Frank Parlato
The United States v. Belief
On March 30, 2026, a federal judge in Brooklyn will sentence two women for teaching a philosophy about the clitoris.
The prosecution wants 20 years for Nicole Daedone and 14 years for Rachel Cherwitz. The charge is conspiracy to commit forced labor. The government did not charge the actual crime. The prosecutors never had to prove that Daedone and Cherwitz forced anyone to do any labor.
Pillar One: Fabricated Evidence
In May 2022, while Netflix was filming a documentary called Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, a former participant, Ayries Blanck, and her sister, Autymn, collaborated with the production team and FBI Special Agent Elliot McGinnis to create a set of personal journals. The journals were written in Google Docs over a two-week period and backdated to 2015 to give the impression they were contemporaneous accounts of abuse.
Netflix paid Autymn Blanck $25,000 to read the journals on camera.
Agent McGinnis, the FBI’s lead on the case, participated in the creation of this evidence.
Five months after the documentary aired, Daedone and Cherwitz were indicted. The fake journals were the centerpiece of the prosecution and their star witness Ayries Blanck.
The journals however were detectable as fraud. They mention a book not published until 2019 — four years after they were supposedly written. The forensic evidence is undisputed. Google docs keeps an edited version history.
Worse luck. The defense caught the fraud. The prosecution, confronted with fraudulent evidence that their own FBI agent help to put as fraud before the court, quietly conceded the journals were fake and that Blanck had lied.
Judge Diane Gujarati did not dismiss the case, hold an evidentiary hearing, refer McGinnis for a criminal investigation or Blanck for lying to federal agents. Judge Gujarati ruled that since the prosecution would not use the journals or Blanck at trial, the matter was resolved.
The prosecutors continued on with their case.
Pillar Two: The Exclusion of Science
Daedone and Cherwtiz claimed that Orgasmic Meditation (OM)— a structured, 15-minute practice involving clitoral stimulation — was not sex but meditative and therapeutic. The prosecution’s case depended on the jury rejecting that claim.
Every witness was questioned about OM. Every closing argument referenced it. Prosecutor Nina Gupta described it to the jury as “the ritualistic massaging or stroking of a woman’s genitals for 15 minutes.”
The defense tried to introduce nine peer-reviewed studies from major universities — Pittsburgh, Thomas Jefferson, UCLA, and MIT. The studies used brain scans, physiological measurements, and clinical trials to examine what happens during OM practice.
The answer was consistent across all nine studies: OM looks like meditation, not sex. Brain scans showed the same patterns found in Tibetan Buddhist monks and Franciscan nuns at prayer. The brain’s sex-reward center didn’t activate. When asked to rate the experience, practitioners scored OM as meditation at 4.69 out of 5 and as sex at 1.42. People with clinical PTSD practiced it safely with zero adverse events. Women who had survived childhood sexual abuse responded better, not worse — the opposite of what one would expect from an exploitative practice. And 62 percent reported mystical experiences, which is on par with a moderate dose of psilocybin in the renowned Johns Hopkins studies.
Study 1: Practitioners Experience OM as Meditation, Not Sex Siegel et al.
Study 2: Practitioners Report Mystical Experiences Comparable to Psilocybin Siegel & Emmert-Aronson
Study 3: OM Can Be Safely Taught to People with PTSD Kriegman et al
Study 4: Long-Term Practitioners Show Different Resting Brain Activity Newberg et al.
Study 5: OM Increases Interpersonal Closeness — Even Between Strangers Prause, Siegle & Coan
Study 6: Trauma Survivors Experienced Enhanced Arousal, Not Harm Prause, Cohen & Siegle
Study 7: Brain Imaging Technology Confirms OM Resembles Meditation, Not Sex Newberg et al.
Study 8: Real-Time Physiology Confirms the Body Responds During OM Siegle & Prause
Study 9: Brain Imaging Shows OM Is Neurologically Distinct from Sex Newberg et al.
Judge Gujarati excluded all nine studies. Her reasoning was that OM was not on trial.
The prosecution characterized OM as sex, as a tool of manipulation, as the mechanism of brainwashing, throughout the trial. The defense was not permitted to introduce a single peer-reviewed finding suggesting that OM might be what Daedone and thousands of practitioners said it was.
The jury heard nine women say they were brainwashed. They never heard the nine studies that showed that the brains of people who practice OM look like the brains of monks, not pornography addicts.
Pillar Three: The Brainwashing Theory
The government’s theory of the case required proving that apparent voluntary, enthusiastic participation was “coercive control.”
No witness testified she was physically restrained, threatened with violence, or had documents confiscated. No one was a minor. No one was undocumented. Every one of the nine witnesses the government called a victim was a college-educated, White woman from a middle-class or affluent background. Every “victim” described entering the practice voluntarily and valuing the practice at the time.
According to the prosecution, Daedone articulated a philosophy about female sexuality and consciousness that White women found compelling. They came to her events, paid for courses, and practiced what she taught.
According to the prosecutors, the nine White women (out of the thousands) were brainwashed.
The evidence of the crime is that people participated. The evidence of coercion is that they liked it. The evidence of harm is that nine women said they were brainwashed. That’s the word they actually used to describe their prior happiness as serious harm.
Rebecca Halpern, a therapist with a master’s degree, testified she was happy. She testified she was brainwashed. When asked how those coexist, she said: “The happiness is part of the brainwashing.”
Christina Berkley testified that her trauma was not from any sexual practice. What was the trauma? “The brainwashing.”
Margaret Pixley, a medical doctor, testified she loved the practice. She never said no. She never said she wanted to stop.
Prosecutor Kayla Bensing explained the theory to the jury: “The Defendants argue that these were grown women, these were adults. And they were educated, they were smart. Members of the Jury, that just shows how powerful the coercion was in this case.”
The smarter the woman, the more brainwashed. The more educated, the more coerced. If the women are unsophisticated, they are easy prey. If they are sophisticated, the manipulation was extraordinary. There is no version of any woman who participates in One Taste (or any belief system) who cannot, under this theory, be retroactively declared a victim.
Pillar Four: Conspiracy Without the Crime
The indictment charged a single count: conspiracy to commit forced labor under 18 U.S.C. § 1594. No separate count of forced labor was charged. This means the government did not need to prove that anyone was actually forced to labor.
The forced labor statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1589, was enacted as part of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. It was written for human trafficking. The paradigm case is a woman held in a brothel, a migrant worker locked in a factory, a domestic servant whose passport has been confiscated. Physical restraint. Threats of violence. Actual bondage.
The maximum sentence — 20 years — was calibrated for those cases.
Now that maximum is being sought against Daedone and Cherwitz for giving lectures, writing books, and teaching a practice involving consensual touch to adults who paid to learn it and could walk out the door at any time.
The charging structure allowed prosecutors to obtain penalties for forced labor without proving it occurred. They needed only to prove that Daedone and Cherwitz agreed to a plan that, if executed, would have resulted in forced labor. The “plan,” as constructed by the prosecution, was the teaching of OM itself — the philosophy, the community, the lifestyle, the practice. The teaching was the conspiracy. Belief was the crime.
Pillar Five: The Constitutional Breach
The OneTaste prosecution raises First Amendment questions that Judge Gujarati has declined to address and that the legal world has barely begun to examine.
Daedone articulated a philosophy about female sexuality, consciousness, and embodied experience. She built a community of people who shared a common language about these subjects.
If the teaching is the conspiracy, the First Amendment is implicated.
The “victims” are nine college-educated adults who participated voluntarily, valued their experience at the time, and, candidly, were coached over multiple government sessions into recharacterizing that experience as coercion. The “harm” is that they were brainwashed.
It was sufficient to sustain a conviction. It is a precedent. Now the government can criminalize a belief system that produces regretful former participants. A church, wellness practice, self-help movement, or philosophical community can be prosecuted through disgruntled alumni on a forced labor conspiracy charge.
What This Case Is About
Take away the clitoris, and what remains is a prosecution of belief.
The government did not prove that anyone was forced to do anything. The government did not prove that the practice was harmful — it excluded all evidence to the contrary. The government did not charge the crime of forced labor. The government proved that Daedone was a teacher who attracted followers (more than 35,000 attended classes or events). Nine of those later had regrets.
The two defendants are sitting in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center awaiting sentencing.
The case is a candidate for presidential clemency because the prosecution represents a prospective category of government overreach that the pardon power was designed to remedy.
That power exists for cases where the legal system has produced a result that, however procedurally defensible, offends the principles of justice. A prosecution built on fabricated evidence, sustained by the exclusion of exculpatory science, predicated on an unfalsifiable theory of the very dubious and unscientific theory of brainwashing, charging a conspiracy without the underlying crime, and seeking trafficking-level sentences for the teaching of a legal practice to consenting adults, is the kind of miscarriage of justice that clemency is meant to correct.
The Clemency Argument
Thousands of practitioners say the practice gave them greater access to their own bodies, desires, and agency over their lives. Nine say they were brainwashed. The government chose to believe the nine and silence the thousands.
On March 30, Judge Gujarati will impose a sentence. It may not be the last word. That belongs to the public, to history, to whatever remains of the American principle that the government does not decide which beliefs are permitted and which are crimes.
This case was really never The United States v. Nicole Daedone.
It was The United States v. Belief.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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