The Guardian81%
Comeuppance: how an orgasmic ‘cult’ ended in a prison term for its founder 60%
By Edward Helmore0%
4/5/2026, 3:00:47 AM
Topics: Features
BS Summary: This article contains 32 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Confirmation Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 28.4% saturation with 297 hits. Analysis detected 2,262 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,045 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 56.2% and a BS Rank of 60% (8,769 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 59.90% of the article peer group.
Clitoral stimulation as a path to spiritual connection, mental clarity and emotional wellbeing has been practiced for millennia.
After being convicted on forced labor conspiracy charges related to the practice (and getting sentenced to nine years by a Brooklyn court last week), Nicole Daedone was given the opportunity to address the court.
Known as the “The Oracle” of OneTaste, a trademarked orgasmic meditation enterprise that extolled the benefits of hours of arousal, Daedone, 57, swiveled her chair toward the public gallery, smiled broadly, and said: “No.”
Outside the court, supporters described Daedone’s conviction as wrong and dangerous.
Some said the seven former adherents of OneTaste, co-founded by Daedone in 2005, who testified against her at trial did not account for hundreds more who said they were indeed satisfied.
Anjuli Ayer, the current CEO of OneTaste, called it “a terrifying day for freedom.
If persuasion can be a crime and consent doesn’t matter, then no one is safe.”
Rori Montali, a wellness practitioner and intimacy influencer, argued that orgasmic meditation had helped her recover from trauma.
“It helped me get back into my body and know that it is safe to feel and not be afraid.
It taught me that it’s OK to touch and feel alive again through what God gave us,” she told the Guardian.
But orgasmic ecstasy was not the lens through which federal prosecutors viewed the principals of San Francisco-based OneTaste when, in 2023, they charged Daedone, OneTaste’s founder and former CEO, and Rachel Cherwitz, its former head of sales, with forced labor conspiracy.
Prosecutors claimed Daedone and Cherwitz “used psychological, emotional, and financial coercion to control their victims and extract labor and services for their own benefit”.
After their sentencing, US attorney Joseph Nocella said, “Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation and it is a crime that causes harm to vulnerable victims,” adding that the defendants had combined forced labor with sexual exploitation to cause trauma to the victims “in ways that extend beyond lost wages or long hours”.
OneTaste has recently been the subject of a 2022 Netflix documentary called Orgasm Inc and the 2025 book Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult by the Bloomberg reporter Ellen Huet.
Formed in San Francisco, California, in 2004, the group gained steam over time as alternative therapies moved mainstream and the once-fringe idea of orgasmic meditation, or “OMing”, which has roots in Buddhist Tantric sex, became part of the wellness industry we know today.
Daedone became the face of OneTaste early on.
OneTaste adherents sometimes lived together in communes devoted to Daedone’s teachings.
Huet described attending an OM session where she witnessed Daedone on a massage table in a position described as “butterflied open” while a helper, Josh, stroked her for over an hour.
“Nicole seemed to be levitating to another planet,” she wrote, “And the audience members felt themselves pulled skywards in her wake.”
At its peak, OneTaste had 300,000 members and established outposts in Los Angeles, New York, Austin and London.
OM attracted publicity, with the New York Times writing skeptically in 2009 that “a commune dedicated to men and women publicly creating ‘the orgasm that exists between them,’ in the words of one resident, may sound like the ultimate California satire”.
But the slow sex movement drew the attention of the FBI to Daedone, who planned to make OM as mainstream as yoga.
The Los Gatos native had originally graduated from San Francisco State and opened an art gallery before transforming herself into The Oracle.
After a lengthy investigation, resulting in charges, the government said that Daedone and Cherwitz had lured women, often those who had suffered trauma, into the OM community, then isolated them.
They claimed that Daedone and Cherwitz assigned these women duties such as cooking, cleaning, gardening or providing sexual favors for investors.
Prosecutor Sean Fern said the women had come to the community seeking personal growth but “left as shells of their former selves”.
“And what did the defendants get out of this?
Power, prestige and money,” Fern said.
The first government witness, named Becky, said she lost her sense of reality, went into debt, and was subjected to both verbal abuse and unwanted sexual touching.
“OneTaste, to me, is a cult,” Becky testified.
Outside court last week, defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean, who described Daedone as a “ceiling-shattering feminist entrepreneur”, argued that the government had misused forced labor statutes and the charges had come “painfully close to criminalizing thoughts and beliefs”.
“We are deeply concerned people having a normal developmental life and changing their views will look back at a time and say, ‘Hmmm, I think I was manipulated and coerced.’
People can look at all types of experiences, college, marriages, and say I really was manipulated and did things I really didn’t want to do,” Bonjean said.
Hanging over the case, which is now set to be appealed, is the question of if OneTaste and its practice of orgasmic meditation rises to the level of a cult.
Ex-Moonie – a former member of the Unification church – Steven Hassan told the Guardian it does, in part because it “relied on authoritarian control and had narcissistic leaders who think they are above the law and control the behavior, information and thoughts of their followers”.
Hassan believes that cults coming out of the wellness movement are becoming common and they no longer need to rely on physical isolation because the internet and cellphones can do the job.
“They’re constantly being indoctrinated online,” he said, adding that the hallmarks of brainwashing were indoctrination, distrust and cancel culture.
“It’s all part of brainwashing somebody.”
But supporters of OneTaste argue that that FBI had adopted Hassan’s “dangerous theories” into their official training despite the American Psychological Association and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom each formally rejecting the idea of brainwashing.
OneTaste’s current CEO, Ayer, said in a statement that the case against Daedone and Cherwitz – who received a six-and-a-half-year sentence – was not “a case of labor or even conspiracy”.
“This is a case to say ideas are dangerous,” Ayer said.
“And of course ideas about women’s power and volition would be the most dangerous.”
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