The Age of Conviction
It was the best of times for prosecutors. It was the worst of times for justice.
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the American federal system has entered an era that historians will likely later compare — with some embarrassment — to the Salem proceedings of 1692. Not for the gallows, but for the process: disfiguring belief into evidence, regret into crime, and accusation into guilt.
The accusers in Brooklyn were called victims before the first word of evidence was heard. They testified that they had been free to leave at any time, had never been restrained or threatened, and left voluntarily when they chose. Yet they testified they had been brainwashed.
The alleged coercion came from the women loving what they were doing so much that the threat of the loss of it felt like serious harm. Under this novel theory, this brainwashing theory, anyone at any time could be the target of punishment. Not for actions but for thoughts.
Nine women out of thirty-five thousand who had passed through a meditation company called OneTaste were proffered the government’s diagnosis: they had been brainwashed. Their testimony that they had consented was, the prosecutors explained, further evidence of the brainwashing’s efficacy. “The Defendants argue that these were grown women, these were adults. And they were educated, they were smart. They did walk in here with degrees and careers and they were clearly thoughtful, conscientious people. Members of the Jury, that just shows how powerful the coercion was in this case.” Under this theory, competence was evidence of coercion. There was no fact pattern that could result in acquittal.
That they had walked in freely proved they could not walk out. That they eventually did walk out proved nothing at all.
A Model That Could Convict Anyone
The justification for this legal theory was provided by a man named Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor from Massachusetts who had built a career and a diagnostic instrument — the BITE model — on the claim that he could identify, from the outside, whose beliefs were freely held and whose were implanted. He had applied this instrument to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to anti-vaccine movements, to January 6th defendants, and, in a bestselling book published by Simon & Schuster, to the President of the United States Donald J. Trump, whom he compared to Jim Jones and Adolf Hitler and whom he called on a public livestream in 2025, “a child trafficker.”
His model was published in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It was taught to agents at Quantico. It was embedded in DOJ and DHS training protocols. And in June of 2025, it produced its first federal conviction in Brooklyn, NY.
The indictment had been prompted by a Netflix documentary “Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste” whose centerpiece was the personal journals of a former participant, Ayries Blanck. These journals almost perfectly conformed with the harm described in Hassan’s BITE model. They were later forensically proven to have been fabricated in 2022 and backdated to deceive the public and, hopefully, the jury that they were written in 2015 when Blanck had just left OneTaste. The fabricators referenced a book, The Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook, not published until 2019. It is also significant to note that at the time the journals were really written, the FBI, Netflix and the journal writer were collaborating and that Blanck was Hassan’s personal therapy client. It is also important to note that the lead FBI agent, Elliot McGinnis, helped manufacture the fabricated journals and got caught advising Blanck and her sister on how to hide the evidence of their fraud.
When the fraud was uncovered, U.S. District Court Judge Diane Gujarati did not dismiss the case as one would expect. Instead, she excluded the fabricated evidence, dropped the perjuring witness, and proceeded to trial as though the foundation for the prosecution’s case had never existed.
At trial, the government charged conspiracy to commit forced labor — but not forced labor itself. It had never been done before. The nine women took the stand and each one testified she could come and go as she pleased. Then came the novel claim:
Something worse happened to us. We consented, they said, but we were brainwashed. We thought we loved it, but our minds were not our own. It was the signal triumph of the prosecution that only women could be victims. No man among the 35,000 participants was called brainwashed. Even these prosecutors knew a jury would laugh at the notion. It appeared that Daedone’s true offense was teaching women that if they wanted the privileges of men, they must accept the responsibilities of men. That idea, as much as any witchcraft, had to be eradicated.
And so, 300 years after Salem, a federal court criminalized regret. The judge was Diane Gujarati. The prosecutors were Kayla Bensing, Nina Gupta, and Kaitlin Farrell. History should remember their names.
And the serious harm? The fear of losing the love of those who brainwashed you. Of being shunned by them and others in their group.
The Sentencing Trap
The prosecutor told the jury: “It’s not about whether these victims actually suffered serious harm.” The jury was instructed they need not find that anyone was harmed, restrained, or held against their will. Only that two women, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, had agreed to a plan to brainwash them. The jury convicted.
At sentencing, prosecutors repudiated every word they said to the jury and demanded punishment to be determined by the judge, not only for the conspiracy, but for actual forced labor that the jury had been told they need not consider. To make the punishment harsher and the imprisonment lengthier, they sought an enhancement, a federal sex crime — 18 U.S.C. § 2242 — that had never been charged, never appeared in the indictment, and never even suggested to the jury. The standard of proof dropped from beyond reasonable doubt to a coin flip. The judge would decide. The requested sentence: twenty years for the founder, Daedone, fourteen for her co-defendant, Cherwitz.
To appreciate what twenty years meant, one had only to look at the cases where human trafficking had actually occurred. When someone held a woman captive in a private home for nineteen years, her passport confiscated, forbidden to leave, they got seventy-two months. When someone beat a child from the age of nine, tore her earlobes, forced her to sleep on a park bench, they got eighty-four months. A domestic worker scalded with boiling water, fed from the garbage, threatened with murder, one hundred and thirty-two months.
For Daedone and Cherwitz, who were accused of brainwashing nine women who said they were free to leave whenever they wanted, the government sought two hundred and forty months.
What history will likely record is not a prosecution but a template — one that converts voluntary association into servitude, philosophical instruction into coercion, and a jury’s limited finding into a judge’s unlimited punishment. The template requires no violence. The forced labor conspiracy conviction requires no victim who could not leave. It requires only regret, repackaged by prosecutors as proof of a crime that had no name until they invented one. That name is brainwashing.
It should be noted that this was women on women. The prosecutors were women, the judge was a woman, the nine accusers were women, all of them college-educated, all of them professional, attacking two women as if they were witches who must be destroyed, for a philosophy that ironically intoned that if women wanted privilege like men, they must also be equal to men in responsibility. The women who attacked the two women wanted to be equal to men when it was to their advantage, and to invoke the ancient privilege of infantilized woman when that was to their advantage. It was a war against women waged by women. It was a time of savagery cloaked in black robes and feminine voices, in pantsuits and sweaters.
History will note the irony. The man who made the conviction possible, Steven Hassan, had published the blueprint for its next application. Hassan’s BITE model, field-tested on two women in Brooklyn, was designed for a larger target. His book was called The Cult of Trump. The precedent was built. The weapon was loaded.
Two endings are possible, and only one man can choose between them.
In one, a president who had survived fabricated dossiers, novel statutes, biased judges, and the full force of prosecutorial overreach, recognizes the pattern and pardons the women before the precedent is applied to other cases, the churches, the mosques, the movements where people work and volunteer and believe.
The other alternative is one where the women will remain in prison. And the precedent survives. The prosecutor who’d criminalize belief, suppress philosophy, or imprison an enemy has her weapon ready.
A woman taught women to be strong; she taught them to have a heart that never hardens, a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts. She was sacrificed so that women could remain weak.
And a man is asked to pardon the two defendants and preserve the right for the American citizen, even female, to venture where they please, to make mistakes, to claim glory if they succeed, and own defeat if they fail. It is strength itself that the prosecutors have waged war against. And there is one man now who can determine which of these two diametrically opposed results shall prevail.
