Leading Scholars Slam Jailing of Orgasm Guru Using Junk Science
Twenty experts say the OneTaste case rests on a debunked theory—after the star witness’s diaries were exposed as fakes—in what they say is a miscarriage of justice.
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Twenty of the world’s top religious freedom experts have sounded the alarm over the U.S. government’s use of a debunked “brainwashing” theory to imprison an “orgasm meditation” guru.
Nicole Daedone, 58, founded OneTaste, the controversial San Francisco wellness company that taught the partnered genital-stroking practice to thousands of paying students. A Brooklyn jury convicted her and former sales chief Rachel Cherwitz, 45, of forced labor conspiracy in June 2025, and on March 30, Donald Trump appointee Judge Diane Gujarati handed Daedone nine years and Cherwitz six and a half.
Now the backlash has gone global. On June 27, twenty bipartisan scholars of religion and human rights—among them Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz and Ronald Sullivan, the London School of Economics’ Eileen Barker, and Baylor’s J. Gordon Melton—signed a memorandum, published through the Turin-based Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), declaring the case “a significant threat to religious liberty and democratic norms.”
The memo supports an analysis by Massimo Introvigne, the Italian sociologist who founded CESNUR, edits the religious-liberty magazine Bitter Winter, and is widely regarded as the world’s foremost authority on new religious movements.
“Some may not understand why new religious movement scholars regard the OneTaste case as an extremely dangerous precedent,” Introvigne told PunchUp. “It is not about the content of the OneTaste courses and practices. It is about an American court that reintroduced the pseudo-scientific theory of brainwashing from the back door of trafficking laws, thus putting all religions that rely on volunteer labor in potential danger.”
Their problem is the theory that won the conviction. Nobody was beaten or locked in. The women prosecutors called victims testified they consented to the practices. The government’s answer, delivered in prosecutor Nina Gupta’s closing argument, was that “choice wasn’t something they were in a psychological state to even consider,” as the National Law Review reported in late May.
The scholars say that is “brainwashing” doctrine by another name—a theory federal courts ruled inadmissible as pseudoscience back in 1990—and note the verdict marked the first time in U.S. federal case law that a forced labor conviction rested entirely on psychological coercion, with no physical force alleged.
The memo points at celebrity cult deprogrammer Steven Hassan as its architect—a man who served as personal therapist to key government witnesses—writing: “Many observers believe he obtained through OneTaste the new legal precedent he had long sought.”
The scholars are not alone. CAP LC, a European religious freedom group with U.N. consultative status, told the Human Rights Council the convictions mark “a major departure from established constitutional principles,” warning that if psychological influence alone counts as forced labor, any spiritual, therapeutic, or community group is fair game.
Dershowitz agrees. “The law was intended for victims of real trafficking: people forced or tricked into labor or sex work under threat of harm,” he has said. “It was never meant to punish those who freely joined a community, or to turn regret into retroactive victimhood.”
The theory, though, is only half the scandal. The government’s star witness, Ayries Blanck, was dropped weeks before trial after her supposedly contemporaneous journals turned out to be fakes—one entry cited a book published in 2019, four years after she claimed to have written it, and the handwritten pages matched word-for-word a digital file edited by multiple people.
“The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the handwritten journals are authentic,” prosecutors admitted, as The New York Times first reported in April 2025.
It gets worse. A 47-page interim report from the Oversight Project, the MAGA-aligned watchdog, alleges FBI case agent Elliot McGinnis received the fabricated entries by email in March 2023—under President Biden’s DOJ, while the same material was being licensed for $25,000 to a Lena Dunham production company for Netflix’s 2022 documentary Orgasm Inc, and weeks before the indictment dropped.
During the handover, someone deleted a telltale reference to the film’s working title, “Series One: Darkness”—and the report says the forensic trail points toward McGinnis himself. Prosecutors then went to trial with clips of OneTaste footage identical to those in the film. The report describes “damning evidence of FBI-Netflix collusion.” When the defense subpoenaed Netflix’s communications with the FBI, prosecutors branded it a “fishing expedition” and got it quashed.
The case has led to a bipartisan alliance of liberal academics, the Times, a European U.N. watchdog, and a Trump-world oversight shop, all arriving at the same conclusion from opposite directions.
The government is unmoved. At sentencing in March, Judge Gujarati said Daedone caused victims “long-lasting, if not irreparable” harm, as Courthouse News reported, and prosecutors maintain the pair groomed vulnerable women into sex acts with clients and investors. Dershowitz, meanwhile, told NBC News that he plans to ask President Trump to pardon both women, calling the case “a miscarriage of justice.”
“Today, the defendants are members of an obscure wellness movement. Tomorrow, it could be your pastor, rabbi or imam,” Dershowitz warned. “When government power turns belief into evidence of crime, it doesn’t just endanger one group, it endangers the very freedom that defines America.”
According to federal records seen by CBS News and reported by the Daily Beast in late April, OneTaste has submitted pardon applications to the DOJ. Daedone’s appeal is now before the Second Circuit.
PunchUp has contacted the Department of Justice and the FBI for comment.
Okay, let's give this a stab.
The issue is, IMHO, linchpinned on two linked and somewhat divergent concepts or points.
1) Can "One Taste" be considered a "religion" using the commonly accepted definition of what a "religion" is? If it can't, then "religious freedom" is not an issue, at least in this case.
2) Could any of the methodologies used, even if under the banner of "religious freedom", be considered "cultish" or even (mentally) torturous? To say that being mentally tortured in any way is less harmful, or non-harmful, is perhaps "precise", in that the methods used for application are different. But it is only a question of "degree". If you get hit by a bicyclist, it hurts less than being hit with a garbage hauler. Yet both objects still hit you.