Is the ‘OneTaste’ CEO a sex cult leader – or a high priestess of female pleasure?

I first met sex guru Nicole Daedone three years ago when she was performing orgasmic meditation on a colleague from her sexual wellness start-up, OneTaste.

Daedone, was delicately touching Rachel Cherwitz, her head of sales, giving her multiple, and very vocal, sexual highs – for 15 straight minutes – in front of more than 100 riveted people in a studio in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district at 7pm on a weeknight.

Naked from the waist down, Cherwitz was lying on a raised table with her legs open towards the audience. Cameras and microphones catching her every reaction.

The crowd was that archetypal New York mix of wealthy investors, impeccably dressed-for-business single women, and the orgasm-curious of all ages. OneTaste had already been endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow, who interviewed Daedone on her goop podcast and described her orgasmic meditation as the “yoga of sex.”

I was there to write about the event because just months earlier OneTaste had been accused in a Netflix documentary titled, “Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste” of exploiting vulnerable people yearning for personal growth and sexual empowerment. Daedone’s Manhattan event was a fightback of sorts: she intended the demonstration that I witnessed to make the case for orgasmic meditation (a mixture of clitoral stimulation and mindfulness) as female empowerment.

But afterwards, Daedone told me that the FBI was circling – spurred by the Netflix documentary. And she was correct, eight months later she and Cherwitz were charged with forced labor conspiracy and are now on trial in Brooklyn Federal Court. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

The prosecution hinges on whether Daedone was a pioneering CEO running an avant-garde business that would empower women – or a sex cult leader luring in and then profiting from her disciples. Had Daedone discovered the new yoga or was she plying an age-old grift?

Both Daedone, 58, and Cherwitz, 44, deny the criminal charges, and the allegations in the Netflix documentary. They intended the demonstration that I witnessed to make the case for orgasmic meditation – a mixture of clitoral stimulation and mindfulness which they say is the basis for female empowerment.

The Netflix film told the stories of numerous former OneTaste followers who claimed they were lured with promises of healing past trauma through orgasmic meditation (or OM for short) but say they were then pressured into debt for expensive training courses, lived in communal spaces under constant surveillance, and were groomed to perform sexual acts for the company’s investors and potential clients. That in effect they had been captured by a sex cult.

But speaking to The Spectator, Daedone scoffs at the suggestion that she is a cult leader and describes the prosecution as “an attack on my philosophy.”

“This is a cultural vetting of the practice. Same thing with yoga, same thing with psychedelics. And same thing with us. So when people say, is this a cult? None of this is about laws being broken. They [the FBI] came up with conspiracy, which is a thought crime.”

Consent, she insists, was written into every practice and followers were always free to leave, which many have admitted on the witness stand.

Daedone first experienced orgasmic meditation from a Buddhist monk in the late 1990s, and says her vision was to reach millions of people with the technique and make it as accepted as yoga and meditation.

She launched OneTaste in 2001 as a path to personal fulfillment and 15 minute orgasms. The name, she says, derives from a Buddhist expression, which means, “just as the ocean has one taste of salt, so does the taste of liberation.”

“The Dalai Lama says it’ll be Western women that change the world. And so orgasmic meditation training is really for women to not fall into the typical patterns of deference with men, but to actually stand up, give their vision and lead.”

This kind of headline-ready rhetoric helped propel OneTaste to enormous popularity and enormous profitability. In 2014 it was rated as one of the fastest growing companies in the US. At its peak, it operated in nine US cities, with many of its employees living together, sharing beds and working full time on orgasmic meditation on clients and each other.

Explaining the practice, she says that being “the stroker” makes her “feel like I am playing a musical instrument,” and she finds it spiritual and empowering.

Today, despite the charges against Daedone and Cherwitz, the company is still in business. Daedone sold the OneTaste 162-acre Mendocino “orgasmic compound” in 2017 for $12 million, but kept control of The Institute of OM, through which she still teaches the orgasmic practice in Harlem, as well as controlling some affiliated charities and female empowerment projects.

Daedone, of course, says she is relying on her own orgasmic meditation right now – it is “the reason that I can sit in that courtroom for nine hours a day.”

Every day, Daedone and Cherwitz walk into court flanked by a remaining vestige of the former empire: a small group of ardent and immaculately turned-out supporters, often all wearing the same beige, brown or camel-color palette.

Dr Caroline Griggs, a pharmacist who lives in California, has traveled to New York to support the OneTaste duo for the duration of the six-week trial. Explaining why, she tells The Spectator, “The idea of women’s power resonated with me. It wasn’t like I went home and announced, ‘Dad, I’m in the school of orgasm!’ My whole family will tell you I’m a different person for the better.”

Griggs, 37, flew to New York for her first orgasmic meditation class in 2017, where she observed a live demonstration of the technique. Explaining the experience her eyes welled up, “Immediately when I walked into the room, I just felt welcome. They did the demo, and then I just cried. I just felt like I could breathe for the first time in my life.”

That Daedone and Cherwitz have ended up in court is no surprise to her. “If OneTaste had been about men’s sexuality, we wouldn’t be here. People get threatened by [female sexuality], especially in America.”

Former OneTaste employees testifying in the trial should own their past choices and decisions to participate in OM, she believes. “That’s part of life. You sign up for things, you take risks. I think that part of being an adult… is taking responsibility for your life.”

Sofia Teplitzky, 38, was introduced to OneTaste in 2014 after watching a Daedone Ted Talk online. Aged 24, she left her husband and her job to practice orgasmic meditation. Now she is working for OneTaste’s Institute of Orgasmic Meditation, living in the organization’s shared facility in Harlem. And attending court every day.

She explained, “I tried talking to my husband or my friends that I had at the time about different things that I was feeling about life, about relationships, about my sexuality. They all were kind of weirded out by my questions. And then when I found OneTaste, it was like I could ask questions and I could express how I felt, and no one thought I was weird.”

Teplitzky has completed every one of the classes in the OneTaste program over ten years, meaning she is likely to have practiced orgasmic meditation thousands of times.

“When I first found OneTaste, I was very into material things like how my life looked. My Instagram was very beautiful. I traveled a lot. I had a foreign husband who was very good looking,” she explained. “And then around the time that I started doing orgasmic meditation, I realized, are those things actually what made me feel fulfilled? I have more access to myself knowing and expressing who I am and what I want, and that is because of orgasmic meditation.”

Teplitzky will remain throughout the trial, saying of the former OneTaste members who are taking the stand for the prosecution, “To me, it feels like people wanting to retroactively blame, which I don’t think is empowering to women.”

Next to Daedone’s well-tuned out court supporters sit another very different group: suited FBI agents who also attend every day, listening intently from the public gallery. They are here because the case might end up on the desk of the Director, Kash Patel. An FBI agent is accused of helping to fabricate a key piece of evidence that also had a starring role in a Netflix documentary about OneTaste.

The documentary featured the journals of former employee Ayries Blank, in which she detailed many lurid allegations, and for which her sister was paid $25,000 for sharing with Netflix. A grand jury indicted Daedone and Cherwitz a month after the prosecutors submitted the journals in 2023.

But a judge later ordered that the journals – which were the basis of the criminal case against Daedone and Cherwitz – be removed from evidence after it was revealed they were not written in 2015 but instead forged and created in 2022 for Netflix’s documentary.

“The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the handwritten journals are authentic,” prosecutors admitted in writing to the judge in 2024.

Then in April this year a member of Congress sent a letter to the FBI Director demanding an investigation. In it he alleges the FBI agent manufactured “evidence through entertainment media,” directed witnesses to destroy evidence and filed misleading affidavits, amongst other claims.

Making matters more murky, the same FBI agent has also been accused of similar wrong-doing in a previous sex cult prosecution, which could at the very least lead to an appeal. The FBI declined to comment to The Spectator when asked about the conduct of the agent.

With such new developments, Netflix will no doubt be itching to commission a sequel, the guilt or innocence of Daedone and Cherwitz irrelevant – ratings being the only important metric. And, naturally, Netflix has its own lawyers in court every day, listening intently for mentions of the streamer or details about the faked journals their producers based their original documentary on.

The verdict of the jury is also likely to be irrelevant to their courtroom supporters. In their eyes the OneTaste leaders are, and will always be, wrongly accused by the federal patriarchy. One wonders, however, if the group’s presence in court is a net positive for the defense: is it wise to have women accused of being cult leaders flanked into court by devotees who all dress similarly and have left their lives to follow them? Or is the enduring support a testament to their core mission?

Could somewhere along the line OneTaste have become less about female empowerment and more about brainwashing, coercion and the empowerment of its leaders – who are now accused of putting their own business and status firmly before other people’s pleasure?