Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz face sentencing on March 30 on a single count of forced labor conspiracy in a Brooklyn federal courthouse before US District Judge Diane Gujarati. The prosecution is asking for 20 and 14 years, respectively.

The federal government is declaring that certain knowledge — specifically, Nicole Daedone’s teaching that women can access expanded states of consciousness through structured sensory practice — is forbidden fruit.

The DOJ didn’t merely allege fraud or financial crimes in the traditional sense. They built a case around “coercive control,” a theory that says the teaching itself is the crime. Not what Daedone took from people. What she gave them.

The serpent doesn’t force Eve to eat. He asks a question: “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” 

He introduces doubt about the prohibition itself. 

That’s what Daedone did — she questioned whether female sexuality had to remain in the darkness, unnamed and unexamined. 

The 15-minute container, the nest, the specific stroke protocol that Daedone developed as a mindfulness practice which she called Orgasmic Meditation (OM) — these aren’t restrictions. They create a space where something can happen that couldn’t happen in ordinary life. 

Every spiritual tradition understands this. The monastery wall, the meditation cushion, the Sabbath itself.

The prosecution reframes the container as a cage. 

The Tree of Knowledge

OM’s core claim is that directed attention to sensation produces not just awareness but goodness. That the body, attended to with precision, reveals something worth knowing. 

The prosecution’s implicit counter-theology is that this particular form of knowing is dangerous, that some trees in the garden must remain untouched.

The government’s theory of coercive control expands with each iteration — first it was about financial exploitation, then it became about the philosophy itself, then about the lifestyle, until the mere act of teaching OM to consenting adults became criminal conduct.

The Daedone prosecution isn’t really about fraud. It’s about a justice system that can’t tolerate a woman teaching other women that their bodies contain knowledge the state didn’t authorize.

The Government’s Theory of “Coercive Control”

The prosecution’s core anxiety is that Daedone built a community of people who shared a common language about female desire and embodied consciousness. A language that the institutional world didn’t authorize. The “coercive control” framework isn’t really about coercion. It’s about the danger of shared vocabulary. When people have a common tongue for experiences the state can’t regulate, the state seeks to scatter them. 

Every cooperating witness who recants their prior positive experience with OM, every former practitioner who now describes in prosecutorial language what they once described in the language of awakening — that’s the confounding of tongues.

The federal sentencing guidelines operate on an inverted logic. The prosecution doesn’t ask how many were harmed. It asks how many were exposed to the teaching. Loss calculations in the OneTaste case aren’t based on people who complained. They’re based on the total universe of people who participated in courses, attended workshops, engaged with the organization — the overwhelming majority of whom never reported harm and many of whom have publicly stated the practice changed their lives for the better. 

Former OneTaste participants who still speak positively about their experience are treated with the same suspicion. 

A Practice of Liberation

The entire OM practice is structured as a kind of wrestling. Two people in a container, negotiating sensation, staying with discomfort until something shifts. You don’t get one without the other. Daedone never promised comfort. She promised encounter — and encounter always leaves a mark. 

Jacob walks away limping. He also walks away transformed.

The prosecution reads the limp and calls it injury. It ignores the new name.

Daedone saw something about female sexuality that the culture wasn’t ready for. Not a fantasy — an observed reality, documented through thousands of hours of practice. The response wasn’t engagement. It was the pit.

The FBI’s investigation of OneTaste relied heavily on disgruntled former participants and a Netflix documentary crew that was embedded with a federal agent — a collaboration between entertainment and prosecution that produced evidence shaped by narrative rather than fact. 

The “garment” in Daedone’s case is the practice itself: OM existed, people participated, and the government holds up the fact of participation as proof of crime. Just as Potiphar’s wife held up Joseph’s cloak as proof of assault.

How many people benefited from Daedone’s teaching, rose to positions of influence and wellbeing through what they learned, and then forgot her when she needed them? The butler’s amnesia is the silence of every OM practitioner who quietly moved on with the expanded life the practice gave them while Daedone faced federal charges.

That’s the clemency argument in a single verse. Whatever the government intended by this prosecution, whatever narrative it constructed, the ultimate question is: Was life preserved or destroyed? Did the teaching save people or harm them?

Thousands of practitioners declared that it gave them access to their own bodies, their own desire, their own authority.

Stronger than the Stigma

The specifications matter: the 15-minute container, the nest, the stroke protocol, the communication framework. These aren’t arbitrary. They’re the three hundred cubits by fifty cubits by thirty cubits. They’re the engineering that allows something living to survive the flood of cultural shame around female sexuality.

The DOJ destroys indiscriminately. 

The covenant after this prosecution — if clemency is granted — should be equally clear: the government will not again criminalize the teaching of embodied practices to consenting adults.

For more on this series…

The Clitoris is Legal, Teaching About it Isn’t: Unravelling the Daedone and Cherwitz Case

Excluded From Trial: Nine Studies That Show Orgasmic Meditation Is Meditation, Not Sex

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

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