2017.

In June 2018, however, Bloomberg published an in-depth expose of OneTaste, in which 16 former employees and OneTaste members alleged that the group “resembled a kind of prostitution ring — one that exploited trauma victims and others searching for healing.” “In some members’ experiences, the company used flirtation and sex to lure emotionally vulnerable targets. It taught employees to work for free or cheap to show devotion. And managers frequently ordered staffers to have sex or OM with each other or with customers,” reporter Ellen Huet wrote. (OneTaste denied the allegations at the time, calling them “outrageous.”) The expose also revealed that an employee had previously sued the company for suffering sexual assault and harassment on the job; though they denied the allegations, it resulted in an out-of-court settlement in 2015.

The exposes prompted multiple documentaries about OneTaste, most notably the 2022 Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste. It also prompted an FBI investigation, culminating in Daedone and Cherwitz being indicted on forced labor charges in June 2023. Prosecutors alleged that Daedone and Cherwitz intentionally targeted vulnerable individuals to recruit them to join the organization, instructing them to engage in sexual activity and to live communally with other members. The two have pleaded not guilty, and each face a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted.

The latest lawsuit expands on these allegations, with Jane Doe alleging that she was employed by the organization between 2008 and 2014 as an audiovisual specialist, living and working with other OneTaste employees at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “During her time with OneTaste, Jane Doe was forced to engage in sexual intercourse with co-workers as a way of solving problems in the workplace,” the lawsuit reads, adding that she was “subjected to verbal abuse, threats of castigation from the OneTaste community, name calling and financial punishments if she did not participate in the “OM” sessions or in the company policy that she have sex with other members to ‘calm work tensions.'”

The suit alleges that the company also forced the plaintiff to engage in sex acts with potential customers as a way of encouraging them to spend money on classes. “When OneTaste members declined to participate in sexual activities, Defendants and their employees and agents chastised, humiliated, embarrassed and withheld pay from OneTaste members,” the lawsuit says.

Daedone and Cherwitz did not respond to a request for comment.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/onetaste-orgasm-cult-lawsuit-sex-trafficking-1234890660/

 

CultNEWS101 Articles: 2/6/2023 (Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth, Faith Healing, OneTaste, Children of God)

Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth, Faith Healing, OneTaste, Children of God

Courthouse News Service: Psychedelic church asks panel to let it seek religious exemption for drug use

"An attorney for an Orlando church asked an 11th Circuit panel on Wednesday to overturn a Florida federal judge's dismissal of its challenge to a Drug Enforcement Administration decision prohibiting the church from using psychedelic ayahuasca tea in its religious retreats.

Billing itself as a "spiritual learning and healing center," Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth offers three-day retreats at its facility where participants can imbibe ayahuasca, a tea that contains the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in search of a religious awakening. For a $999 donation, Soul Quest Church extends participants the chance to join in on weekend retreat ceremonies to experience the "healing" attributes of the tea.

There's just one problem: federal drug enforcers say the church is not entitled to a religious-based exemption to the Controlled Substances Act, the federal law designating DMT as a Schedule I substance with no currently accepted medical use.

Regardless of the DEA's decision and a wrongful death lawsuit arising from one of its retreats, the ceremonies have continued unabated for the last seven years.

An attorney representing Soul Quest Church and its leader, Christopher Young, told a panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court that a Florida federal judge unfairly dismissed his clients' lawsuit against the DEA last March.

The church sued the agency under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, claiming in legal filings that its refusal to issue a religious exemption for the sacramental use of ayahuasca violates the First Amendment's free exercise clause. Soul Quest Church had previously sued to block the DEA from enforcing the Controlled Substances Act against its use of the tea."

The Spokesman-Review: Shawn Vestal: Another year, another chance to fix Idaho's fatal faith-healing protections

"More than seven years ago, Boise attorney Kirt Naylor signed off on a rallying cry to defend Idaho's children.

In a letter to then-Gov. Butch Otter, Naylor and the rest of the 17 members of the Governor's Task Force on Children at Risk, outlined a child mortality rate in a Canyon County faith-healing community that was 10 times greater than the state average.

The committee, including doctors, judges and citizens from across the state, urged Otter to revise the state's religious exemption to child abuse and neglect laws, which protect parents from civil or criminal repercussions if their children suffer or die as a result of their religious beliefs.

"Our First Amendment right to religious freedom does not include the right to abuse or neglect children," the letter read.

"In 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 'The right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death. ... Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow that they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children ... "And yet year after year, more martyred children of the Followers of Christ Church are buried from treatable or preventable causes — from sepsis, pneumonia, diabetes and other conditions that most children survive — and year after year, attempts to stand up for them in the Statehouse come to naught."

Variety: 'Sexual Wellness' Company Founder Loses Libel Bid Against BBC Over Podcast

"The founder of "sexual wellness" company OneTaste has failed in her bid to sue the BBC for libel over a podcast.

Last March, Nicole Daedone, the co-founder and former CEO of "orgasmic meditation" company OneTaste, applied to be party to an existing libel action against the BBC over a podcast called "The Orgasm Cult" that ran in November and December 2020. She was joined in her application by OneTaste itself and Rachel Cherwitz, an "orgasmic meditation" practitioner.

The original libel action, which continues, was filed by the Institute of OM LLC and OM IP Co – understood to be a rebranded version of OneTaste – in November 2021.

However, the BBC argued that Daedone, Cherwitz and OneTaste's libel claims were time-barred, falling outside the 12-month limitation period.

In a judgement handed down on Thursday, Mr Justice Pepperall, who heard the application, said that he would not permit Daedone and OneTaste to be added as parties to the libel claim because the time limit had expired and would be "prejudicial" to the BBC. However, he said that Cherwitz's libel claim could proceed because she was "not aware of the original claim and did not make a deliberate decision in November 2021 not to join in proceedings."

"While the High Court has decided not to hear my defamation claim, this does not in any way alleviate the BBC's responsibility to correct its errors and ensure the facts are put on record," said Daedone in a statement. "I have said I find bringing defamation proceedings distasteful. Yet despite having in its possession the true facts that unravel the false thread that holds together its podcast, the BBC has been unwilling to do its duty to ensure the public is accurately informed."

Daedone had claimed the BBC's podcast had defamed her by suggesting that she – along with OneTaste and Cherwitz – had "controlled a destructive sex cult which, under the false pretence of being a wellness organisation promoting empowerment for modern women, deliberately manipulated and exploited vulnerable women causing them lifelong trauma for the purpose of making themselves wealthy," according to the judgment."

Abnormal Normal: My Life in the Children of God - Kindle edition by Mahoney, Mary.

"A rational look into a very irrational group mentality.

The early 1970's was a turbulent time in the US. Anti-war protesters took to the streets, countless students dropped out and became hippies, and drug use spread among the young. As if to offer the youth a way out of this societal storm, there arose a rebirth of Christianity, the Jesus People. The Children of God was at the cutting edge of this movement. It is behind the curtains of this enigmatic group that our story unfolds."

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'Sexual Wellness' Company Founder Loses Libel Bid Against BBC Over Podcast

KJ Yossman
Variety
January 26, 2023


The founder of “sexual wellness” company OneTaste has failed in her bid to sue the BBC for libel over a podcast.

Last March, Nicole Daedone, the co-founder and former CEO of “orgasmic meditation” company OneTaste, applied to be party to an existing libel action against the BBC over a podcast called “The Orgasm Cult” that ran in November and December 2020. She was joined in her application by OneTaste itself and Rachel Cherwitz, an “orgasmic meditation” practitioner.

The original libel action, which continues, was filed by the Institute of OM LLC and OM IP Co – understood to be a rebranded version of OneTaste – in November 2021.

However, the BBC argued that Daedone, Cherwitz and OneTaste’s libel claims were time-barred, falling outside the 12-month limitation period.

In a judgement handed down on Thursday, Mr Justice Pepperall, who heard the application, said that he would not permit Daedone and OneTaste to be added as parties to the libel claim because the time limit had expired and would be “prejudicial” to the BBC. However, he said that Cherwitz’s libel claim could proceed because she was “not aware of the original claim and did not make a deliberate decision in November 2021 not to join in proceedings.”

“While the High Court has decided not to hear my defamation claim, this does not in any way alleviate the BBC’s responsibility to correct its errors and ensure the facts are put on record,” said Daedone in a statement. “I have said I find bringing defamation proceedings distasteful. Yet despite having in its possession the true facts that unravel the false thread that holds together its podcast, the BBC has been unwilling to do its duty to ensure the public is accurately informed.”

Daedone had claimed the BBC’s podcast had defamed her by suggesting that she – along with OneTaste and Cherwitz – had “controlled a destructive sex cult which, under the false pretence of being a wellness organisation promoting empowerment for modern women, deliberately manipulated and exploited vulnerable women causing them lifelong trauma for the purpose of making themselves wealthy,” according to the judgment.

She also said that the podcast accused the trio of being responsible for “serious criminal acts including the repeated rape of a vulnerable woman, sex trafficking, and facilitating and benefiting from prostitution and violations of labour law,” the judgment continued.

OneTaste was formed in the mid-early 2000s in San Francisco after Daedone was reportedly introduced to “orgasmic meditation” by a Buddhist monk. The company operated workshops, retreats and a coaching program, among other offerings. However, following a Bloomberg deep dive titled “The Dark Side of OneTaste, the Orgasmic Meditation Company,” which claimed the company “resembled a kind of prostitution ring,” the FBI reportedly opened a probe.

Daedone sold her stake in the company in 2017.

The BBC’s 10-part podcast, “The Orgasm Cult,” hosted by Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, touts itself as “a story about people desperate for connection and how far they would go to find it.”

The logline reads: “Join Nastaran Tavakoli-Far as she investigates One Taste through exclusive interviews with former employees and asks big questions about the wellness industry.”

In November, Netflix dropped a documentary about the company titled “Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste.”

A spokesperson for the BBC told Variety: “We note the court’s decision not to allow the libel claims of two claimants to proceed, and aren’t able to comment further at this preliminary stage.”

OneTaste’s current CEO Anjuli Ayer said: “I am encouraged that Rachel Cherwitz’s application for an individual libel claim has been approved. The false attack on a woman for entertainment purposes is misogynistic and should not be allowed to continue. Rachel is a courageous individual for taking on a leading global broadcaster that has lost its moral compass. I am thankful to the High Court for having carefully considered our out of time application for a libel claim against the BBC. The same claim continues from our affiliated company the Institute of OM.”

https://variety.com/2023/biz/global/onetaste-podcast-bbc-nicole-daedone-libel-lawsui-1235503124/

OneTaste peddled sexual wellness via 15-minute orgasms. Then everything went wrong

LOVE & SEX

OneTaste peddled sexual wellness via 15-minute orgasms. Then everything went wrong

As Netflix releases a documentary charting the downfall of an orgasmic meditation company likened to a cult, Olivia Petter examines the future of a somewhat tainted sector

Independent
November 14, 2022

Imagine you’re having an orgasm. Not just any orgasm, but one that could cure all of your problems. One that is earth-shattering, transcendental, and unlike anything you’ve ever known or felt. It is an experience that gives you a newfound purpose, community and identity. Oh, and it lasts for 15 minutes.

These were just some of the claims made by OneTaste, a now-defunct sexual wellness company famed for its workshops on “orgasmic meditation”, a trademarked practice involving a man stroking a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes. Peddling progressive and feminist ideologies, the company quickly became much bigger than its headline offering, with workshops and offices spanning the US, while its messianic founder, Nicole Daedone, earned endorsements from Khloe Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow. Then everything went wrong.

A new Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc, charts the downfall of OneTaste, detailing allegations of sex trafficking, prostitution and violations of labour law. In the film, employees speak about their experiences for the first time, with some claiming that the company ethos perpetuated incidents of sexual assault and exploited vulnerable people, while others compared the organisation to a cult. OneTaste has previously said that “any allegations of abusive practices are completely false”, while Daedone has more or less disappeared. However, the industry that OneTaste more or less pioneered continues to boom. In fact, it’s bigger than ever.

Estimated to be worth more than $19bn (£16.5bn), sexual wellness is arguably one of the fastest-growing sectors today. And yet no one can agree on what this vague term actually means. The World Health Organisation has no official definition but defines sexual health as “a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing in reference to sexuality”. Google “sexual wellness”, though, and you’ll get results on anything from buying a new vibrator to, er, having a vagina facial.

“Sexual wellness has become somewhat synonymous with self-care these days,” says Gigi Engle, certified sex educator at 3Fun and author of All The F***ing Mistakes: A Guide to Sex, Love and Life. At its core, the concept is a noble one. “It’s about embracing and investing in your pleasure without shame,” adds Engle. “It’s a big step away from the purity culture, shame-based views of sexuality we’ve had in the past and is about being able to express the need for pleasure and sexuality as a means to maintain a healthy and balanced life overall.”

Inevitably, with such an umbrella term, the industry has sometimes been characterised by woo-woo. Consider the vaginal egg, a product Paltrow once sold for $66 (£50) on her wellness website, Goop, claiming that inserting one daily could provide women with a “spiritual detox” and remove negative energy. In 2018, Goop agreed to pay a settlement of $145,000 (£112,514) for making unscientific claims about the health benefits of the eggs.

Then there are the sexual practices these companies are peddling. Remember vaginal steaming? Again, this was something previously endorsed by Goop; it involves sitting over a boiling bowl of hot water infused with herbs to “cleanse” and “freshen” the vagina. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in 2019, the treatment was widely criticised after a 62-year-old woman sustained second-degree burns while attempting it.

Today’s leading sexual wellness brands tend to focus on creating new sex toys and sexual aids, such as lubricants, serums and oils. As Engle points out, many of them can be helpful and bring about positive change in someone’s sex life. But consider how these products are marketed – there’s a lot of pink packaging – and how they use the language of hyperbole. These products will heal you, we’re told. Make you feel fully alive. Nourished. Satiated. Transformed. Watch one of Daedone’s Ted Talks and it all starts to become eerily familiar.

Over recent years, the wellness industry as a whole has faced a backlash. Back in 2016, the #cleaneating movement was linked to sparking eating disorders, like orthorexia, and major proponents of the movement were vilified (bestselling authors and clean eating pioneers, The Hemsley sisters, went their separate ways following the fallout), or revealed as frauds (Belle Gibson lied about having cancer to promote her wellness blog). Consequently, it’s generally considered wise to approach the contemporary wellness industry with a degree of scepticism. But if the OneTaste scandal has taught us anything, it’s that nowhere is this more vital than with regards to sexual wellness.

When you break it down, OneTaste was founded on the same exact principles today’s sexual wellness brands perpetuate – healing, pleasure, liberation – and whether it’s packaged up in a pink flowery box or a $300 workshop, the end goal is always the same: orgasm. It’s a powerful one, too, when you consider the so-called orgasm gap – just 65 per cent of straight women usually or always orgasm during sex compared to 95 per cent of straight men – and the fact that roughly 10 per cent of women have never had an orgasm.

The idea is predicated on people not being sexually self-sufficient and needing products or courses to help them. But applying a supply and demand model to something as intimate as sexuality is risky business. The stakes are higher, and as we’ve seen with OneTaste, so is the propensity for damage. Many of the people drawn to OneTaste were survivors of sexual assault, or people who had experienced some sort of sexual trauma. Either that, or they had come from a background where sex and sexuality wasn’t explored openly, and so were more susceptible to Daedone’s teaching.

“Most people don’t have adequate education around sex and sexuality – so when someone makes it accessible for you, it can become very powerful,” says Dr Steven Hassan, renowned expert on cults and author of Combating Cult Mind Control. “Orgasms are ecstatic experiences that flood our brains with chemicals that make us feel good. But what happens when you’re in a sexual experience is your critical thinking goes offline, so you’re vulnerable.”

OneTaste is an example of what happens when that vulnerability is exploited to the extreme. There’s no disputing that we all need to be sexually well, so to speak, but whether or not we need this to be commercialised is something different altogether. “I think sexual wellness is a meaningless term,” says Dr Jen Gunter, gynaecologist and author of The Vagina Bible. “It has no clear definition and seems to have been purely created to sell products, coaching, and to establish the harmful narrative that a woman should always be hot and horny, meaning if that isn’t you, we have things to sell you.”

Of course, that’s not to say people shouldn’t enjoy the sex toys and sexual aids that are on offer today. “But don’t call it ‘sexual wellness’,” says Gunter. “That’s just called exploring sex. I would encourage people to not use an umbrella term like sexual wellness and instead think what it is they would like to try to change or learn about and then find real experts in the field. Sex is hard to talk about for a lot of people, and that is sad. But lots of people selling wellness in this space seem to be exploiting that gap.”

In fact, some would argue that it’s questionable to monetise sexual wellness in the first place. If you’re going to invest in helping people to have better, healthier sex lives, surely that money is best spent on sex education. “The sexual wellness industry is worth billions of dollars and, as such, there is a big consumer and capitalist drive behind the companies making pleasure products,” says Engle. “There are so many brands out there making wonderful, healthy products – but they’re often overshadowed by bigger companies who can make cheaper products that aren’t as good. Between the low-quality products and the lack of sex education, it puts the consumer at a big disadvantage.”

“From the perspective of a sexual health and sex education specialist, I do not think pleasure should not be branded or sold,” says Anne Philpott. “It needs to be recognised as something globally we all have the capacity for – rich or poor.”

That’s not going to stop this industry from growing. “Sexual wellness” taps into so many zeitgeist trends: empowerment, feminism, self-love and being assertive about our desires. But caution should be applied, by both companies and consumers. As Huet puts it at the end of Orgasm Inc, OneTaste offered people “love, connection, belonging”, things that most of us surely want, but in an industry that's vague at best and exploitative at worst, “things can become dangerous”.



https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/onetaste-orgasm-inc-netflix-true-story-b2224545.html