The Weak, Weird Case Against a Supposed ‘Orgasm Cult’

When Nicole Daedone co-founded OneTaste in 2004, she presented it as a facilitator of female pleasure and power. OneTaste emphasized “orgasmic meditation,” or OMing—a 15-minute partnered clitoral stroking practice meant to foster focus, connection, and mindful sexuality. OMing can help people “discover richer relationships, an embodied sense of self and the uncompromised feeling of wholeness,” the OneTaste website advertised in 2009. To OM, “one person strokes another person’s clitoris for 15 minutes with no goal other than to feel the sensation,” it said in 2018.

There was no mention of snakes. Or magic. Or sex trafficking.

Over the years, OneTaste took off, hosting conferences featuring boldfaced names and receiving friendly coverage in outlets ranging from from Vice to New York to The Atlantic. In 2017, Khloe Kardashian called OMing “the key to ultimate satisfaction.”

But as OneTaste’s reach expanded, some wondered whether the company was up to more than just mindfulness. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek reported on complaints about the company from disgruntled former employees and alleged occultish activity: a “Magic School,” “temporary ceremonial piercings,” people being decreed priests and priestesses of orgasm. OneTaste, according to the article, said “the ceremonies were ‘play’ and compared Magic School to Burning Man.”

The media started calling OneTaste an “orgasm cult.” A Lena Dunham–produced Netflix documentary, Orgasm Inc, cast the group in an occult light, mixing dramatized footage of robed rituals involving snakes with real-life footage from the group’s events.

Soon the FBI got involved. A few months after its initial article, Bloomberg reported that the bureau was “making inquiries into OneTaste,” asking people “a range of questions, including whether the company pressured workers into sexual encounters to help close a sale.”

The agency was fresh from investigating NXIVM, another self-help group accused of being a sex cult. That investigation ended in convictions for NXIVM leader Keith Raniere and five women involved with the group, including actress Allison Mack.

Now the feds were looking for potential OneTaste victims. One name on their list was Alisha Price.

Price, now 49, was working as a hairdresser in Port St. Lucie, Florida, where she’d moved to help take care of her elderly parents. But years earlier, in San Francisco, she had worked for OneTaste, living in a communal space where some employees and OM practitioners chose to reside.

Two FBI agents flew in from New York in April 2021, and they arrived at her door with a subpoena. One of those was Special Agent Elliot McGinnis, a former New York City police officer who had resigned in the midst of an investigation into a complaint about excessive force. McGinnis had also led the investigation into NXIVM.

“When they came to my house, I was like, ‘You think this is like NXIVM, don’t you?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, we do,'” Price told Reason in an interview. At the time, she thought: “They wanted a high profile case that was salacious and had a sexual component and was something that they could, you know, take down a big organization for.”

Price recalls them saying she was an important “victim witness.” She would need to come to New York to testify in front of a grand jury—or perhaps chat now instead?

Price says she felt “ambushed.” So she chatted, stressing that she was not a victim. That did not bring the bureau’s interest in her to an end. She was repeatedly told, through her lawyer, that the FBI would need her to testify.

The lawyer put her in touch with two FBI victim specialists, one of whom she says told her the anxiety she felt was just residual “trauma” from OneTaste. This went on for over a year. Price felt like she “had no choice but to be a victim in the FBI’s eyes,” she says. She calls the victim-specialist system an “institutionalized victim mill” meant to “manufacture victims.”

She also thinks she knew what the FBI was after. “Based on the questions they asked me,” she says, she believes “they were hoping that I was going to say things on the record and they could turn into a charge of sex trafficking.”

Despite Price’s refusal to play the role of victim, the feds found a way to bring a charge—albeit one less salacious and ultimately weirder than what they may have originally intended.

Later this year, Daedone will be tried in federal court. The trial was initially slated for January but was pushed back at the government’s request. It’s now scheduled to start May 5, although the defense has requested the trial be pushed back further, to September.

On trial with her will be Rachel Cherwitz, OneTaste’s former head of sales. Like Price, Cherwitz initially got the victim treatment. When she wouldn’t participate in the case that way, they took a different approach.

“After Ms. Cherwitz declined to identify as a victim,” wrote lawyers Duncan Levin and Jennifer Bonjean in a letter to U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati last summer, “a phalanx of FBI agents in full SWAT gear descended on her home with a helicopter and convoy of SUVs despite her attorney’s assurances that she would be available to answer any questions that they had.”

The two face a single count of conspiracy to commit forced labor, an offense allegedly undertaken “between approximately 2004 and 2018.”

Neither woman is charged with actually forcing labor or engaging in other criminal acts. Their lawyers believe this is the first time the feds have charged forced labor conspiracy without an underlying forced labor charge.

“The Government need not prove that anyone was, in fact, victimized by a conspiracy,” U.S. Attorney Lauren Howard Elbert told the court during a status hearing last April. “They need only prove that an agreement existed to victimize somebody.”

Leading up to the trial, prosecutors have seemed hard-pressed to prove even this. In outlining the case, they have employed dubious theories of criminality, such as “coercive control,” and they have relied on expansive readings of legal terms like “serious harm.” Above all, they have exploited rank sensationalism, as though hoping that throwing in lots of details about kinky sex and free love while suggesting cultish behavior will do where evidence of legal wrongdoing falls short.

Underlying the case is one of the Justice Department’s catchall justifications: stopping sex trafficking and prostitution. The case isn’t explicitly about that, but the feds clearly intend to imply that this is really a sex trafficking case, even if the charges don’t go that far.

‘Mindful Sexuality’

OneTaste’s name is a nod to a line attributed to the Buddha: “Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.”

OneTaste was intended “to help other people get out of suffering,” says Daedone. She likes to cite scientific research that she says shows orgasmic meditation’s potential range of benefits, including promoting emotional resilience and helping people with sexual trauma feel arousal. “I believe that everything is about sex except for sex—sex is about power,” she says. And women will “always be at the mercy of sexuality until we can actually grab it and harness it and drive it.”

One solution, she argued, was orgasmic meditation. In an OM session, which can happen in private or in a group, the “stroker” remains clothed while the “strokee,” resting in a “nest” of pillows, disrobes from the waist down. OMing is to last for 15 minutes, no more and no less. Gloves and lube are used. An OMing ethics guide lays out a host of rules, including “no commerce” and “nothing extra,” meaning “no romantic gestures, added or subtracted steps, etc.”

OMing and its associated philosophy were taught by OneTaste staff and coaches, who in the company’s early years were based out of two adjoining San Francisco buildings known as One Taste, an Urban Retreat Center.

In one, staff offered classes in OMing, yoga, and “connected living,” as well as massages and a café that sold “macrobiotic, vegetarian and raw food options.” In the other—the “warehouse”—OM enthusiasts lived in a highly communal space.

Price was an early resident of the warehouse. Already a practitioner of meditation and yoga, she came to OneTaste in 2006. “It immediately felt like a right fit for me,” she says, calling her first time OMing a “profound experience.” So she kept at it, later teaching OneTaste classes and eventually becoming a OneTaste employee.

“You didn’t have to live at OneTaste to work at OneTaste,” Daedone explains. In the early years, however, many did, because it was a tight-knit group with a shared mission. “When it started, we were just a bunch of friends,” she says. “We didn’t have a whole lot of money.” Everything was done communally. “I cooked….We all did whatever was necessary.”

OneTaste was a business, but for some it was also a lifestyle.

Price went on to live in another communal OM space, known as the 1080 house, on San Francisco’s Folsom Street. “I remember falling asleep in my room of 1080 in the summer,” she posted to Facebook in January. “Windows open listening to the people I lived with chatting and laughing with each other. Someone playing guitar. They could really play. A couple fucking in another room. It was good sex too, real and deep. Loving and sensational.”

Eli Block, now a lead orgasmic meditation instructor with OneTaste, first got involved around 2007, attending a communications games event where the women were so “unapologetically erotic” that he was put off—at first. He came back about a year later and “it just clicked,” in part because Daedone had started blending more Buddhist philosophy into the experience. Block had grown up around Zen philosophy—he jokes that when some kids went to the lake, “I went to a meditation monastery”—but this was something different, and not just because of all the clitorises involved. “Nicole had this very immediate, applicable, really blue-collar way of cutting through the veneer,” Block says.

To hear the government tell it now, shame was wielded like a weapon against people in OneTaste residences, used to control them and extract free labor. But Block—one of the first residents of the “urban monastery” at 1080—paints a much different picture, describing the atmosphere as deliberate, fun, permissive, and safe. It was a place where you could be “unguarded” and “take a risk and not worry that you’d be endlessly shamed,” he says. “People had the freedom to discover” who they were, he says, and this extended to artistic expression, sexual expression, and new roles within the community or the organization. At the same time, authenticity was expected. “People paid,” says Block, to have OneTaste staff “demonstrate that we can see through your facade.”

Many people took an OM class or a few and then moved on. Others went deeper.

Former OM coach and OneTaste employee Jennifer Slusher first got involved with OneTaste in 2008 and went on to live in OM houses in San Francisco and New York. She says she kept coming back “because it was the most powerful thing that I had experienced.”

Like Price, Slusher would later be contacted by the FBI and feel pushed by McGinnis to identify as a victim when she did not, she told Reason. (McGinnis did not respond to Reason‘s request for comment.)

OneTaste was staffed by a mix of employees, independent contractors, and volunteer workers. A “back of house” program allowed volunteers to exchange event work for access to classes—a program the feds would later use to support the “conspiracy to commit forced labor” charge.

“If you didn’t have any money, I wanted it to be that you could take the class, that anything was available,” says Daedone.

By 2013, OneTaste had offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, and it offered not only web-based and in-person instruction but an OM coach certification program, private instruction, and an online hub.

There were OM Circles or classes in more than a dozen cities, including Austin, Boulder, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Daedone published a book, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. In 2014, the company would hold a major conference, with such scheduled speakers as authors Neil Strauss and Naomi Wolf and neuroscientist Reef Karim. OneTaste and orgasmic meditation were featured everywhere from Vice to Deepak Chopra’s YouTube channel. Daedone appeared on actress and wellness maven Gwyneth Paltrow’s podcast.

But there were signs of trouble. The tight-knit nature of the OM community, and the taboos around its central practice, tended to forge both bonding and emotional volatility. This was “not, like, rainbows and sunshine kind of work,” says Slusher. “Tapping into your sexuality—it can be incredibly triggering.” Some people displaced their anger at things that arose from the practice onto OneTaste’s leaders, she suggests.

Block echoed this sentiment. Certain people would come “up against a reality they didn’t like” and blame their discomfort on Cherwitz and Daedone, he says.

In 2015, the company privately settled a lawsuit brought by a former employee, Ayries Blanck, who alleged a “hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wage and intentional infliction of emotional distress.” As part of an out-of-court settlement, Blanck received $325,000 and agreed not to “disparage OneT

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