The women arrived with dreams of rebirth, community and climax. Instead, they said, their twenties were ruined by working at OneTaste, a buzzy San Francisco company that billed itself as a health and education start-up promoting female empowerment via “orgasmic meditation.”
They came to see OneTaste as a cult, but the prosecution of two of its leaders will decide whether they were coerced into working for the company or simply deluded by its teachings.
The question is central to the federal case against Nicole Daedone, OneTaste’s founder and former chief executive, and Rachel Cherwitz, its former head of sales, who have each been charged with one count of forced labor conspiracy. The charge carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors say Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz deployed “psychological tactics” to groom OneTaste employees for masturbation rituals and to isolate them, leaving them reliant on the company and unable to access or even imagine a world outside.
Such forced labor schemes usually employ a tangible threat, such as physical violence or the confiscation of travel documents. OneTaste employees have not described such blunt tactics. Rather, they say, they feared that defying Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz would ruin them not financially or physically, but spiritually.
Lawyers for Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz have seized on that, noting that the witnesses were adults who had free will, and that some came from affluent backgrounds. They have pointed out that the witnesses did leave OneTaste, only to return when they yearned for spiritual community.
“Each time you left, you made a choice to come back,” Michael P. Robotti, a lawyer for Ms. Cherwitz, told one witness.
To win convictions, prosecutors must convince jurors that Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz forced OneTaste employees to work against their will, using physical, emotional or psychological coercion, and that each woman benefited. They must show that OneTaste employees had to keep working, including by engaging in orgasmic meditation, in order to avoid “serious harm.”
Through the first half of what is expected to be a six-week trial, more than a half-dozen former OneTaste employees have testified to sexual acts rarely mentioned in a courtroom. They said they had no other options at the time, but have stopped short of saying they were threatened with violence, the loss of property or anything beyond losing their standing within OneTaste.
Juda Engelmayer, a spokesman for the defendants, said the former OneTaste employees had chosen to explore an “unconventional lifestyle,” and had then “decided they were victims because it no longer aligns with how they see themselves.”
“This case is a dangerous attempt to criminalize regret,” Mr. Engelmayer said in a statement.
Determining consent can be difficult when it comes to cults, which by nature wipe away a person’s capacity to question order, said Rick Alan Ross, the founder of the Cult Education Institute. Mr. Ross, a deprogrammer who has testified as an expert in many such cases, said OneTaste appeared to bear the hallmarks of a coercive cult.
Cults, Mr. Ross said, “shut down your ability to critically think and reason,” leading people to do things they would never have considered before they joined the group.
“People have these unreasonable fears, that ‘if I leave the group I’m a traitor. If I leave the group, I’m a counterrevolutionary,’” he said in an interview.
NXIVM, the Albany-area sex cult led by Keith Raniere, also billed itself as a self-help organization and offered classes in its idiosyncratic rituals. But it blackmailed members with threats to release nude photographs and embarrassing secrets.
So far, there has been no evidence of such acts against OneTaste employees. Witnesses said they did what Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz asked because their entire senses of self revolved around OneTaste.
Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who helped win a 120-year sentence against Mr. Raniere, said that unlike his victims, OneTaste participants knew that sex acts were the organization’s calling card.
That could prove to be an obstacle for the prosecution, she said, in its effort to persuade the jury that orgasmic meditation was forced labor.
“You want to hit the jury over the head with how terrible this is,” Ms. Penza said.
The work, according to former OneTaste employees, consisted of participating in orgasmic meditation with anyone they could find, at any time. The job, which was understood to be a 24/7 endeavor, entailed a grueling daily schedule of “OM” sessions, cooking and cleaning in the communal house and seeing to Ms. Daedone’s and Ms. Cherwitz’s personal needs.
There were also tasks well outside orgasmic meditation. Some OneTaste employees testified that they were told to have sex with a top investor who was also Ms. Daedone’s romantic partner, as well as to whip him and walk him around on a leash.
People outside the community were called “muggles,” mortals unworthy of the path of spiritual enlightenment on which OneTaste adherents had embarked.
Erin Hatton, a professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, said OneTaste employees had experienced “status coercion.” Unlike more overt and physically violent coercion, status coercion emerges when a person cannot leave a job, or “their only community,” because of how much their self-worth depends on it.
That could be a tough sell for prosecutors in a criminal trial.
“It can be a tricky argument to make, because the powers of coercion can be subtle and even invisible to outsiders,” Professor Hatton said. “Nobody is standing over you with a whip.”
And the defendants have presented a placid, upbeat image in court. Ms. Daedone, who has said that she will testify in her own defense, typically wears a flowing tan shawl each day, gazing at the jury when a defense lawyer addresses a witness.
Ms. Daedone founded OneTaste in 2004, offering its courses at prices than could run into five figures. The central ritual typically involved a man stroking the genitals of a woman, with her sitting in a butterfly position on pillows, for 15 minutes.
OneTaste opened centers across the country, with locations in Austin, Texas, and New York. But as the word spread, so did allegations that OneTaste was a pseudoscience-peddling cult.
Employees were paid little, if at all; in fact, they paid to take OneTaste coaching courses that could cost more than $10,000. Members of OneTaste’s sales team were told they could not sleep until they met certain targets, and were routinely subjected to public humiliation and ostracism. Being a saleswoman for orgasm was a surprisingly hard job, one former employee testified.
The government’s witnesses have described an insular culture that did not tolerate dissent, with a work environment that was unforgiving. Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz even controlled their employees’ romantic relationships, witnesses said.
Participation came with an expected adherence to Ms. Daedone’s views on sexuality and relationships, which looked down on monogamy. OneTaste workers were frequently directed to abandon monogamy because it threatened their path to enlightenment. At least once, OneTaste’s leaders personally destroyed a romantic relationship by demanding that one person sleep with another person outside the relationship.
When the former employees were asked in court why they participated in sexual activities that were uncomfortable, one of them, who is now a medical resident, said that comfort had felt less important than the path to enlightenment.
Far from resisting the appearance of a cult, the company embraced the label, with its leaders even referring to it that way publicly, Christopher Hubbard, a former website manager for OneTaste, testified.
Mr. Hubbard, who said he had joined the company to advocate female sexual empowerment, said he was initially hooked by what appeared to be a “Buddhist, female empowerment organization.” Over time, he grew disillusioned with what he saw as OneTaste “trying to force people to do stuff.” It wasn’t the nonconformist group he signed up for.
“I thought we were going to make a difference in this country,” Mr. Hubbard said. “And I wanted to be a part of that.”
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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