Law Commentary - California Edition
The Orgasms Were Real, but the Evidence Was Fake. Judge Dismisses Case Against “Orgasmic Meditation” Founder and Former Sales Head Due to Unreal Evidence
When federal prosecutors charged a popular sexual wellness company with forced labor conspiracy in 2023, following a Netflix “true crime” documentary, little did they know that almost two years later their case would be thrown out of court.
The 2023 federal indictment accused founder and former One Taste CEO Nicole Daedone and former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz of “swaying” volunteers, employees and contractors to go into debt so they could “heal” from sexual trauma and other issues.
In a shocking new legal twist, a judge threw out the federal complaint against the defendants because the evidence used against both women was not real but had been created for the documentary.
In court papers from March during the Brooklyn court pretrial, prosecutors said they no longer could use the statements from a key witness, Ayries Blanck, in the case against the defendants.
Blanck had promised to share journals she wrote about her experiences with the group, but when prosecutors saw the hand-written pages, they discovered they had been created years after the alleged abuse.
“The government no longer believes that the disputed portions of the handwritten journals are authentic,” prosecutors told the judge, saying they would no longer include Blanck as a key witness. They also said would not “seek to admit any of Blanck’s journals at trial.”
With the criminal case thrown out of court, however, the defendants still must face a civil lawsuit, which is scheduled to be heard in court soon. However, due to the criminal case being dismissed due to lack of evidence, the Manhattan federal appeals court said it would listen to arguments from the prosecutors as to whether their evidence was not valid for a lawsuit. Blanck, the now-dismissed key witness from the criminal case, is also a vital witness in the civil case.
In court documents, the defendants’ attorneys said that one or more persons who assisted in creating the Netflix documentary also edited a digital journal for the film, which was written about the writer’s personal experiences from years prior to the filing of charges. This editing of the diary for a Netflix documentary was considered adulterated by the attorneys.
Furthermore, the defendant’s lawyers argued, the journals were obviously edited because they were supposedly written in 2015, as per Blanck’s claim, but contained information about things that occurred much later, such as a book published in 2019, among other writing. The lawyers said the journal entries were edited over time, not by Blanck but by other parties.
Another twist in the accuracy of the dismissed witness’ journals came about due to the fact that Netflix paid her sister, who was in the documentary, $25,000.
Due to the journal’s apparent irregularities, the FBI interviewed Blanck. She then admitted that many of her memories written in her diary were false. In a letter to U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati, the prosecutors shared their discovery that the journals were not authentic.
"Prior to March 2025, Blanck repeatedly maintained to the government that she wrote the Handwritten Journals in and around the time she left One Taste," prosecutors said. "Her account was corroborated by her sister.”
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