MEL: The Downfall of OneTaste, Silicon Valley's Favorite Orgasm Cult

[China]

THE DOWNFALL OF ONETASTE, SILICON VALLEY’S FAVORITE ORGASM CULT

 

Seated inside a large hall in Sonoma, California, a packed crowd of people watched as a 22-year-old woman named Diana reclined on a gynecological exam table with her dress pulled up, spreading her legs to accept the hand of a middle-aged man, eager for him to bring her to an orgasmic climax. They’d been at it for three hours, and yet, she still couldn’t stop cumming. 

 

He told the audience what he was doing, and they really got it.”

 

Better yet, they could learn how to bring such pleasure themselves as Baranco was selling classes. “When that demonstration was over, people RAN to every available space on the property so that they could get off too — get the women off!” Diana claimed.

 

That “coming show,” which took place way back in 1976, was billed as the first public demonstration of a woman orgasming. It served its ulterior purpose well: Word quickly spread, and Baranco’s classes became a lucrative business. 

 

Baranco, a mercurial figure, was central to the first iteration of Bay Area sex cults in the 1960s and 1970s. He ran a series of communes called More House, or alternately, Morehouse communes. He was a master marketer and con man extraordinaire, reinventing himself as a love guru just in time for the Free Love generation. But to Baranco, a clitoris was mostly a button for profit. This led to foreseeable outcomes — namely, sexual abuse and allegations of prostitution, which toppled the movement by the early 1980s. 

 

Cultural memories, however, are short. Which is how Nicole Daedone, a former student of Baranco’s, was able to reboot and rebrand his playbook as “Orgasmic Meditation” workshops in 2004, using the exact same shtick, and no one batted an eye. (Imagine a quasi-spiritual practice based on rubbing a clitoris — that’s OMing.) 

 

Before she’d started OneTaste, Daedone had tried her hand at a few earlier hustles, traveling in proto-cult spaces like Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and co-founding an art gallery. By 2004, though, Daedone started selling something far more lucrative — sexual empowerment to women. Her major financial partner was Reese Jones, a tech-bro-cum-internet-millionaire. The Times originally listed him as her boyfriend. 

 

The problem was, after the Times story first introduced OneTaste and OM to the mainstream, many women and men came forward to recount the abuse they’d witnessed or suffered from Daedone’s brainchild. 

 

Yet, in 2013, OneTaste received a second wave of breathless, toothless press coverage. By then, it seemed like every media outlet felt compelled to send a reporter to go check out OMing for themselves and then publish a highly-repetitive gonzo story of what it was like.

 

In October, Gawker famously gave the world its unvarnished assessment of the OneTaste experience in the aptly-titled piece “My Life with the Thrill-Clit Cult,” in which writer Nitasha Tiku recounted how Daedone boasted to the audience of a three-day conference that OMing was now a technorati-approved pursuit. “

 

In under a decade, Daedone had reached rarified air. She was now Silicon Valley-approved, throwing the media into yet another tizzy. The Atlantic covered OneTaste as “The Pro-Orgasm Movement,” Refinery29 offered its readers “The Strange Truth About Orgasmic Meditation” and Salon and Elle promised (respectively), “‘Behold the Glory of the P*ssy!’: My Orgasmic Meditation Awakening” and “Orgasmic Meditation Finally Made Sex Fun for Me.”

 

That’s when Bloomberg did an expose entitled “The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company.” After interviewing 16 former members and commune staff, reporter Ellen Huet pieced together an image of what was really going on inside OneTaste: “Many of the former staffers and community members say OneTaste resembled a kind of prostitution ring — one that exploited trauma victims and others searching for healing. 

 

Five months later, in November 2018, the FBI launched a criminal investigation into Daedone and OneTaste. At the time, it was estimated that 10,000 people were regularly taking OneTaste classes. Today, obviously, it’s a much different story. OneTaste’s web presence has been deactivated, and all of the former web addresses are listed as available for purchase. Similarly, over on YouTube, OneTaste hasn’t uploaded a new video in the last two years. 

 

Charges still haven’t been filed, but the investigation remains active.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

FBI ARRESTS KEY MEMBER OF ‘ORGASMIC MEDITATION’ COMPANY IN MENDOCINO COUNTY THIS MORNING

 

FBI special agents arrested a leader of OneTaste, a “sexual wellness” company specializing in a practice it calls “Orgasmic Meditation,” in Mendocino County early Tuesday morning. Rachel Cherwitz, the former Head of Sales, was taken into custody without incident, on charges of forced labor conspiracy. Her co-defendant, founder Nicole Daedone, remains at large. The U.S. District Attorney’s Office would not comment on whether or not Daedone is considered to be a federal fugitive at this time.

 

Cherwitz appeared in court in San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon and will be indicted in the Eastern District of New York at a future date.

 

OneTaste claimed to offer sexual and spiritual wellness through a practice called “Orgasmic Meditation” which consisted of stroking a woman’s genitals for fifteen minutes. The organization offered expensive courses in the practice, claiming it could heal past traumas.

 

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace announced the charges against Cherwitz and Daedone saying, “Under the guise of empowerment and wellness, the defendants are alleged to have sought complete control over their employees’ lives, including by driving them into debt and directing them to perform sexual acts while also withholding wages.”

 

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[PleaseBlitz]

The most amazing part about this thread is the January post got zero replies.  

[The Evil Genius]

18 minutes ago, PleaseBlitz said:

The most amazing part about this thread is the January post got zero replies.  

 

No one could find it. 

Edited June 7, 2023 by The Evil Genius

[Forehead]

How was a company called OneTaste possibly about manual stimulation and not oral sex?  That should have been obvious.

[CousinsCowgirl84]

They’ve been curing hysteria for years….