You’ve heard of the Monkey Trial. This is the Clitoris Trial.
She taught in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. She gathered people into rooms and spoke to them about a practice that involved stroking the clitoris. She called it Orgasmic Meditation, or OM. She wrote books, answered questions, taught courses and even demonstrated it live to adults-only.
Thirty-five thousand people came to hear. Sixteen thousand paid for classes. More than a thousand paid good money to learn how to teach and coach others in the practice.
Then the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York brought an indictment on a single charge of conspiracy to commit forced labor. No separate count of actual forced labor was charged. The theory was Nicole Daedone was not really teaching the stroking of the clitoris but conspiring with her sales associate, Rachel Cherwitz, to use people’s desire for sex to brainwash them into doing work, including having their clitoris stroked by men, for their enrichment.
Cherwitz was charged too. The government never charged them with actually forcing anybody (through brainwashing) to be stroked, only that they conspired to do it.
Witnesses Testify Against the Theory
The prosecution’s case required that Orgasmic Meditation (OM) be understood as sex — commercial, exploitative, transactional, dressed up in spiritual language, or as prosecutor Nina Gupta told the jury, “the ritualistic massaging or stroking of a woman’s genitals for 15 minutes.”
Gupta explained the crime to the jury.
“The defendants indoctrinated the victims to believe that Nicole Daedone was a guru and that her teachings were the path to enlightenment and spiritual growth.”
“But Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz didn’t just indoctrinate their victims with teachings to coerce them into doing their bidding, they also personally connected spirituality to OMing to protect themselves.”
Then they brought on the victims, all women, and not the kind of victim you would normally see in a forced labor scenario. Normally you’d expect to see a Guatemalan woman with no papers physically forced or threatened to perform sex or hard labor under threat of deportation or worse.
Not these women, they were all college graduates, all White, all from middle-class or affluent families, all able to leave at any time, all in their twenties or thirties (there wasn’t one in the bunch that was in their teens).
The coercion was not threats or force. Daedone preached love and nonviolence. The coercion was a new frontier in control.
They called it brainwashing.
They were brainwashed into having their clitoris stroked.
Happy and Brainwashed
The first victim at the trial, Rebecca Halpern, a therapist with a master’s degree, testified that she had believed at the time that the clitoris stroking practice of OM “connects a human being in a way that is different from anything else you had experienced.” She went to learn to use it to “shed the beliefs that had been keeping [her] from embracing pleasure.”
At the time she was doing it, she had posted publicly: “OM has changed my life… before OM, I was never content and always lonely. OM taught you to stay connected no matter what.”
Halpern testified that in her (brainwashed) mind, the separation of OM from sex “came largely from Nicole”
Prosecutor Kaitlin Farrell asked: “You testified you were happy?
A: Yes.
Q: You also testified that you were brainwashed?
A: Yes.
Q: How do those two things work together?
A: I think it’s — there was so much other stuff, the sexual abuse and the emotional abuse and the psychological abuse that was happening behind closed doors; that is not included in any of the things that I signed. That’s the brainwashing. So the happiness is part of the brainwashing. Right? Like, it’s — that’s — because people don’t stay in places where they’re not happy.”
Another victim of the clitoris stroking, Christina Berkley, college-educated, White, described her understanding at the time was that OM was “a way to tap into something deeper and greater” and testified that “the pursuit of finding our own power was very important.”
When asked if she found the practice beneficial, she answered: “At the time I found the practice beneficial, yes.”
Later, she realized that Daedone had brainwashed her.
Prosecutor Bensing identified brainwashing as the core trauma she experienced:
Q: You were asked on cross-examination whether the alleged trauma was as a result of any sexuality practice, and you testified it was not?
A: That’s right.
Q: I want to be very clear. What was the trauma?
A: The brainwashing.
Another victim, Margaret Pixley, a medical doctor, under cross-examination, said: “OMing I view as a sexual practice, but it’s also an attention and spirituality generating practice and I did at that time hold it as separate from sex.”
“I really loved the practice. I liked what I was experiencing through my practice at that time.”
She loved the practice at the time. She never said no. No one could have guessed she did not want to have her clitoris stroked, legally, consensually by an adult consenting man of her choosing.
How could anyone have known? Pixley herself did not know. No one knows they are brainwashed (if you believe in brainwashing) when they are brainwashed, not even a medical doctor.
Pixley described her clitoris stroking as a “slow whittling down of who I was and how I saw the world and my own personal boundaries.”
She testified, “Because I had this warped understanding of what was real and what was normal, I did things … that I would never do otherwise.”
Pixley said, “I think I was so indoctrinated at that point that I felt like I was doing something wrong because I didn’t like it.”
A Novel Theory
The prosecutors forged new legal ground just as Daedone had forged new ground with the use of the clitoris in healing, meditation, and the notion that those sensations could be separate and apart from sex.
The prosecutors’ new ground was that the clitoris could be used on women to brainwash them.
Another victim of the nine college-educated White women was Dana Gill, an ordained minister, who testified: “There were a lot of wonderful and helpful things about the practice, yes.”
She acknowledged that “freeing people from their bondage around sexuality” appealed to her. It was something she “really began to believe.”
When asked by defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean: Q. You referred to what happened to you at OneTaste as coercion, right?
A: Yes.
Q: Okay. This coercion that told you to doubt your inner voice, I think, is something you said. Does that sound right?
A: That sounds about right.
She had been brainwashed to ignore her inner voice through the stroking of her clitoris by men of her choosing.
Lianna Lifson, a high school teacher with a master’s degree, testified that Daedone “taught that OM would help with trauma… that it would help thaw out places where you felt frozen from that trauma.”
She said, “I think in the beginning it did.”
She never once said no. But can a brainwashed woman say no?
During cross-examination, defense counsel Celia Cohen asked Lifson: You testified that you were — you felt you were brainwashed, right?
A: Yes.
No man was ever paraded before the jury as a victim on two solid grounds. One: no jury would ever believe a man could be brainwashed for men are strong of mind and defiant of spirit, and of course, two: they do not have clitorises.
This is why all the victims were women and all of them chose men (willing men) to stroke their clitoris in this practice called Orgasmic Meditation, for 15 minutes at a session, at times and places that they chose.
Every woman described a practice they entered voluntarily, valued at the time, and understood as not sex but somehow spiritual.
What they actually said was that they believed — and then, after deprogramming largely through the good offices of government consultation, they stopped being brainwashed.
It was not easy. It took, on average, 10 to 12 meetings with federal agents and prosecutors. It took government-approved therapists, such as Steve Hassan, who specializes in “coercive control.”
It took slow, patient work to transform “I believed” into “I was made to believe,” transforming “I loved this” into “I was manipulated into loving this.”
All nine of the women who realized they were brainwashed are entitled to restitution, a share of whatever the government could extract from OneTaste and Daedone herself. That may have motivated the women, a six or seven-figure payday, if the money holds out.
It was something else, harder to name: the relief of no longer having to explain to a skeptical world why you once let a man stroke your clitoris and called it spiritual. It is easier to say you were brainwashed.
The Government Can Decide If Belief Is Delusion
The witnesses’ prior belief in the practice was offered as proof that the practice is coercive.
The theory of the trial is that if you believed in OM, you were brainwashed. If you later stopped believing — after meetings with the government — your disbelief proves your brainwashing was real.
The evidence of the crime is that people participated. The evidence of coercion is that they liked it. The evidence of harm is that nine women out of 35,000 participants were persuaded to describe their former happiness as false consciousness.
The defense had said that the victims were smart, grown, and educated women. How could they consent and later say they were brainwashed?
During summation, prosecutor Kayla Bensing explained to the jury how this seeming contradiction could exist in the modern world, where women are presumed to be able to say both yes and no and be held to it.
The prosecutors wanted to affirm without doubt that when a woman says no, she means it. But these women did not say no. They said, yes.
The prosecutors who were women themselves were pioneering new ground. Yes, a woman can say “No,” and all must respect that. But if she says yes, it can be later understood that a woman’s “yes” can be the product of being brainwashed.
The selection of college-educated White women was a stroke of genius, for if a smart and successful, even privileged woman can be brainwashed, it shows that every woman can be brainwashed at any time by any man or, in this case, even by any woman.
They crystalized the argument in words that belong in the annals of legal history.
Prosecutor Bensing explained why women are not of the same strong mental timber as men (largely because their clitoris can make them feeble-minded and susceptible to brainwashing).
Bensing said, “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. You heard from people [women] who were from all walks of life and they were all coerced. They were all traumatized by this. And not just after the fact. They all, each and every one of them [9 in total], testified to performing labor or services after they had been psychologically damaged.”
The prosecution didn’t need to prove the teaching was false. They needed to prove it was persuasive. There were no expert witnesses allowed to testify at the trial on the benefits of OM and no testimony allowed to show all the thousands of women who said the practice had helped heal them.
Nicole Daedone had once seen this coming.
She said: “If women were in possession of our own resource of sexuality, we would be ungovernable.”
The thousands who said they benefited from her teaching proved the first half of that statement. The nine brainwashed women proved they are still quite governable after all.
The prosecution is seeking 20 years for Daedone and 14 years for Cherwitz. Sentencing is March 30.
