By Frank Parlato
Will a Brooklyn Federal Prosecution Make It Possible to Prosecute Trump for Running a Cult?
On March 30, 2026, in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, Judge Diane Gujarati will sentence two women for a crime the jury was told it did not need to find had actually occurred.
That sentence will have consequences that the prosecutors may not have fully understood. It promises a precedent wide, vague, and elastic.
It will loosen the burdens of evidence and bend the old standards of proof, and finally give the government the power to prosecute the leaders of any cult, movement, group, or unconventional religion.
Prosecutors will finally have the power to shut down subversive or undesirable organizations. It will be solely at their discretion.
The precedent is United States v. Cherwitz, Eastern District of New York, June 2025.
The crime of conviction: conspiracy to commit forced labor under 18 U.S.C. § 1594.
Maximum penalty: twenty years.
Before June 2025, such a charge had never stood on its own. A forced labor conspiracy was always tied to an accompanying charge of forced labor or sex trafficking.
AUSA Kaitlin Farrell told the jury: “It’s not about whether these victims actually suffered serious harm and whether they actually caused them to work. That is absolutely not the question of this trial. The focus is what the defendants agreed and intended, not whether a particular victim had a choice.”
The jury convicted.
What follows is how Donald Trump could be prosecuted at a state level using this legal precedent, using the same logic the government applied to two women who ran a sexual wellness company in San Francisco.
BROOKLYN, 2025
Nicole Daedone started OneTaste in San Francisco in 2004. It taught a controversial, self-described spiritual practice known as Orgasmic Meditation. The government could not charge them for that. Orgasmic Meditation is legal.
Stripped of euphemism, it involves one adult stroking the clitoris of another, with the consent of both.
For most of American legal history, the government possessed laws to shut down the practice. Lewdness statutes in many states prohibited sexual touching for arousal without regard to consent.
The Mann Act, in its original form, made it illegal for women to cross state lines for “immoral purposes.” Between them, such laws could have stopped OneTaste and its Orgasmic Meditation practice.
In 1986, Congress limited the Mann Act. In 2003, Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that states cannot ban private, consensual conduct between adults.
OneTaste was founded in 2004. One year after Lawrence.
The old prohibitions were gone.
So the government found a new charge and created a precedent. The charge was forced labor conspiracy, but there was no corresponding forced labor charge. Prosecutors needed no proof that anyone was forced or that any labor was obtained. They needed only an agreement — two or more people intending to use psychological influence — and witnesses willing to reframe their consent as captivity.
Prosecutors had a motivation to stop OneTaste.
About 35,000 people attended a course or event; 16,000 paid for classes. It was growing.
The FBI investigated the group under 18 U.S.C. § 1591 — the federal sex trafficking statute also used against Jeffrey Epstein and Keith Raniere. The investigation ran for five years.
Sixty-nine witnesses were formally interviewed, some more than ten times.
The FBI’s human trafficking unit justified its “High Performing” rating — the highest available, received for six consecutive years — by listing OneTaste alongside Epstein and NXIVM in internal briefings sent to senior leadership: “NY continues to work the highest profile HT cases in the FBI: i.e. Epstein, NXIVM, OneTaste.”
At the end of five years, they could not charge sex trafficking. These were adults who paid for courses and left whenever they chose.
THE BROOKLYN WITCH TRIALS
Defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the jury in summation: “Didn’t know you were at the Brooklyn witch trials, did you?”
The trial record supports her.
Witness Rebecca Halpern testified that OneTaste insiders called outsiders “Muggles” — the Harry Potter term for non-magical people, for those on the outside who couldn’t access what insiders possessed.
The insiders were the awakened. The outsiders were ordinary. Leaving meant becoming a Muggle again — losing access to something transformative and exclusive that the unenlightened world couldn’t understand.
Michal Neria testified that senior staff members were called witches. Rachel Cherwitz was known as a witch. “They had intuitions,” Neria explained. “They can make magic happen.” Asked on cross-examination if she was serious, she answered: “A hundred percent. I don’t think it, I know it. That they thought they were witches.”
Three hundred thirty-three years after Salem, a federal court convicted two women partly because their followers called them witches and believed it. The doctrine remains. The vocabulary changed. The result is the same.
Now consider Trump’s movement.
His followers use jargon: the Storm, the Great Awakening, the Plan, digital soldiers, the deep state, normies still asleep.
His rallies have the air of revival meetings. His most devoted supporters describe transformation, seeing what others cannot, and belonging to a community of the awakened that ordinary people — Muggles, in OneTaste’s vocabulary — cannot comprehend.
Leaving Trump’s movement means becoming ordinary again.
It means becoming one of the sheep, the normies, the unawakened.
Under the OneTaste doctrine, the fear of that reversion is serious harm. The language that creates and sustains it is evidence of the enterprise. The leaders who coined it, deployed it, and profited from it are the leaders of a forced labor conspiracy.
CONSENT WASN’T REAL
Every government witness in the OneTaste trial testified, under cross-examination, that she had been free to leave.
Michelle Wright: “Nobody held a gun to my head.”
Michal Neria: “Each and every one of those things was offered to me and yes, I made the choice to.”
She testified that OneTaste leadership “often emphasized that all the decisions that we were making, we were making them on our own. That it was our choice, our desire, our responsibility.”
Anthia Gillick signed a document stating:
“I voluntarily and knowingly accept each of the risks and other matters set forth in this paragraph.”
She agreed that OneTaste was “a community you voluntarily chose to be a member of.”
Lyndsi Keves signed a form acknowledging:
“I may choose not to participate in any activity offered in the course. However, if I decide to participate, I do so of my own knowing and free will.”
When asked if she was free to leave and chose to stay: “Yes.”
Asked if she made the choice to return each time she left OneTaste, Dana Gill answered, “Yes.”
They asked Rebecca Halpern:
“You chose to work at OneTaste, right?
Yes.
You signed up to do it?
Yes.
Nine women – the entire universe of “victims” that the government presented as proof of the conspiracy — signed consent forms acknowledging that they could say no to any activity, that they could leave at any time.
It looked like consent.
GUILTY REGARDLESS
AUSA Kayla Bensing had the answer.
“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.”
Competence is evidence of coercion. Education is proof of manipulation. The consent forms are evidence that the signatories were psychologically conditioned to sign them. The more freely the follower chose, the more complete the brainwashing. The smarter the victim, the stronger the case.
Christina Berkley explained the doctrine from the witness stand:
“You don’t know all of the facts of what you are saying yes to… it was like you weren’t consenting or saying yes or choosing, fully knowing all of the things that were going on.”
Rebecca Halpern was asked:
Q: 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: The happiness is part of the brainwashing. Because people don’t stay in places where they’re not happy.
Happiness is evidence of coercion. Contentment confirms control. Joy, satisfaction, gratitude, a sense of growth — each became proof not of choice, but of psychological influence so effective it concealed itself.
There is no fact pattern under this theory that results in an acquittal. No degree of education, sophistication, or informed participation can qualify as genuine consent once the government determines the system producing that consent was psychologically coercive.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled on this in 1988. In United States v. Kozminski, Justice O’Connor wrote that an open-ended psychological coercion standard “could criminalize a broad range of day-to-day activity and would delegate to prosecutors and juries the inherently legislative task of determining what type of coercive activities are so morally reprehensible that they should be punished as crimes.”
HOW FREE PEOPLE BECOME VICTIMS
The consent testimony is half the story. The other half is how the government managed its victims.
Every witness followed the same arc.
At the time, they participated in OneTaste and said yes. They signed forms. They testified they were free to come or go. It was not traditional forced labor.
After leaving the organization, freely, and after ten to fifteen government meetings, after being coached by therapists, after being offered restitution, they discovered the second version.
Lyndsi Keves signed a form acknowledging free will. After government contact, the consent forms were “used to shut down objections.”
Rebecca Halpern chose to work at OneTaste and signed a form affirming free will. After government contact:
“I knew somewhere in there that I had been carefully, gently brainwashed over time.”
Michelle Wright said no one made her work at OneTaste.
After government contact:
“I think there is a limit in choice when coercion has been underlying everything.”
Dana Gill, in a recorded 2011 podcast, described her time at OneTaste in glowing terms.
After government contact:
“I’m struggling with the term consent because in my mind there was coercion over a period of time.”
Michal Neria told the jury,
“It was like a religion.”
The transformation from yes to no took from two to five years per witness.
THE DEFIANT WITNESS
Alisha Price saw the process and refused it.
Price worked at OneTaste from 2007 to 2013. She saw no crimes. A decade after she left, the FBI showed up at her door with a subpoena and told her she was an important victim witness. She told them she didn’t consider herself one.
They told her she would be arrested if she did not come to testify.
“I had the sinking feeling,” she said on a national broadcast in March 2026, “that they were seeking to create a narrative that I didn’t feel existed.”
She asked if she had to participate. They told her yes. That was not true. It took her a year and a half to get the FBI off her back.
Former congressman Matt Gaetz summarized it:
“The FBI shows up and says, are you a victim or a criminal? You choose.”
Price is what the process looks like when it fails to produce a victim.
But the government does not have to convert every participant.
The nine women who testified are enough to succeed.
THE VICTIM WHO BECAME A DEFENDANT
The best illustration of how the process works is not among the nine who said yes. It is one who said no.
Before the indictment came, prosecutors gave Rachel Cherwitz a choice. She could accept the victim designation, claim psychological coercion, say she had been brainwashed, and cooperate.
She insisted that she had acted independently and autonomously and did not consider herself a victim.
For that refusal, she went from victim to defendant (they needed two to make a conspiracy) and now faces more than a decade in federal prison.
In terms of conduct, there was no meaningful distinction between those who testified for the prosecution and Cherwitz.
The witnesses recruited, coached, and sent texts encouraging participation. The only thing that separated them from Cherwitz at the sentencing table was their willingness to say one word.
Brainwashed.
That is the ticket out. That is the ticket in. It is available in any prosecution of any undesirable or politically disfavored group, cult, religion, business, club, or team, whose former participants are willing — after sufficient government contact — to produce a second version of their story.
TRUMP VICTIMS?
Substitute the names.
Not Dana Gill. Michael Cohen.
Not Michelle Wright. Cassidy Hutchinson.
Not Alisha Price — the one who resisted. Any former White House aide who refused the narrative and spent a year fighting the FBI before walking away.
Not Michal Neria. Any former aide who felt shunned, lost their income, and then received a call from a prosecutor offering them the one thing the government offers first: the chance to be a victim instead of a defendant.
Michael Cohen sat beside Trump for years and described his loyalty in terms identical to OneTaste witnesses describing their devotion to Daedone.
After legal exposure and contact with the government, Cohen produced the second version.
Lev Parnas. The same reframing.
BELIEF BECAME CRIME
Claiming your teaching is spiritual is evidence of criminal intent.
The more sincerely followers describe their devotion in transcendent terms, the stronger the case that the transcendence was manufactured to hide exploitation.
AUSA Nina Gupta told the jury in summation:
“That’s not because OMing was actually spiritual. They connected OMing to spirituality for legal protection, and so people would follow Nicole Daedone’s teachings.”
Witness Anthia Gillick:
“Nicole Daedone taught us that orgasm was synonymous with God and synonymous with a soul.”
Witness Michal Neria:
“It was like a religion.”
Witness Rebecca Halpern:
“It was all wrapped up into one thing. My work was not separate from these teachings. The expectations of these teachings affected my willingness to provide labor.”
AUSA Kayla Bensing in rebuttal summation:
“You can believe in something and still be guilty of a crime. Religious or spiritual motivation for committing a crime does not exonerate you. In the same way that a Nazi is free to express abhorrent ideas, but can’t use those ideas to justify crimes.”
John Lauro represented Donald Trump in the January 6 federal case. He now represents Nicole Daedone post-trial.
“The thread that connects these cases is clear: under the Biden Regime, law enforcement has been overtaken by ideology and government oppression. We should all be concerned, most particularly religious communal practices who could one day be the target of a far-left administration much more radical than the Biden Regime.”
“Today the defendants were leaders of OneTaste. Tomorrow, the targets could be evangelical ministries, Catholic dioceses, Hasidic communities. Once prosecutors are allowed to criminalize belief, no faith tradition is secure.”
James Lawrence, former deputy general counsel at HHS, wrote in The American Conservative:
“Against conservative Christians, the playbook would be straightforward. Evangelization becomes recruitment. Labor is extracted through church ministries. Church discipline and excommunication become the last steps in a campaign of shame and humiliation. There is no limiting principle.”
The precedent set in Brooklyn has no limiting principle. Its next logical targets are the institutions of the American right. Then it can move to the left.
BIZARRE AS PROSECUTION FUEL
The OneTaste conviction did not rest on evidence. It rested on atmosphere.
Five weeks of testimony about clitoral stroking, BDSM scenes, handjobs, women being told that orgasm was synonymous with God, and staff members designated as witches who could “make things happen” that ordinary people could not.
The jury found it bizarre. The bizarreness was not incidental to the prosecution’s theory. Strange beliefs held with total devotion by intelligent people, extracted from followers who feared becoming ordinary again — that is the template. The stranger the belief, the stronger the case that followers couldn’t have freely chosen it.
Once the jury decided the practices were strange enough to warrant disgust, the legal theory was superfluous. The verdict followed from the atmosphere. The atmosphere was manufactured across five weeks of carefully selected testimony.
Donald Trump’s movement is as strange as OneTaste.
His followers waited in Dallas for the resurrection of JFK Jr. They believe a global elite harvests children. They donated money to a billionaire while he was under criminal indictment and donated more after his conviction. They describe leaving the movement in terms that sound like Anthia Gillick describing what would happen if she left OneTaste: loss of community, loss of purpose, loss of identity, loss of the sense that one’s life has cosmic significance.
Gillick told the jury: “It became my entire belief system. It was my moral compass. I would have done anything.”
The prosecution called that coercive control.
Trump’s most devoted supporters say the same thing in different words.
Hillary Clinton said it in 2023:
“Maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the (Trump) cult members.”
The dirtying-up phase of a future Trump prosecution is complete. Nine years of mainstream media coverage, late-night mockery, congressional testimony, and blue-state cultural saturation have done for Trump what five weeks of Brooklyn testimony did for Daedone.
By the time a future prosecutor stands before a Manhattan or Atlanta jury, they will already believe that something wrong happened inside the movement.
The new legal theory will give them permission to act on what they already feel.
That is how the OneTaste conviction worked. The law was the vehicle. Disgust was the fuel.
THE EXPERT WHO NAMED THE NEXT TARGET
The psychological framework that made the conviction possible has a name. The BITE model — Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotional control.
A mental health counselor named Steven Hassan developed BITE.
The FBI publishes BITE on its website and in the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. It was taught to agents at Quantico. It was embedded in DOJ and DHS training protocols. It was used by the FBI’s human trafficking unit as the analytical foundation for the OneTaste investigation.
Hassan has applied the BITE model to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to anti-vaccine movements, and to January 6th defendants.
And to Donald Trump.
His book, The Cult of Trump, published by Simon & Schuster, argues that Trump is a cult leader psychologically identical to Jim Jones and David Koresh, and that millions of his followers are brainwashed, not as a metaphor, but as a clinical diagnosis applicable to a federal prosecution.
On a livestream in 2025, Hassan stated:
“I’m criticizing Donald Trump as being a malignant narcissist, which is the stereotypical profile of all destructive cult leaders based on Adolf Hitler’s profile.”
The man who trained the FBI agents who built the OneTaste case has already applied the precedent to the President of the United States.
Matt Gaetz, former congressman and House Judiciary Committee member, said it on his national program: the Hassan theory used to convict Daedone and Cherwitz “literally describes Donald Trump as a modern-day Jim Jones and all the rest of us as Kool-Aid drinkers.”
Brainwashing
In 1990, a federal court in the Northern District of California ruled on the admissibility of expert testimony on “brainwashing” and “coercive persuasion” in United States v. Fishman. The court excluded the testimony. Its ruling: the theory was “not generally accepted within the scientific community” and was inadmissible under the Frye standard.
The experts excluded were Margaret Singer and Richard Ofshe — the intellectual predecessors of Hassan’s BITE model.
The American Psychological Association has never endorsed the brainwashing theory. The American Sociological Association has never endorsed it. A federal court declared it junk science in 1990.
The Eastern District of New York built a forced labor conviction on it in 2025.
The future star witness for the coming Trump prosecution is on record. Hassan has been waiting for this precedent.
Mike Howell, on the Swamp Justice podcast, hosted by The Heritage Foundation, made the point:
“You can’t have a guy (Hassan) who called the president the leader of a cult. It means 77 million Americans are members of a cult. Imagine what happens if unfortunately the White House goes into the wrong hands — then we’re going to these theories and we’re all getting prosecuted for being cult members.”
Howell noted that Hassan’s model remains on the FBI website:
“You have this weaponized actor that is still being relied upon throughout the federal government.”
THE THEORY AMERICA CONDEMNS ABROAD
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom is a federal agency mandated to monitor and condemn religious persecution abroad. Three of its reports, from 2020 through 2026, condemn the same legal theory used to convict Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.
The 2020 USCIRF report condemns Russia for prosecuting people based on group membership and alleged intent “without evidence of any actual or planned violence.”
AUSA Farrell told the Brooklyn jury:
“It’s not about whether these victims actually suffered serious harm. That is absolutely not the question of this trial.”
The 2020 report identifies the “helpless victims without free will” framing as the defining rhetorical signature of anti-cult persecution.
AUSA Bensing told the Brooklyn jury:
“Choice wasn’t something they were in a psychological state to even consider.”
Word for word. The same framing USCIRF calls authoritarian.
The 2023 USCIRF report condemned France for laws under which people convicted of “sectarian activities” face prison sentences.
AUSA Sean Fern told the Brooklyn jury that the OneTaste defendants’ crime was that “they were taught that the way to enlightenment was to obey the defendants’ demands.”
The crime was the philosophy.
The 2026 USCIRF Annual Report — released March 4, 2026, three weeks before sentencing — contains a chapter titled “Weaponization of Legal Frameworks.”
It specifically condemns laws that criminalize “psychological influence” in spiritual contexts without proof of physical harm.
USCIRF Commissioners Abraham Cooper and Mohamed Magid issued official statements condemning laws that criminalize “mental subjection” or “brainwashing” as “pseudo-scientific anti-cult ideology.”
The United States government spent decades publishing reports condemning Russia, China, France, and Central Asian governments for using this framework to prosecute spiritual communities, strip members of legal autonomy, and convict without proof of actual harm.
The Eastern District of New York built a criminal conviction on the same framework in 2025.
The January 6 defendants were brought before district court judges and offered sentencing leniency in exchange for disavowing their “cultish” political beliefs. The framework was tested on the followers first. The leader’s prosecution is the next chapter.
The National Law Review called the OneTaste conviction “a dangerous precedent,” asking: “How can voluntary participation in educational programs constitute forced labor?”
For Trump, every rally attended, every dollar donated, every volunteer hour logged, and any former aide who felt psychological pressure to remain loyal, enter the calculation of conviction.
THE STATE VEHICLES: THE MAP IS ALREADY DRAWN
When Trump’s presidency ends, he cannot pardon his way out of state charges.
The map is already drawn.
Georgia: The Fulton County RICO case already contains proto-brainwashing elements.
Georgia RICO requires no federal predicate — only two Georgia predicate acts within four years. Trump has been active in Georgia since 2020. The OneTaste precedent makes the brainwashing layer explicit. Hassan provides the expert. The jury pool in Fulton County provides the rest.
New York: Letitia James built the architecture. The civil fraud case under Executive Law 63-12 was a proof-of-concept for an aggressive, novel statutory application against Trump.
What has not been used is New York Penal Law enterprise corruption — New York’s RICO. It requires only three predicate acts. It carries no interstate commerce requirement. It carries twenty-five years. The Martin’s Act’s low-intent threshold sidesteps the hardest proof problem — what did Trump actually believe — because it doesn’t require proof of intent to defraud in certain applications.
Michigan: A Michigan judge dismissed charges against fifteen of sixteen fake electors in September 2025, ruling they were not sophisticated enough to understand the electoral process fully.
Under the Cherwitz framework, that finding is not a setback. It is the knowledge gap doctrine applied by a sitting state court judge to Trump’s own recruited network.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel did not wait for Brooklyn to name the theory. In September 2023, at an event with liberal activists, she said the fake electors she had charged were “brainwashed” to keep Trump in power.
“They really legit believe that,” she said. “They genuinely believe it.”
She also noted that the cases would be tried in “a very, very Democratic-leaning county.”
The Michigan AG had already identified the victims, named the mechanism, and selected the jury pool — two years before Brooklyn established the federal precedent validating her theory in court.
The statute of limitations is not a problem. Trump is committing predicate acts today. By the OneTaste standard — fear of social consequences equals serious harm equals the coercive force that sustains a forced labor conspiracy.
Trump is, by the doctrine established in Brooklyn, committing the offense right now.
THE CHOICE
The argument that the OneTaste precedent could be used against Trump is not new.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, assigned to Trump’s January 6 case in Washington, D.C., presided over some of the harshest sentences handed down to Capitol rioters.
In December 2021, at Robert Palmer’s sentencing, she said:
“The people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.”
In October 2022, at the sentencing of Christine Priola, she said:
“The people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
A federal judge, performing her judicial function, at criminal sentencing, on the record: followers acting on induced loyalty to one man. The leader uncharged. The people who exhorted the enterprise free. The followers in the dock.
She was describing the knowledge gap. She was identifying the enterprise. She was noting, judicially, that the leader had not yet been held accountable for what she found his followers had done in his name.
Brooklyn answered the question she left open.
2021: Federal judge finds followers acted on blind loyalty to one leader who remains free and uncharged.
2022: A federal judge finds that the people who exhorted the enterprise have not been charged.
2025: Federal jury finds that loyalty induced through psychological coercion constitutes forced labor conspiracy.
2026: The precedent sits at the Second Circuit, one affirmance from becoming binding law across three states.
2029: January 20. The presidency ends.
Second Circuit Risk
The Cherwitz conviction will be appealed at the Second Circuit. Two outcomes are possible. The Second Circuit reverses or narrows — and the psychological coercion theory is weakened, perhaps fatally.
Or the Second Circuit affirms and expands. The theory becomes binding circuit court precedent across New York, Connecticut, and Vermont.
Controlling law. In the exact jurisdiction where Letitia James is building her case.
Right now, United States v. Cherwitz is a district court verdict. A judge in Manhattan or Albany can still distinguish it, limit it, or decline to follow it. A Second Circuit affirmance ends that option. Every future motion citing Cherwitz becomes a citation to a binding authority rather than a persuasive precedent.
A pardon of Daedone and Cherwitz, before the Second Circuit rules, leads to a withdrawal of the appeal.
If the Second Circuit never rules, the theory is frozen at the district court level.
Trump can pardon himself from federal exposure. He cannot pardon himself from Georgia, New York, or Michigan.
A Second Circuit affirmance hands every state prosecutor in those jurisdictions the most powerful available judicial validation that their theory works.
“The President was targeted in the same way we were,” she said.
The Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney who sat beside him at the hush money trial — said:
“Biden’s DOJ and the Democrat machine tried for years to put President Trump and his associates in jail. They did everything in their power to destroy livelihoods, reputations, and families. They weaponized the government, and that’s something that we cannot and will not forget — they’re corrupt enough to try again.”
The weapon they will try again with now has a name and a docket number.
Alan Dershowitz is not a OneTaste defender. He said so directly to NBC News. He reviewed the trial materials anyway. What he found moved him to announce publicly on March 18, 2026, that he intends to present the case for clemency directly to President Trump.
He said.
“As soon as I saw the indictment, I realized that with a few changes of words, this indictment could have been directed against Mormon groups, against Hasidic groups, against various Protestant or Catholic sects. There are so many people who join ideological or religious groups, volunteer their time and later become disillusioned. The idea that prosecutors can later say that voluntary participation must have been coercion is extremely dangerous.”
PARDON MAY HELP TRUMP
Dershowitz noted that the presidential pardon authority “is the only power in government not subject to checks and balances. A president can exercise it at any point.”
“When prosecutors redefine social pressure and emotional commitment as ‘forced labor,’ they are creating a legal weapon that could eventually be used against almost any unpopular group.”
“Their case,” he wrote, “should concern every American.”
“I am watching this same criminalization happen again with conspiracy laws being weaponized against other groups that those in power want to denigrate and destroy.”
Defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean told NBC News:
“After a five-year investigation, the government brought a conspiracy charge no one has ever seen before…. At its core, this case turns decade-old regret into a federal crime carrying a potential 20-year sentence.”
Cherwitz’s attorney Celia Cohen:
“The novel conspiracy theory rests on events and perceptions from years ago, and its reliance on retrospective interpretations of consent should give pause. The stakes are significant — not just for my client, but for the broader application of these laws.”
Donald Trump has spoken for years about the weaponization of the justice system. About fabricated evidence. About corrupt FBI agents. About judges who function as prosecution proxies. About novel charges invented for political targets.
He has been describing this case. And the one later, stemming from this precedent, to be used against other groups, used against MAGA, and possibly him.
Pardoning Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz is not mercy, though it is justice. It may be smart politics. It may be a step toward self-preservation.
A pardon can help suppress what some describe as the most dangerous prosecutorial precedent in modern American legal history — a precedent built on junk science declared inadmissible in 1990, condemned by official United States government reports as the methodology of authoritarian religious persecution, and sitting one Second Circuit affirmance away from becoming the controlling law of the circuit where Letitia James practices.
James undoubtedly is waiting for January 20, 2029, and the fresh chance with the OneTaste precedent as her new and finest weapon.
Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz are sentenced on March 30, 2026.
Selected Art from Artvoice
Selected Links
See also OneTaste and the FBI Scorecard
Dershowitz / NBC News clemency announcement: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alan-dershowitz-plans-seek-trump-pardon-orgasmic-meditation-leaders-aw-rcna264104
Ronald Sullivan op-ed (International Policy Digest): https://intpolicydigest.org/a-controversial-case-at-the-intersection-of-media-and-prosecution/
Mike Howell Swamp Justice podcast: https://x.com/SwampJusticePod/status/1966573183693111689
The Matt Gaetz Show: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/matt-gaetz-show-rep-brandon-gill-auron-macintyre-amy-reichart-anjuli-ayer-alisha-price-michael-harrigan–70881350
USCIRF 2020 report: https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2020%20Anti-Cult%20Update%20-%20Religious%20Regulation%20in%20Russia.pdf
USCIRF 2023 report: https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-07/2023%20Status%20of%20FoRB%20Issue%20Update_07.19.pdf
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
