A First Amendment Right To Preach Orgasm?
Yes, some people feared leaving OneTaste, defense lawyer Jennifer Bonjean admitted on Monday. “There was fear of being kicked out of the group chat.”
Bonjean’s client, Nicole Daedone, is co-founder of the sexual and spiritual wellness company OneTaste. Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, OneTaste’s former head of sales, are on trial for an alleged conspiracy to commit forced labor.
On Monday, the prosecution rested its very underwhelming case—a case that has invoked witchcraft, bad brain science, and a disturbing infantilization of women.
Freedom of Association Under AttackÂ
Typically, a forced labor case involves someone employing violence, threats of violence, or other means of “serious harm” in order to compel someone to work for them. But again and again, government witnesses—former OneTaste volunteers, employees, and community members—testified that they were entirely free to quit their positions, move out of OneTaste communes, or otherwise cease formal associations with the group without threat of physical harm or some sort of serious retaliation. They just didn’t want to go because they feared being excommunicated from the OneTaste community, which they had become dependent on for their social, sexual, and spiritual identities.
The idea that this constitutes a “serious harm” that can sustain a forced labor charge “gets us into some very worrisome First Amendment issues, because the First Amendment protects people’s right to assemble as they see fit,” Bonjean told U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati on Monday.
“Scientologists are permitted to fraternize with Scientologists. Churches are permitted to socialize with people that share their beliefs. They are permitted under the First Amendment to say, you don’t share our beliefs, therefore you may not be part of our community,” Bonjean said. “And OneTaste also—not just as a business but as a community—was permitted to say, ‘we share these beliefs, we live by them ourselves, if you don’t want to live by them, then you will have to leave.’ Or ‘you may be a customer, you can attend classes, you can be on the outer circles, but you…may not be in the inner circle, because…we don’t want people who don’t believe in these principles.'”
Those principles are much of what the government has been putting on trial. The prosecution’s theory of the case is that OneTaste’s teachings about things like sexual openness, openness to new experiences, personal responsibility, and the value of orgasmic meditation (O.M.)—a 15-minute, partnered clitoral stroking practice—left people powerless to reject living, working, or sexual situations they did not want.
Yet with government witness after government witness, the defense has produced evidence suggesting that discomfort or displeasure came only with hindsight. In the moment, these witnesses were effusive—on social media, in emails to OneTaste higher-ups, and so on—about the benefits of O.M. and OneTaste teachings more generally.
“What the government has alleged [and] the evidence has demonstrated is that there were people who participated in OneTaste and then later determined that they were psychologically harmed,” Bonjean suggested to Gujarati on Monday. “Not that in the moment psychological harm was the reason they stayed.”
‘I Take No Responsibility’
Government witnesses testified about fears of losing “social status” and that there was “a high school clique situation gone bad and you could lose being closer to the cool kids,” Celia Cohen, a lawyer for Cherwitz, told Judge Gujurati on Monday. “And people did testify that that was what was important. And if they didn’t do this, they would lose that kind of status. But again, that is not serious harm.”
Reading the transcripts from this trial, which started on May 5, it’s clear many of the government’s witnesses are now uncomfortable with choices they made while affiliated with OneTaste—things like deciding to go into debt or solicit money from a man to pay for courses; engaging in a lot of promiscuous sexual activity; or staying in a professional or volunteer role or a housing situation that eventually soured. And, whether intentionally or not, they seem to be looking for someone other than themselves to blame for these choices, even if they were mentally capable 20- and 30-something-year-old adults at the time.
One government witness, Michal Neria, talked about marrying Misha, a man who had been paying for her to take OneTaste courses and proposed to her at a OneTaste event. Cherwitz allegedly suggested to Neria “that I could ask him to pay and that it’s completely his decision whether to say yes or no,” Neria testified on May 22. “Rachel and the other higher-ups put that idea in my head. I would have never come up with it by myself.”
“So, you take no responsibility for asking Misha to pay for your courses?” Bonjean asked.
“I take no responsibility,” Neria said.
Bonjean then asked Neria if she could agree that she did not have to ask Misha to pay for her courses. “Then I wouldn’t have been able to take those courses,” Neria replied.
So, Neria did something that benefited her at the time (“I really wanted to take that course,” she told
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