It is hard to improve on Assistant U.S. Attorney Sean Fern’s opening statement in the Eastern District of New York courtroom in the case against Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.
While Fern’s delivery was poetic it lacked a certain candor which I have attempted to correct with a revised version of his opening statement which has additionally the novel benefit of that unlike Fern’s version actually says what he really means.
In the courtroom’s fluorescent haze, Sean Fern stood before the jury and said:
Ladies and gentlemen, for over a decade, Nicole Daedone and her second-in-command, Rachel Cherwitz, worked to coerce adult women, women who had credit cards, wi-fi, and cell phones, who at first thought they voluntarily joined a sex-positive community, to perform labor, including sexual labor.
These women typically came from traumatic backgrounds as bad as anything you might see on a Lifetime original movie. They were looking to improve their lives.
The defendants lured these women into a sultry, sordid community called OneTaste that seared the innocence off their souls and charred the fringes of their socks. After gaining their victims’ trust—the defendants unfurled a scheme so devious, so moist with metaphor, that the women were gaslit.
Picture a room full of people, everybody’s rubbing and moaning, and women are being victimized. The victims, in this scheme, lays back, eyes closed, getting her clitoris stroked, usually by a man, for 15 minutes, as many as five times a week.
The women were forced to schedule their clitoris stroking in advance, and then lay back with a timer running, and forced to pay thousands of dollars for it —forced because they were told it was for personal growth.
The women didn’t need shackles. Just a slow breaking down of the woman until no thought, no bond, no autonomy remained. Was there bruising? No, but their energetic field was totally ravaged.
The women never said “no.” They were forced to say “yes.” They didn’t have to be locked in a room to be caged. Somewhere between the clitoral stimulation and the unpaid invoices, these women were driven into submission. They couldn’t leave, because they no longer remembered they had once arrived.
The women were forced to share a bed in a communal house which they were forced to pay to get into, sometimes having to wait months until there was an opening for a bedroom and a shared bed. Some of the victims will tell you they did not feel “seen” in the communal living space.
If this case had been about men getting their genitals stroked, I promise you, we would not be here today. It would not be called forced labor. We’d call it a bachelor party. But when it is women, it’s forced labor. It’s coercion.
The defendants coerced their female victims to sexually service OneTaste clients and investors. Rubbing dicks, boiling eggs, and being rubbed in turn with gloves. They were rubbed and billed. They meditated; they exfoliated. They left as shells of their former selves.
Nicole Daedone, the defendant, took ancient tantric techniques combined with TED Talk jargon, proclaiming that liberation lay in rubbing a woman’s naked genitals for 15 minutes. She called it Orgasmic Meditation—but it wasn’t consensual. Because once you joined OneTaste, your pleasure was no longer your own. The victims were women who scheduled, paid for, and orgasmed during these sessions – tricked into clitoral stimulation.
At its beginning, OneTaste relied on a wealthy tech investor. Daedone recruited multiple women to keep him happy so he would continue funding. After they used up his money, the defendants switched to charging tens of thousands of dollars for programs, memberships, and coaching sessions.
OneTaste claimed to promote female empowerment but beneath all the talk of empowerment, the women stopped being women—and were brainwashed. They were seduced not by money, but by indoctrination, and because the victims had generally good credit scores, forced into debt and isolation without walls, and breaking down personal boundaries through rubbing female genitals.
As you’ll hear from the female victims, there was no hard threat. No one was locked in a room, threatened with violence, or had their phones or internet taken away. Instead the women were told they would lose their “spiritual growth” if they stopped working.
You’ll hear from Dana Gils. She was psychologically manipulated, coerced into debt by their claims that the path to personal growth ran through expensive courses. To pay off that debt, the defendants ordered Dana to rub prospective clients’ penises until they climaxed and make omelets for a man who bankrolled the dream.
She emerged from OneTaste like a cracked eggshell—runny, slippery, and convinced the yolk was where wisdom lived.
You’ll hear from Michelle Wright, who chopped vegetables in the kitchen and rubbed for rent. She believed in female empowerment until her sexual boundaries were dismantled, stroke by stroke.
She left like a discarded taco shell—crumbled, empty, and a little greasy.
You’ll hear from Becky Uma Halpern, who let clients stroke her naked genitals until her enlightenment ruptured and left her like an empty peanut shell, with the salty taste intact but no nourishment for her soul.
You’ll hear from other women who turned to OneTaste for healing but left that community as broken remnants of their former selves – husks discarded after someone ate the corn from the cob and left the husks strewn all over the grass – like it did not matter if these poor women blew anywhere in the wind.
Some of these women worked seven days a week, broken girls in shared beds, expected to work through illness, answer calls and send text messages, some of which went unanswered causing emotional distress, and provide sexual services to support OneTaste. For this work, they were paid very little or nothing at all. In fact most of the time they paid to be stroked.
They worked because they were taught that the way to enlightenment was to obey the defendants’ demands. They worked because they were isolated from their friends, and families, whom they did not want to tell about their orgasm-based enlightenment.
They worked because they were taught there was no such thing as being a victim, when all they ever wanted to be was a victim, and that doing the things they found sexually disgusting was the path to freedom. They worked because if they refused, they were shunned. They rubbed people. Slept in bunk beds. Made eggs. Got called “viruses” if they talked back or sent to meetings designed to cause them to mistrust their own intuition.
They were afraid that if they said no, they would be exiled from the OneTaste community and go back to the unhappy life they had. They were afraid if they said no, they would be spiritually ruined.
So they said yes. But did their soul say yes? No. Because they were afraid they would be verbally humiliated. They were afraid if they said no, they would have to get a job somewhere else that did not involve having their clitoris stroked.
Dana, Michelle, Becky, and other women will tell you how the defendants’ tactics broke them down until OneTaste was the only thing the victims wanted.
Though Orgasmic Meditation was a co-ed practice – men and women participated equally in a practice that centered on women receiving physical pleasure – you will note that only women are testifying that they are victims in our case.
The coercion element applies solely to female participants. The women who asked for it, paid for it, and then got off—are the victims. Men don’t get brainwashed. They start cults. They don’t join them.
The defendants are charged with the crime of forced labor conspiracy. Forced labor is when someone gets another person to work for them by making that other person fear serious harm.
Serious harm can be any fear, including fear of reputational, physical, religious, psychological loss, existential sadness, confusion, regret, self-reported energy disruption, financial discomfort, emotional squinting, spiritual flatulence, bad dreams, losing alignment, or disrupted vibrational status.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when a woman is told she won’t spiritually transcend without letting a man rub her clitoris for fifteen minutes—that tis forced labor especially if she didn’t enjoy it emotionally, regardless of what her face and signed waiver said at the time.
Ladies and gentlemen, this wasn’t personal growth—it was corporate tantra with a coercive backend. Some of these women didn’t even know they were victims—until I told them they were.
At the conclusion of this case, I will ask you to find the defendants guilty.
