When they were convicted of forced labor conspiracy, two leaders of OneTaste, a lifestyle company devoted to the female orgasm, used a fierce public relations campaign to claim they were victims of the justice system. Then, that fervent advocacy helped land the women, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, in jail.
After weeks of sordid testimony, the judge, Diane Gujarati, specifically cited the publicity effort before refusing to grant the defendants bail before their September sentencing, an uncommonly strict requirement for first-time, nonviolent criminals — and one that the government had not sought.
Juda Engelmayer, the women’s lead publicist, had written online posts that the judge found troubling, including one that featured a swastika superimposed over the Justice Department’s logo.
“You think a swastika is helpful to the defendants?” Judge Gujarati asked Jennifer Bonjean, a lawyer for Ms. Daedone, at a hearing on June 10 in federal court in Brooklyn.
Zealous media strategies surrounding celebrity trials have become common, with a blueprint created by President Trump’s aggressive attacks on prosecutors, judges and plaintiffs. For the defendants in the “orgasmic meditation” case, the strategy may have backfired, even though it won some conservative commentators to their side.
“It’s treacherous, the relationship between the media and the clients and court,” said Arthur Aidala, a lawyer who has represented high-profile clients including Harvey Weinstein. “You really need to proceed with caution.”
Mr. Engelmayer wrote articles during the trial that were critical of the judge, prosecutors and witnesses; aggressively sought coverage from news outlets; and spoke to reporters about what he called the unfairness of the case.
Ms. Daedone, OneTaste’s founder, gave frequent interviews and held events at the company’s New York headquarters. She appeared on “NBC Nightly News” and Dr. Phil’s television show and spoke to reporters for Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
“Media is used for just about every trial,” Mr. Engelmayer said in an interview. “Why shouldn’t the defense be allowed to have their narrative out there?”
Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz were convicted after a five-week trial in which more than a half-dozen women testified to feeling brainwashed into thinking there was no life outside their work for the organization, which made ritualized masturbation a good to be sold. Their tasks included having sex with OneTaste investors, as well as cooking and cleaning OneTaste’s communal living space.
Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz said Judge Gujarati’s decision to keep them behind bars was unfair retaliation for actions taken by their representatives and boisterous supporters — not them. It is a draconian punishment that epitomizes the case’s rank unfairness, they said.
“This is nothing new,” Ms. Bonjean said. “It’s a theme in the case.”
The women are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a troubled and violent facility in Brooklyn that has housed other high-profile inmates. Their lawyers have appealed the decision to jail them to a higher court. Though the government’s lawyers did not seek Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz’s detention at the bail hearing, they are now seeking to keep them behind bars, according to court filings.
As first-time offenders who were free on bail for two years, Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz are not at risk of fleeing the country, nor are they a threat to the community, their lawyers said.
Yet according to Judge Gujarati, the publicity campaign veered into witness intimidation. In addition to Mr. Engelmayer’s posts, the judge said the two women’s supporters had engaged in a pattern of mistreatment of victims who testified.
Ms. Bonjean acknowledged during the bail hearing on June 10 that the two women’s supporters had “reached out to talk” with witnesses. Celia Cohen, a lawyer for Ms. Cherwitz, said her team would “make sure that no victims or anything is disparaged.”
During the hearing, Judge Gujarati said she was focusing only on whether the two women would be a danger to the community and a flight risk, not on their unorthodox belief system.
She then brought up how a member of the OneTaste defense team had leaked documents that were under seal before the trial. She took issue with Ms. Cohen’s argument that her client was not violent, referring to the testimony of women who had said they felt abused and manipulated.
The “specific behaviors of certain supporters” of the two women was troubling, Judge Gujarati said. One was Marcus Ratnathicam, a OneTaste member who also works as a publicist for the company. Judge Gujarati suggested that he had been “making faces” at witnesses during the trial.
Judge Gujarati did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York declined to comment.
Mr. Engelmayer, who was not in the courtroom during the bail hearing, said in an interview that he viewed the judge’s decision as a personal attack on his character. He denied any claims of witness intimidation, and he said he had not chosen the swastika image for the post.
Judge Gujarati “doesn’t have the privilege of not being mentioned in the press,” Mr. Engelmayer said, adding without offering evidence that the judge had entered the trial with “an ax to grind.”
Though Judge Gujarati homed in on Mr. Engelmayer’s own writing, the overall media blitz was a conspicuous aspect of Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz’s defense outside the courtroom. The women found support in conservative-leaning news and opinion outlets.
Mr. Ratnathicam said he had “reached out to everyone” before the trial, but that the right-wing media had been most interested in covering the case.
Revolver News, a conservative news and commentary outlet that was founded by Darren Beattie, who now works in the Trump administration, ran sponsored content from OneTaste throughout the trial. A reporter from the outlet was present in the courtroom for much of the trial.
Reason, a libertarian magazine, published critical coverage of the government’s case before and throughout the trial. In one article after the verdict, the writer Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote that the convictions represented the “total infantilization of women, negating the gains in sexual and social autonomy that we’ve won.”
Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative and ally of President Trump, criticized the OneTaste prosecution in a May podcast interview. So did Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who was a staunch ally of Mr. Trump and who was once under federal investigation for sex trafficking.
“The abuses of prosecutors begin against groups that are unsympathetic,” Mr. Gaetz said in May on One America News Network, a conservative news outlet. “Once the power is consolidated and deployed, even against the freaks, it can be weaponized against everyone.”
Ms. Bonjean said that the sympathy from conservative figures was “rooted in not wanting the government to interfere in your spiritual beliefs,” and that skepticism of the Justice Department was key to their interest, particularly given Mr. Trump’s complaints of a rigged justice system.
“Being railroaded is something close to their heart,” Ms. Bonjean said. “They feel not only President Trump, but also people from his first administration, were railroaded.”
When asked whether Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz would seek a pardon from the president, Ms. Bonjean said she would “exhaust all avenues to get my client released.”
“I would of course be hopeful the administration would look at the case,” she said.
Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.
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