By Frank Parlato

The term ends January 20, 2029. The man who held it steps back into the jurisdiction of ordinary law. The great man remains, but the office no longer stands between him and the process that his enemies would try to deploy.

Whether he may pardon himself remains unresolved, a question deferred rather than answered. If the moment comes, the Supreme Court will decide.

Assuming that he can, there are still those at the state level, the Letitia Jameses and smaller still than her, who may try. They may have gotten a new tool, something handed to them at the federal level, applicable in the states colored blue.

He will beat them, no doubt. But they will try when he is out of office, not so much for stopping his power, for his is a power that comes from himself, but for the proof of their concept.

They would have the last laugh. They would prove that vengeance is a sort of deterrence. They will empower themselves by making a name for themselves, and nothing is fair to them but self-love and war.

Forced labor conspiracy is the new name of their weapon.

It used to require physical coercion. Last June, a federal jury changed that.

THE BROOKLYN VERDICT

A federal jury in Brooklyn convicted two women, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz – the OneTaste Case – of conspiracy to commit forced labor.

There was no allegation of physical force or evidence that anyone was prevented from leaving. Or that anyone was forced to labor. That wasn’t even charged.

The charge was conspiracy, and the word they used was “brainwashing.”

It is a great leap from putting two women in prison to going up against the mightiest man and trying to railroad him into prison.

But they may try.

THE PRECEDENT

The OneTaste case was about influence. What the defendants said. How they made people feel. Just the idea that somebody got inside someone’s head and made them afraid to leave.

Not force, not threats. Something harder to pin down. A new line was crossed. The law, once anchored in the physical, recognized the invisible. Mind control. Brainwashing. And retroactive regret.

The precedent may never be used on Trump. But still, it changes things. Coercion used to mean force. Now it means influence. Coercion used to mean muscle—ugly and obvious. Now it is in the mind, the way people feel at the time, and how they explain themselves later.

A new standard, so broad that interpretation belongs to whoever holds power.

Will they target Trump?

It won’t be as easy as that.

But do not think they won’t try. For the men who created this, Jamie Raskin and Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump, will want to see it through.

THE THEORY OF THE MEN WHO BUILT IT

The legal theory behind the OneTaste conviction can be traced to Steven Hassan, who authored The Cult of Trump in 2019.

And to an ally of his. On page 17 of that book, a statement from Congressman Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager during the second impeachment of Donald Trump, appears.

He described the Republican Party as resembling “a religious cult surrounding an organized crime family.”

Hassan developed it. In 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation published his BITE model in its Law Enforcement Bulletin, presenting it as a tool for identifying trafficking victims.

The FBI would later investigate OneTaste. The indictment reflects Hassan’s theory. The conviction marked its acceptance.

Hassan has written that the same psychological coercion framework applies to Donald Trump.

He calls it the BITE model—Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion.

Control those things, and you have a brainwashed person. That is the model. That is what makes a cult. His book is The Cult of Trump, and his prosecution is the OneTaste forced labor conspiracy conviction.

They got Daedone and Cherwitz on Hassan’s BITE model, the one he designed for Donald Trump.

Four elements, Hassan explains, each representing a dimension of influence.

When a person or group exerts control of all four—guiding actions, directing knowledge, shaping beliefs, and directing feelings—then it is, in Hassan’s terms, a destructive cult.

Sure, the opposite may be true: A leader will guide actions, right actions or direct behavior for it is for which that people come to him or her and that information is not unlimited – for no one knows all, except the Great God Himself – and that the mere direction of preference of what we shall know and deem important, under Raskin and Hassan, is in their model the potential limiting of information.

And if emotion is in their eyes managed—maybe managed toward his view of wisdom or decency or freedom as Trump has done or tried to do then the designation is applied, not because he is necessarily wrong, but because they can say so.

If someone can influence all four—what you do, what you hear, how you think, and how you feel—then, in Hassan’s view, you’re not part of a group anymore. You’re in a destructive cult.

The definition is structured, but its application depends on how those elements are interpreted.

One thing is clear. Physical force is no longer necessary. The standard shifts toward the mind. Psychological influence. If an individual believes they cannot leave, that belief may be treated as serious harm. If they report happiness, it may be interpreted as evidence of brainwashing. If they later regret their participation, that regret can serve as the proof of the crime.

Hassan has applied this framework quite broadly—to religious groups, political movements, media audiences, and social communities.

He names the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, anti-vaccine movements, QAnon, multilevel marketing organizations, Fox News audiences, Rush Limbaugh’s listeners, January 6 defendants, the MAGA movement, and, Donald Trump.

No bruises required. No locked doors. Just the idea that somebody got inside your head and set the terms. And no one got inside more heads than Donald Trump. Love him, hate him, he’s there. Inside a lot of heads.

Influencing the world.

Right or wrong, or mostly right or sometimes or rarely wrong. He is the man who said I am the leader and in a system like this, of Raskin and Hassan and his Cult of Trump, the boundary is not where you stand, but how you are seen.

There’s something vastly new in the idea that force or threats of force isn’t needed anymore to be forced labor.

That harm can all happen quietly, inside a person.

Just get inside their head. If they think they can’t walk away, that’s enough. If they’re smiling, maybe that just means the hook’s set deep.

If they love a man today because they think he saved a nation at the brink of disaster, and if they come back later saying they wish they’d left sooner—you’ve got a forced labor case.

THE BLUEPRINT

Two years after he published The Cult of Trump, in 2021, Hassan completed a doctorate at Fielding Graduate University, focusing on undue influence. In his acknowledgments, he described a strategy: produce research, publish it, and participate in cases that establish precedent.

On June 9, 2025, a federal jury in Brooklyn delivered a precedent.

Chapter Ten of The Cult of Trump outlines a series of proposals: psychological evaluations for presidential candidates, a government body empowered to investigate tax-exempt organizations for mind control practices, a redefinition of undue influence to extend prosecutorial reach, and the formal training of law enforcement in his BITE model.

Hassan has appeared before the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the US Department of State. The US Department of Labor incorporated the framework into its training.

By the time Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz were indicted in 2023, the framework was in place.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had incorporated Hassan’s model into its training materials. It informed how agents identified victims, how witnesses were questioned, and how the OneTaste case itself was constructed.

JAMIE RASKIN

Hassan’s ally, Jamie Raskin, on January 11, 2022, publicly thanked Hassan, stating that his expertise was needed. A sitting member of Congress acknowledged reliance on the architect of the BITE model and the author of the Cult of Trump.

Three months later, Raskin stated that he had been consulting “deprogrammers” in an effort to reach his Republican colleagues to get them to turn from Trump.

It was a moment where politics began to borrow the language of cult intervention.

On September 27, 2023, Raskin confirmed that Hassan had been included in a congressional youth training program. By March 20, 2024, in a House Oversight Committee hearing, Raskin referred to Republican colleagues as “cult members selling flowers at the airport.”

The phrase carries meaning. Hassan was recruited into the Unification Church in 1974, whose members were known for selling flowers at airports.

Within this framing, those who defended Trump were recast as those who had been victims of his psychological capture. Opposition was not disagreement, but a mental condition.

Hillary Clinton echoed the language, suggesting on CNN that “deprogramming” might be needed.

Barack Obama referred to a “cult of personality” at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

There is an irony here.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom — USCIRF — the federal agency mandated to monitor and condemn religious persecution worldwide – in three annual reports — 2020, 2023, and 2026 — condemned the same precedent that convicted Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz.

USCIRF commissioners Abraham Cooper and Mohamed Magid issued official statements condemning laws criminalizing “mental subjection” or “brainwashing” as “pseudo-scientific anti-cult ideology.”

The agency’s 2026 annual report contains a chapter titled “Weaponization of Legal Frameworks.” It condemns the criminalization of “psychological influence” in spiritual contexts without proof of physical harm.

At the trial of Daedone and Cherwitz, AUSA Kayla Bensing told the jury: “Brainwashing, loss of identity, loss of self-esteem, exhaustion. That is serious harm.”

Psychological influence was the crime.

USCIRF calls that religious persecution when other countries do it.

On March 27, 2026, one week before Daedone’s sentencing, Raskin co-sponsored H.R. 1744, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Reauthorization Act, reauthorizing the agency that had condemned the theory when it is done in other nations that he helped build and prosecute in this nation.

Eleven days after Nicole Daedone was sentenced to nine years in federal prison, Raskin demanded a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment of Donald Trump, public release of the results, and congressional testimony under oath from the White House physician.

Chapter Ten of The Cult of Trump — the book with Raskin’s quote on page 17 — had called for exactly that in 2019.

THE TARGET

At a Donald Trump rally, Hassan can trace the BITE model elements.

Matching hats are a sign of shared identity; slogans function as repeated messages; community reinforces belonging; distrust of outside sources limits competing information; loyalty to a leader binds the group.

Forget that no politician in modern times has inspired so many. Hassan calls it brainwashing.

Under the BITE model, inspiration may be understood as influence across behavior, thought, emotion, and information.

The Brooklyn verdict demonstrated that a jury can accept psychological influence as legally relevant in a specific context.

Whether that reasoning can be shifted to political activity will be a separate and contested issue, one that implicates core First Amendment protections.

The Raskin-Hassan argument describes a sequence: a pattern of former insiders speaking publicly, engaging with a framework, and appearing in media or legal contexts. In the OneTaste case, such a sequence culminated in a federal prosecution and conviction.

Around Donald Trump, several former associates have regret: Michael Cohen, Lev Parnas, Omarosa Manigault Newman, George Conway, and Anthony Scaramucci—have used the language of “cult” or departure.

Whether this constitutes a “pipeline” of victims in a legal sense is not established.

The OneTaste saga had its own arc: insiders, media, feds, courtroom.

It’s tempting to see the same story twice—to look at what happened with OneTaste and look at the voices around Donald Trump and feel like the pattern if applied could be repeating.

The existence of a precedent does not, by itself, establish applicability to a different context.

THE TEST CASE

onetaste rachel-cherwitz-and-nicole-daed-640x478 - Frank Report — Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz

OneTaste, founded in 2004, drew tens of thousands of participants over more than a decade. Participation was voluntary; individuals enrolled, paid, and departed on their own terms.

Their teachings were controversial. They taught that a woman can feel as free as a man to have sex. It came from San Francisco, which isn’t Brooklyn, and in San Francisco, a woman may teach that.

The Brooklyn prosecution focused on a smaller group. The government presented nine witnesses. Nine out of 35,000.

At trial, the contrast between direct and cross-examination revealed tensions in the testimony. No one had brought a case like this before. Only a conspiracy, stretched across years.

They admitted there were no chains or locks. It did not matter. A person could be held without being held. A woman could stay because she felt she could not leave.

Loss of job, friends, family, and home. One by one, or all at once. Enough loss, and a woman breaks. No chains. No locks. Only the feeling that you could not walk out the door.

Thousands came and went, on their own, paid and stayed because they wanted, and left when they chose.

The defense said it should be able to bring in others. Not what one woman felt later. Not what another remembered afterward. A reasonable person, in the same place, with the same life, would she feel forced to keep working?

The court was not convinced. There was no precedent to support it. No law said you could bring in a line of people to say they did not feel coerced, when the government did not claim they were.

In the end, it was not about whether harm was done. It was about intent. Not whether someone could have walked away. It was about teaching.

The prosecutors said she took from many religions. Used what she needed. Made it look deeper than it was to give weight to what she was selling.

The defense asked for a First Amendment instruction to the jury. Judge Diane Gujarati declined. When defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean pressed for a more elaborate instruction on the point, Gujarati replied: “You mean more elaborate than the nothing that I’m putting in about the First Amendment?”

The defense was not allowed to say to the jury that belief, even if strange, even if wrong, cannot be held against a woman. It’s the First Amendment to believe and teach something.

THE TRIAL

One witness said she had been young. Not fully formed in her mind.

“I listened to them because I was a lost young adult. My brain wasn’t fully developed,” said Dana Gill, speaking of her time at 25.

They were all young.

Halpern, Rebecca — 23

Berkley, Christina — 28

Gill, Dana — 25

Pixley, Margaret — 22

Lifson, Lianna — 24

Wright, Michelle — 24

Neria, Michal — 27

Keves, Lyndsi — 32

Gillick, Anthia — 25

Rebecca Uma Halpern said she was brainwashed. She was confronted with her journals, posts, and texts.

Defense counsel asked: “You were happy?”

“Yes,” Halpern said.

“You also testified that you were brainwashed?”

“Yes.”

“How do those two things work together?”

“The happiness is part of the brainwashing. People don’t stay in places where they’re not happy.”

Berkeley testified about the work and Nicole Daedone:

“So yeah, it was amazing. She was amazing.”

The government asked her what her trauma was.

“The brainwashing.”

michal neria - Frank Report — Michal Neria

Defense: “You didn’t have any difficulties leaving OneTaste…?”

Michal Neria: “It was very emotionally hard to leave.”

Defense: “Right. It felt emotional leaving, but nothing obstructed you from leaving, right?”

Neria: “Once we made the decision, nothing obstructed us.”

The prosecutor Nina Gupta said,

“Members of the jury, there may not have been physical chains holding the victims in place. There may not have been locks on the door. But … the victims … felt isolated from their family and friends, and felt like their whole world was OneTaste. It was their community, their friends, where they worked, and they where lived.”

”That’s the entire conspiracy,” said prosecutor Bensing to the jury. “They’re being whittled down into the various things that they identified it as: brainwashing, loss of identity, loss of self-esteem, exhaustion. That is serious harm that left them feeling like they had no choice,”

They had mistaken brainwashing for happiness.

BRAINWASHING

gujarati 1 - Frank Report — Judge Gujarati presided over the trial of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz

No one asked the obvious question. No one was allowed to. The obvious question was: if happiness proves brainwashing, what would freedom be?

What feeling would tell you that you were not controlled?

C0CC62BD-0CC6-486C-A130-32DAADDF18DE_4_5005_c - Frank Report — OneTaste prosecutor Kayla Bensing

The prosecutor Bensing stood before the jury and said:

“So, let’s be clear: You do not have to be a child to be subject to abuse. You do not have to be uneducated to suffer abuse. You do not have to be chained down or in a locked room to suffer abuse. 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.”

At sentencing, the government sought enhancements under the federal sentencing guidelines.

The government’s argument: Daedone occupied a position of “spiritual superiority.” Being regarded by your community as a spiritual teacher became an aggravating sentencing factor.

Judge Gujarati said at sentencing, “What she was doing was not about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension. It wasn’t Harry Potter or the Matrix. It was criminal.”

She declared that Daedone’s spiritual beliefs were not genuine. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the sincerity of a spiritual belief is not a question for judges.

Judge Gujarati ruled on it anyway.

Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote: “Religious groups, spiritual movements, intensive educational programs, and even some workplaces ask members to devote extraordinary time and loyalty. Leaving such environments can mean losing friends, identity, and purpose. But that has never been a crime.”

The sentence had been handed down. Nine years. Judge Gujarati looked at Nicole Daedone and said she imagined this must have been a difficult day for her.

Daedone shook her head no.

Gujarati laughed — caught off guard, for one unguarded second confronting something she had not expected. A woman who had just received nine years in federal prison, in a case built on the theory that she had controlled others so completely they could not know their own minds, shaking her head to say: no. This is not a difficult day.

It is the one moment in the entire proceeding that cuts against the government’s narrative. It was not entered into the record as evidence of anything. It did not need to be.

Alan Dershowitz 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.”

RACHEL CHERWITZ

Then there is the case of the co-defendant, Rachel Cherwitz. She came to OneTaste as a participant. She rose through devotion. She made almost no money. The government acknowledged she was paid only marginally more than the people it called her victims.

In fact, at first the government called her a victim and offered her a chance to testify for them.

She went to prison without recanting.

Under the government’s theory—the theory that convicted her—Rachel Cherwitz is the most thoroughly controlled person in the OneTaste universe. She was so completely brainwashed that she cannot even now recognize her victimization. She is, by every metric the prosecution established, the case’s most profound victim.

The only thing that separates Rachel from the witnesses who received restitution is that Rachel did not recant.

The logic of the brainwashing theory makes this inevitable. Former members who validate the framework and cooperate become witnesses. Former members who maintain their beliefs, refuse to perform the awakening, and insist on the legitimacy of their own experience become criminals. The depth of their continued belief becomes evidence of how dangerous they are.

When offered the right to speak at her sentencing, Cherwitz said: “I do not.” She walked into the Metropolitan Detention Center still a committed practitioner of the philosophy that had convicted her.

There is a name for this system. It is not new.

The Soviet Union developed a psychiatric diagnosis called sluggish schizophrenia. A dissident did not need to commit a crime to be neutralized. He needed only to be declared irrational. A person whose beliefs were pathological had no standing as a rational agent. A criminal can be a martyr. A crazy person cannot.

The World Psychiatric Association condemned Soviet psychiatric abuse and expelled the Soviet Union for it in 1983. Declaring political opponents mentally impaired rather than criminally liable was recognized as the mark of a totalitarian state.

The framework was condemned. The logic survived. It traveled from Soviet psychiatry into Robert Lifton’s scholarship on thought reform. Hassan has credited Lifton with prompting him to switch his major to psychology.

Michael Cohen validated Hassan’s framework on his podcast, calling himself caught in a cult. Lev Parnas described himself as “waking up from a cult.” Omarosa wrote: “I’ve escaped from the cult of Trumpworld. I’m free.” George Conway wrote the foreword to the updated edition of The Cult of Trump. Anthony Scaramucci called it “brilliant” and “required reading.”

Each of them performed the awakening. Each was treated as a witness. Rachel Cherwitz did not. She is serving six and a half years.

THE GENDER OF THE THEORY

nine college educated brainwashed women - Frank Report

There is an old idea, older than this country, that a person is free or not free. That the line between the two is something you can point to. A lock. A chain. A door that will not open. The law was built on this.

In Brooklyn, a court decided that the line is not a door. The line is a feeling.

Consider the cast of this proceeding. The judge: a woman. The lead prosecutors: women. The defense attorneys: women. The defendants: women. The nine witnesses the government called victims: women.

Not one man claimed brainwashing. Not one man testified that a belief system had rendered him incapable of free choice. Not one man said he stayed somewhere because leaving felt emotionally impossible.

Nine men saying those things would not have produced a verdict. The rugged individualism the culture assigns to men — the assumption that a man knows his own mind, makes his own choices, and bears responsibility for them — would not have survived contact with that theory in that courtroom. The jury would not have accepted it. The prosecutors knew that. They chose nine women.

When the theory is applied to Trump, if it is applied to Trump, Michael Cohen will not be the witness. Cohen is a man. Cohen’s regret, his self-described weakness and self-serving description of his captivity will be background. The witnesses will be women. Specifically women who worked for Trump, believed in Trump, gave years to Trump, and later decided — or were guided to decide — that they had not chosen freely.

That is the template the Brooklyn prosecution established. It works because the law, as applied in that courtroom, treated educated professional women who signed consent documents and left when they chose as incapable of knowing their own minds.

The government called that protection.

It is a theory that women, unlike men, cannot be trusted to assess their own experience. That their happiness requires government interpretation. That their choices require government ratification. That their regret, expressed later, supersedes their consent, expressed at the time.

The Brooklyn verdict did not protect women. It infantilized them. And it did so with a female judge, female prosecutors, and female defense attorneys, in a case brought against female defendants, on behalf of female witnesses.

James Lawrence III, a former deputy general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote: “Whatever you think of Daedone’s Buddhist-influenced teachings, the theory undergirding the government’s coercive-control prosecution should give all Americans, including conservative evangelical Christians like me who believe sex outside one-man-one-woman marriage is a sin, reason for pause. The criminal case against Cherwitz and Daedone, replete with allegations of recruitment, trauma, and shunning, can be readily repackaged and deployed against churches, religious institutions, or other designated enemies of the moment.”

In the OneTaste case, not one man’s freedom was at stake in that courtroom. Not one man’s choices were second-guessed. Not one man was told his happiness was evidence of how completely he had been controlled.

The old idea of freedom assumed force because it assumed a rational agent. The Brooklyn theory removes that assumption.

It removes it for women.

THE QUESTION

There may be legitimate arguments that a leader’s approach or policies are wrong or offensive. That has to be distinct from the law. Because otherwise, whoever is enforcing the law gets to decide what morality is. Raskin, for example.

The theory that convicted Nicole Daedone does not specify a target. It specifies a mechanism. A leader. A following. Beliefs that shape behavior. Former members who express regret. That is the formula. It does not require a wellness company in San Francisco. It does not require orgasmic meditation. It requires only a prosecutor who decides that a community qualifies.

The question is not whether this theory can be used again. The government announced that it will be. The question is who decides which community is next, which leader qualifies, and which followers are victims waiting to be deprogrammed. Under the precedent established in Brooklyn, the answer is: the government decides.

So the question is simple: Do we trust people to choose, even when they choose badly? Or do we decide, quietly and politely, that someone else should choose for them?

If there’s an ending to all this, it’s just this— A door, still open.

A voice that says, “Go if you want.”

And the stubborn, necessary belief that freedom, whatever else it may be, is still yours to walk through.