‘Orgasmic Meditation’ Case Raises Question of What Constitutes Coercion
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The women arrived with dreams of rebirth, community and climax. Instead, they said, their twenties were ruined by working at OneTaste, a buzzy San Francisco company that billed itself as a health and education start-up promoting female empowerment via “orgasmic meditation.”
They came to see OneTaste as a cult, but the prosecution of two of its leaders will decide whether they were coerced into working for the company or simply deluded by its teachings.
The question is central to the federal case against Nicole Daedone, OneTaste’s founder and former chief executive, and Rachel Cherwitz, its former head of sales, who have each been charged with one count of forced labor conspiracy. The charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors say Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz deployed “psychological tactics” to groom OneTaste employees for masturbation rituals and to isolate them, leaving them reliant on the company and unable to access or even imagine a world outside.
Such forced labor schemes usually employ a tangible threat, such as physical violence or the confiscation of travel documents. OneTaste employees have not described such blunt tactics. Rather, they say, they feared that defying Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz would ruin them not financially or physically, but spiritually.
Lawyers for Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz have seized on that, noting that the witnesses were adults who had free will, and that some came from affluent backgrounds. They have pointed out that the witnesses did leave OneTaste, only to return when they yearned for spiritual community.
“Each time you left, you made a choice to come back,” Michael P. Robotti, a lawyer for Ms. Cherwitz, told one witness.
To win convictions, prosecutors must convince jurors that Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz forced OneTaste employees to work against their will, using physical, emotional or psychological coercion, and that each woman benefited. They must show that OneTaste employees had to keep working, including by engaging in orgasmic meditation, in order to avoid “serious harm.”
Through the first half of what is expected to be a six-week trial, more than a half-dozen former OneTaste employees have testified to sexual acts rarely mentioned in a courtroom. They said they had no other options at the time, but have stopped short of saying they were threatened with violence, the loss of property or anything beyond losing their standing within OneTaste.
Juda Engelmayer, a spokesman for the defendants, said the former OneTaste employees had chosen to explore an “unconventional lifestyle,” and had then “decided they were victims because it no longer aligns with how they see themselves.”
“This case is a dangerous attempt to criminalize regret,” Mr. Engelmayer said in a statement.
Determining consent can be difficult when it comes to cults, which by nature wipe away a person’s capacity to question order, said Rick Alan Ross, the founder of the Cult Education Institute. Mr. Ross, a deprogrammer who has testified as an expert in many such cases, said OneTaste appeared to bear the hallmarks of a coercive cult.
Cults, Mr. Ross said, “shut down your ability to critically think and reason,” leading people to do things they would never have considered before they joined the group.
“People have these unreasonable fears, that ‘if I leave the group I’m a traitor. If I leave the group, I’m a counterrevolutionary,’” he said in an interview.
NXIVM, the Albany-area sex cult led by Keith Raniere, also billed itself as a self-help organization and offered classes in its idiosyncratic rituals. But it blackmailed members with threats to release nude photographs and embarrassing secrets.
Content retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/nyregion/onetaste-orgasmic-meditation-trial-coercion.html.
