Orgasm-based wellness company’s founder sentenced to 9 years in prison
March 30 (UPI) — The founder of the orgasm-based wellness company OneTaste, Nicole Daedone, was sentenced on Monday to nine years in jail for forced labor conspiracy.
Daedone was sentenced after being found guilty last year for grooming vulnerable women into working under the guise of helping women heal from various traumas, the New York Daily News reported.
Along with her director of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, who was sentenced to six and 1/2 years in prison on Monday, Daedone recruited women to purchase sexual wellness therapy programs — which included “orgasmic meditation” — and then turned them into “handlers” who would recruit “marks” into the program, ex-employees testified during trial.
Over the course of the decade-long sex abuse scheme, Daedone forced ex-employees to engage in sex acts under the guise of meditation sessions, often forcing them to work for free, the New York Post reported.
Daedone, and her attorneys, have maintained that the company is “rooted 100% in consent.”
“If I talk to you about the practice … you can say yes or no, and no is a perfectly acceptable answer throughout the practice itself,” she told NBC News last year. “It’s all based in consent. We had an ethics committee. This is the antithesis of what this company was.”
Although Daedone was not sentenced to the 20 years in prison that prosecutors sought, she will have to forfeit the $12 million she sold OneTaste for and pay $900,000 to ex-employees who were not paid for their work.
“Ms. Daedone exploited certain women in a calculated way and made money off of that exploitation,” Federal Court Judge Diane Gujarati said at the sentencing.
“What she was doing was not about enlightenment or operating on a different dimension,” Gujarati said. “It wasn’t a game or a show. It wasn’t ‘Harry Potter‘ or ‘The Matrix.’ It was criminal.”
OneTaste operated centers in cities across the United States that offered it’s orgasmic meditation practice, which involved sessions where one person performed a sex act on another for 15 minutes “with no goal except to feel.”
Former employees who testified during the trial called the company a sex cult that was ruled through fear and intimidation, The New York Times reported.
The women said that they were tasked with offering sexual services to clients and investors, as well as care for the company’s communal homes.
One woman testified that she was forced to receive a meditation session and prosecutors alleged that Daedone used the practice as a “means of encouraging productivity,” The Times reported.
After Daedone and Cherwitz were convicted, the Department of Justice said the jury had revealed the duo as “grifters who preyed on vulnerable victims by making empty promises of of sexual empowerment and wellness only to manipulate them into performing labor and services for the defendants’ benefit.”
People who continue to support the company, which has attempted to re-brand itself, have said the trial is prosecuting consenting adults who have chosen to participate in its programs.
While women who testified during the trial said they fell into Daedone’s trap as vulnerable targets — who were referred to internally as marks, according to trial testimony — the company’s current CEO, Anjuli Ayer, called the sentence “a terrifying day for freedom.”
“Once persuasion becomes a crime, anyone can be a defendant, and anyone can be a victim,” Ayer said. “We must correct the record or everyone will suffer.”
Attorney Alan Dershowitz told NBC News earlier this month that he considers the conviction to be “a miscarriage of Justice” based on his reading of the trial materials and plans to help both Daedone and Cherwitz request a presidential pardon.
“With a few changes of words, this indictment could have been directed against Mormon groups, against Hasidic groups, against various Protestant or Catholic sects,” he said. “There’s so many people who join ideological or religious groups, volunteer their time and later become disillusioned.”