This week, in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn, a young woman sat on the witness stand for the prosecution, looked at the jury, and said something that should stop us all in our tracks: “I take no responsibility for my actions.”
The woman, “Michal”, is a former participant in the now-infamous wellness collective called OneTaste. She joined the organization in 2014 because, she readily admitted, she had never experienced an orgasm. OneTaste promised to help her achieve that, through a controversial practice known as orgasmic meditation—part mindfulness, part sexuality, and fully consensual.
Michal testified that she signed up for courses, took coaching, and traveled across the country—all of her own volition. She used her own credit cards. She asked for and accepted money from a boyfriend. She moved into a communal home. She flew to San Francisco for expensive training programs. She did so, she says, because she wanted to experience the thing she feared she never could: sexual pleasure.
Today, she blames the organization and its leaders—Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz—for her choices.
She called them “witches.” That’s not hyperbole. Michal described Daedone and Cherwitz as mystical women, imbued with supernatural wisdom and powers of manipulation. “Rachel Cherwitz was known as, like, a witch… she could make things happen,” Michal testified.
Michal’s testimony comes with considerable weight, not only in court but in the court of public opinion. She was a central figure in the 2018 Bloomberg exposé—“The Dark Side of OneTaste”—that prompted the FBI’s investigation and ultimately led to the current prosecution. She also appeared in the 2022 Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc., which helped cast OneTaste as a sinister cult in the public imagination before any charges were ever filed (and we now know that it was produced from fraudulently created materials).
To the defense, it all points to a narrative scripted long before the trial began.
“This is a witch hunt,” the defense attorneys have argued. “And like every witch hunt, it begins by demonizing women who hold influence and ends by stripping others of responsibility for their own decisions.”
That’s the core of the defense argument: that the government has turned regret into a criminal charge. That it has infantilized adults—many of them well educated, employed, and sexually autonomous—simply because they now say they were uncomfortable. Too uncomfortable, it seems, to be held accountable for their own choices.
The DOJ isn’t alleging physical force. They’re not alleging kidnapping or threats. They’re alleging that persuasion, ideology, and group dynamics were so powerful that consent became impossible; that words, philosophy, and spiritual beliefs were tantamount to forced labor.
But the First Amendment does not vanish just because the speech makes someone feel vulnerable. And agency doesn’t disappear just because someone later wishes they’d made different decisions.
Yes, OneTaste may be strange. It used esoteric, erotic, and spiritual language. But so do yoga retreats, wellness influencers, and a growing number of “feminine empowerment” platforms across the internet. Unconventional isn’t illegal, and seeking transformation isn’t exploitation.
The danger here isn’t just to Daedone and Cherwitz. It’s to all of us. If the government can prosecute ideology as coercion, if it can treat spiritual pursuit as labor trafficking, if it can turn adult regret into a criminal case—then we’re not simply criminalizing conduct.
We’re criminalizing belief.
Michal may believe she was misled. That’s her right. But it was also her right and agency to choose this path, to seek help for a personal struggle, to buy into a philosophy. She wasn’t forced into OneTaste—she sought it out, precisely because it offered the help she said she needed.
The jury will decide the fate of the defendants, but the rest of us should pay attention. If regret becomes a crime—and if belief becomes evidence—we are no longer protecting victims.
We’re producing them.
