For the past month, Harvey Weinstein and Sean “Diddy” Combs have each been on trial in Manhattan for an array of charges related to sexual violence. They are two of the entertainment industry’s most visible men, and the cases against them fit a prevailing pattern of the #MeToo era: allegations that, in rising to the top, they abused their stature to exploit younger women. (Both Weinstein and Combs have pleaded not guilty.) The two trials have often functioned as formal reckonings over accusations that had already been enshrined in public discourse.
In Brooklyn, a different sort of sex trial has been playing out over a similar time frame. Federal prosecutors charged Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz with a count of forced labor conspiracy in 2023, alleging that the women used their leadership positions at OneTaste, the semi-notorious wellness company devoted to Daedone’s “orgasmic meditation” teachings, to coerce employees and participants to perform sexual acts.
On Monday, after two days of deliberations, Daedone and Cherwitz were found guilty. Their lawyers said in a statement that they both plan to appeal.
Gender aside, the case stood apart from those resembling Weinstein and Combs’s. Daedone and Cherwitz received some measure of media support, not least because in the lead-up to the trial, it was revealed that a key piece of evidence featured in a Netflix documentary about the company was falsified. Daedone vowed in a series of interviews, including one with Vanity Fair, that she would testify in her own defense, an unusually bold maneuver for a criminal defendant. (She did not.)
In closing arguments, the prosecution described Daedone as an ambitious leader setting out to grow her business on the back of her devotees’ sexual activity, which was structured around her vision. (Daedone’s orgasmic meditation practice revolves around a partner, typically a man, stroking a woman’s clitoris for 15 minutes, but OneTaste also encompassed a broader view of female empowerment via sex.) Daedone, prosecutor Nina Gupta said, was “coercing vulnerable women to perform sexual acts,” particularly when older, wealthy male investors were involved.
“Having more sex,” Gupta said, evaluating Daedone’s practice, “especially with potential clients, would free them.”
In their testimony, former OneTaste employees described an environment shaped by intense social, spiritual, and sexual pressure. They did not allege that they were physically threatened or blackmailed—the sort of coercive tactics that typically accompany sex cult and sex trafficking cases—but rather that they had learned to see themselves as completely beholden to their community. (“We might as well go out and arrest the high school bullies,” Cherwitz’s lawyer said on Wednesday.) Some testified that they were instructed to have sex with a boyfriend of Daedone’s at the time—a tech entrepreneur who was bankrolling the company in its early days—and, among other BDSM practices, walk him on a leash.
“They knew it was controversial,” Daedone’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, said in her closing statement. “These grown women went there.”
Bonjean, who has also represented Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly, has emerged as one of the foremost legal counterweights to the #MeToo movement. She wore all white as she addressed the jury, and Daedone looked on smiling. In some ways, her defense mirrored those she has made on behalf on some of the world’s most publicly embattled men. “We don’t just believe women or believe anything,” Bonjean had said during the closing arguments of Kelly’s Chicago trial. “We scrutinize. There’s no place for mob-like thinking in a courtroom.” In the case of OneTaste, she argued throughout the trial, women were testifying about sexual experiences that they had simply come to regret.
But in the muddled mix of alternative spirituality and sexual politics that defined OneTaste and the trial surrounding it, Bonjean also found another line of argument. There was nothing criminal, she proposed, about Daedone monetizing her teachings, however outré or distasteful.
“This is not normal,” she said, paraphrasing an argument from the prosecution. “No kidding.”
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