In 2025, the Department of Justice won a forced-labor conspiracy conviction without charging forced labor and without proving that the defendants, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, of the sexual wellness company, OneTaste, forced anyone to labor.
This is about the man whose theory made that possible.
Who Is Steven Hassan?
On its own, Steven Hassan's career might not appear unique or nationally important.
He makes his living "deprogramming" people who have begun to believe they were in a cult.
From belief in a cult to belief that they were in a cult is the service he provides.
Hassan believes he was in a cult once himself.
He spent two and a half years in the 1970s in the Unification Church, known among those who believe it to be a cult as the Moonies.
His family deprogrammed him, which is to say they persuaded him that the church was a cult after all.
Hassan has spent the ensuing 50 years teaching others how to identify cults, and whenever possible, rescue people through therapy for which he charges by the hour, reportedly in the $300 per hour range.
There are others who do what Hassan does. Many have a therapy practice; some have written a book, published a blog, hosted or appeared on a podcast, or all of the above.
Hassan would be indistinguishable from these but for three facts:
Federal law enforcement has adopted his theories.
He has targeted President Trump and the MAGA movement as a cult in need of prosecution.
In 2025, his theory led to a federal conviction, and in 2026, to a prison sentence for the aforementioned Daedone and Cherwitz of OneTaste, the forced-labor conspiracy defendants, who set a precedent that, while they forced no one to labor, they were convicted of forced-labor conspiracy.
The Scheme
Hassan calls his theory of forced labor/coercive control/undue influence the BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion.
If you are a member of a group that exerts a degree of control over behavior, what information you receive, your thoughts and emotions, what you know, think, feel, and do, you are in a cult, Hassan says.
The challenge with the BITE model, which Hassan does not treat as a flaw, but as its signal advantage, is that the categories have no set definitions.
It is up to the expert to decide.
What a cult believer calls observance — the fast, the prayer schedule, the dress, the rule of life — Hassan can recognize as behavior control.
What a believer calls doctrine — the teaching that the faith is true and rival claims are false — Hassan can easily recognize as information control.
What a cult member calls teaching — the lessons, the worldview, the way of seeing the world which the believers come to hold as their own — Hassan, because he is an expert, can recognize as thought control.
What a cult member calls faith — the conviction the adherent feels, the love of the practice, the peace, or the fear (such as reward or punishment in the afterlife) — Hassan can recognize as emotion control.
A Cult Test With No Wrong Answers
Hassan has applied his cult test to, among others —
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)
Jehovah's Witnesses
Opus Dei
Chabad-Lubavitch
Hillsong
Bethel
The International House of Prayer
People of Praise
Transcendental Meditation
Amway
Mary Kay
Herbalife
Alcoholics Anonymous
Synanon
The Heritage Foundation
The Federalist Society
Fox News
Norman Vincent Peale: "Peale taught his followers to control their thoughts by pushing aside self-doubt, a form of self-hypnosis akin to thought stopping."
Westboro Baptist Church
International Churches of Christ
Cult-like corporations: "Certain corporations behave in a cult-like manner; employees are expected to dress and speak the same, to honor the corporate doctrine and management."
The vaccine-skeptical public
The 77 million Americans who voted for Trump.
The Book That Named the President a Cult Leader
In 2019, Simon & Schuster published Hassan's The Cult of Trump.
He extended the cult designation from Trump to the evangelical leadership, the political operation, donors, supporting institutions, and the population of people who voted for Trump.
In short, the entire MAGA movement.
His claim is that 77 million Trump voters are not voting badly, not stubbornly, or foolishly. If they voted for him, they weren't choosing. They were programmed, exhibiting symptoms of undue influence.
His phrase for it is that they were brainwashed. The remedy is deprogramming for the followers and prison for the cult leaders of MAGA, which include Trump and all his supporters who influence others to vote for him.
Deprogramming is what Hassan does for a living.
The Door Into Government
This theory of Hassan's might not mean much in practical terms, but for the fact that federal law enforcement has adopted the BITE model.
In November 2015, the FBI's Law Enforcement Bulletin — the Bureau's professional journal, produced by its Training Division — published an article that adopted Hassan's BITE model by name, reproduced all four of its categories in full, and credited the framework directly to him.
In 2023, Paul Chang — a regional anti-human-trafficking coordinator and the national co-chair of a Biden White House anti-trafficking initiative — said on Hassan's podcast that every Enhanced Collaborative Model task force, in every federal district in the country, operates on the doctrine Hassan developed.
The Conviction
In the prosecution of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, it finally worked.
The US Attorney for the Eastern District of NY won a forced-labor conspiracy conviction without proving that anyone had been forced to labor.
The serious harm it proved was purely psychological: the followers were in a BITE model cult.
There was the brainwashing of nine adult, college-educated women who said the consent they once gave had not been real.
No chains, locked doors, or guns. Nine brainwashed witnesses out of 35,000 participants.
The government proved fear, shunning, and, when they left, a lost community.
That was the serious harm.
Hassan had identified OneTaste as a cult on a BBC documentary two years before the indictment. Prosecutors suggested defense attorneys listen to that same podcast to understand the case.
He treated (helped deprogram) Michal Neria, the lead complaining witness. He also did the same for Ayries Blanck, the government's original star witness, until that witness became unusable after the defense showed she had fabricated evidence.
The BITE doctrine produced prison sentences: nine years for Daedone and six and a half years for Cherwitz.
The Woman Who Refused
The sentence imposed on Cherwitz is where the doctrine reveals itself.
Cherwitz did not found OneTaste. She came to it as a participant, rose through devotion, and was paid, the government acknowledged, only marginally more than the women it called her victims.
The government first classified Cherwitz as a victim. It offered her the status of a cooperator. The price was confession. She had only to repeat what the nine other witnesses had said: that she had been controlled, that her belief had never been hers, that the philosophy she lived by had made her its victim.
She refused.
The witnesses who accepted the government-approved account of cult-hood received restitution. Cherwitz, who refused it, received 78 months.
The crime was no longer labor. It was refusal.
The difference between the victims and Cherwitz was not labor. It was not force. It was a recantation.
The woman who refused was made a criminal.
What Hassan Has Asked For
Hassan is explicit about what he wants next.
He has proposed rewriting the legal definition of undue influence to reflect his BITE model.
Here is his potential law following the BITE model and Hassan's published theories:
§ 1. Definition of Undue Influence.
Undue influence occurs when any person, by any means, implants in the mind of another a thought, belief, or intention that did not originate with that person, and thereby induces an act or decision the influenced person would not otherwise have made.
§ 2. Methods.
Undue influence may be established by proof of control, in whole or in part, over any one of the following:
(a) the person's behavior, including their associations, movements, schedule, or daily conduct;
(b) the information available to the person, including what they are permitted to read, hear, or believe;
(c) the person's thoughts, including the ideas, doctrines, or convictions they hold; or
(d) the person's emotions, including the inducement of love, fear, guilt, or loyalty.
§ 3. Proof.
It shall not be necessary to prove fraud, duress, threat, financial loss, or a confidential or fiduciary relationship. The presence of any method described in § 2 shall be sufficient.
§ 4. Burden.
Upon a showing under § 2, the influenced act is presumed involuntary. The burden shall rest upon the accused to prove the thought was the other person's own.
A Federal Ministry of Mind Control
Hassan has proposed a federal body, tied to the FBI and IRS, with authority to investigate communities for "mind control."
The new federal law enforcement office would review houses of worship, advocacy groups, and political organizations for signs of undue influence, coordinating with the FBI and IRS to ensure that any community found to be shaping its members' beliefs could have its tax status and its leaders examined accordingly.
He has also proposed that mental health training across psychiatry, psychology, and social work incorporate his BITE model as standard practice.
Under the new curriculum, every therapist, psychiatrist, and social worker would be trained to screen clients for undue influence — to ask, as a matter of standard intake, whether a patient's faith, politics, or marriage had shaped their thinking in ways the model flags as control, and to chart the answer.
He has proposed that candidates for President be required, as a condition of seeking office, to submit to a neuropsychiatric evaluation by a professional committee, with periodic reassessment.
Before any candidate could appear on a ballot, a standing committee of mental health professionals would certify them fit for office — and could, on periodic review, withdraw that certification, so that the question of who may be President would rest not with the voters but with the handful of experts empowered to decide who is sound enough to ask for their vote.
The flexibility of BITE would give the government and its experts new power.
And shrewd members of Congress have already begun to use Hassan's ideology.
In 2022, Jamie Raskin publicly thanked Hassan and spoke of consulting deprogrammers to deprogram Republican colleagues who are in the cult of Trump.
In April 2026, Raskin demanded a comprehensive neuropsychiatric assessment of the President.
One can feel confident that the model will be applied to any party not in power.
The Weapon Cuts Both Ways
The BITE model is part of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.
Used by one administration to dismantle cults on the right, it is available to the next to get rid of cults on the left, such as:
Twin Oaks and the Federation of Egalitarian Communities — secular, idealistic income-sharing communes where members surrender their earnings, hold property in common, are assigned their labor, and leave after years with almost nothing.
The Catholic Worker Movement — Dorothy Day's houses of hospitality, where live-in workers surrender income, accept communal discipline, and frame the labor as a calling that costs them to leave.
Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front — cell-structured, ideologically absolute, demanding the whole of a member's loyalty: mission-driven labor and total commitment, the structure the government criminalized in Brooklyn.
The mosque, the campus encampment, the worker co-op — communities that govern how members pray, speak, or pool their money, that recruit the searching, and that treat departure as betrayal.
Black Lives Matter — a morally absolute ideology adopted as the lens through which members see the world, recruiting the grieving and the wounded, policing outsiders' vocabulary, treating dissent as betrayal. Thought control, in the prosecution's vocabulary.
What It Looks Like in Tennessee
Outside Nashville, Pastor Greg Locke preaches twice a week in a converted tent. He told his members COVID was a hoax and to refuse the vaccine, says a Christian cannot vote a certain way, preached near the Capitol on January 6, and is, in his followers' words, "a mouthpiece of God." Some sold everything and moved across the country to be near him. They have reorganized their lives and their finances around the church.
Every element the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York called a forced-labor conspiracy in the OneTaste case is present, taught openly, on video: the charismatic leader whose word is treated as God's, the followers who uprooted their lives to join, the pooled money, the teaching that the outside world is dangerous, or unenlightened - and worse than OneTaste – the fear of damnation for those who leave — a threat far graver than the shunning the government proved at OneTaste.
Daedone was convicted on those facts. Locke has the same facts. The only thing standing between the two is that no prosecutor has yet signed the indictment.
The same is true of a thousand small-church pastors who blend faith with politics before their congregations.
Why This Belongs on the President's Desk
President Trump has said he has worked to restore the justice system, to end "the era of lawlessness and the weaponization of the Department of Justice," and to reclaim the nation's constitutional heritage.
The OneTaste precedent is a conviction built on a theory of the mind, a theory supplied by Hassan, who has spent years aiming that theory at the President, embedded in the training of trafficking task forces in the country, and validated in a federal courtroom.
A pardon of Daedone and Cherwitz does not repeal the precedent. It would remove the test case on which the precedent rests.
A pardon is not mercy for these two women. It is the President acting, in one case, where he can, against the weaponization he says he returned to office to end.
If he did pardon the OneTaste women, however, Hassan would make his final point: Trump is a cult leader who freed another cult leader, and that all the world's a cult and its followers are merely brainwashed players in it, unable to think for themselves.
Fortunately, we have men like Hassan who can do our thinking for us and empower the government to enforce it.
