'Gwyneth Paltrow's sex guru' facing 20 years in jail over claims her $12m orgasmic meditation firm was an abusive sex cult that 'recruited vulnerable women to perform sex acts'

Once hailed as 'Gwyneth Paltrow's sex guru', Nicole Daedone was the glamorous, blonde wellness queen who claimed that the female orgasm could heal trauma, spark creativity and promote women's empowerment.

In 2018, actress and multimillionaire businesswoman Paltrow granted Daedone, a fellow Californian with a yen for exotic sex therapies, the honour of a starry interview to discuss her business, OneTaste, on Paltrow's Goop podcast.

The Avengers star gushed over Daedone, describing her as 'very magnetic' and revealing she too was a fan of the 15-minute group masturbation sessions Daedone had developed.

'She is a long-time proponent and teacher of a practice called 'orgasmic meditation', which has been called the yoga of sex', Paltrow told her listeners.

And so 'orgasmic meditation' was enthusiastically added to the Goop hall of fame, alongside 'vaginal steamers' and jade vaginal eggs.

Paltrow also sang the praises of Daedone's bestselling book, Slow Sex, saying: 'I often recommend [it] to women who are looking for more desire in their relationships.'

But this week, Paltrow's description of Daedone as 'very magnetic' took on a sinister undertone as Daedone and a fellow OneTaste executive found themselves on trial in a Brooklyn courtroom, accused of turning their self-help empire into a 'sex cult' that preyed on vulnerable women.

At its peak, OneTaste was making $12million a year and operating in nine cities, including London and New York, with 150 staff.

The company claims 35,000 people attended OneTaste's introductory courses and events. Its orgasmic meditation – or OM – classes promised to help clients achieve 'higher meaning', 'deeper universal connection' and heal their 'trauma'.

Daedone is on record as having claimed that practitioners could enjoy orgasms lasting three hours.

However, insiders have claimed for years that OneTaste had a dark, exploitative side.

Both men and women paid to attend the classes, the most devoted practitioners often joining as staff to help offset the high cost of the sessions.

Ex-members claimed OneTaste not only targeted attractive young women, ordering them to wear lipstick, heels and short black skirts, but also rich, lonely men – often working in the technology industry – who would empty their wallets for the chance to do OM.

And this week, the court heard how 58-year-old Daedone, OneTaste's former co-founder and chief executive, and her ex-head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, 45, demanded 'absolute commitment' from members and reduced their devoted followers to 'shells of their former selves'.

'They recruited vulnerable women to perform sexual labour for their benefit. What did they gain? Power, prestige and money,' said federal prosecutor Sean Fern.

The jury heard how their 'abusive and manipulative tactics' included keeping victims under surveillance in communal homes, collecting sensitive information about them and withholding wages.

The pair have denied a charge of forced labour conspiracy which could earn each of them a 20-year prison sentence.

Cherwitz's lawyer Mike Robotti conceded with commendable understatement that orgasmic meditation 'might not be everyone's cup of tea', but asked jurors not to let it become a 'distraction' from the charges in the case.

That might be a challenge. Once described, OM is not easily forgotten. An OM class involves a partner – usually male and often a stranger – using a latex-gloved fingertip smeared with lubricant to spend 15 minutes doing what court papers describe as 'the methodical stroking of a woman's genitals'. The partner is fully clothed, while the woman is naked from the waist down.

At OneTaste, OM sessions were communal, sometimes with more than 30 pairs of 'strokers' and 'strokees' sharing a single room.

Courses at OneTaste – which Daedone said she named after a Buddhist mantra that 'just as the ocean has one taste of salt, so does the taste of liberation' – weren't cheap: beginner classes for both men and women cost about $150, the coaching programme was $12,000, and full annual membership cost $60,000. A one-week 'one-on-one' course with Daedone was $36,000.

Often these same customers were later recruited to bring in new clients.

They were encouraged to leave their jobs, invest in coaching programmes and move into 'OM houses' in cities around the US and internationally, where they spent their days refining their technique – with up to four OM sessions a day – and touting for business.

Out of the more than 35,000 who attended in-person events at OneTaste over the years, 400 people chose to live in OneTaste houses.

Jennifer Bonjean, Daedone's lawyer, told the court her client never forced anyone to do anything and said her accusers are simply embarrassed about what they did when they were younger.

'Now they're married and have kids and don't want their neighbours to know what they were doing in their 20s,' said Bonjean, who is also currently representing disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein in a separate case.

'At the time, they were having a blast. Grown people made grown decisions they don't want to stand by.'

She defended Daedone, an ultra-charismatic figure with a penetrating gaze, as a devout Buddhist, and called orgasmic meditation – a phrase her client trademarked under US law – as a 'scientific-based practice with proven benefits', insisting it was merely 'yoga with a twist'.

However, the biggest 'twist', according to prosecutors, was that the women who paid for OneTaste's expensive classes in order to find sensual and spiritual enlightenment instead ended up being thrust into sexual servitude and heavy debts.

Those who believed Daedone's claim that OM could treat anxiety and 'trauma' say they ended up being even more traumatised by the 'cult'.

An alleged victim who was named in court only as 'Becky' told the jury of six men and six women she was 23 when she was recruited as a OneTaste worker in New York, earning just $2,000 a month, for which she was expected to engage in OM with 'anybody off the street'.

She told the court: 'I had to be turned on at all times. It was really frowned upon to say you weren't in the mood.'

She added: 'I was really, really lonely and I really wanted community. I was sexually confused enough that this fitted all the pieces for me.'

Becky lived in a OneTaste house in Manhattan's Harlem, where she said she was never left alone, had to share a bed and woke up at 7am each day for their first OM session.

She then spent most of the day trying to find potential clients, often working until midnight.

'The expectation was to talk to anyone you see and kind of proselytise the company,' Becky said.

Becky left the group after three years, penniless and traumatised, she said. She and other victims 'worked because they were told doing things they found sexually disgusting was the path to freedom', said prosecutor Sean Fern.

Daedone allegedly used aggressive sales techniques and psychological manipulation to pressure members – both men and women – into joining OneTaste.

And when the cash dried up, OneTaste's victims say they were asked to work for free or pay for classes by providing other services, often sexual, that some have insisted essentially amounted to prostitution.

While men who attended OneTaste classes as 'strokers' were told they would benefit by becoming more sensitive to women's sexual needs and potentially be promoted to 'master stroker', their partners had no duty to reciprocate.

However, former members say organisers heavily implied the women having OM would be open to other sexual activity.

Unsurprisingly, the classes proved particularly popular with nerdy but rich Silicon Valley and Wall Street men who had trouble meeting women, especially the pretty ones who filled out OM classes.

Daedone sold her stake in OneTaste in 2017 for $12 million just as the organisation started to face a string of damning media investigations, but she still has followers who consider her a visionary.

A cohort of them have attended her trial, some clutching Buddhist wooden prayer beads and one sitting on the floor of the public gallery in a yoga position.

The towering Daedone arrives at court each day immaculately dressed in tasteful beige and camel outfits. The Sicilian-American, who magnetised Gwynnie and even Khloe Kardashian, has always insisted she intended to empower not harm her followers, and that she's now the victim of media and government prejudice.

She has provided a colourful if occasionally shifting account of the origins of her purported sexual-liberation movement.

An alleged trauma victim herself, she claimed she discovered at 27 that her estranged father was a convicted child molester who used her as 'bait'. She has also said she worked as a stripper and had been threatened with a knife at her throat.

To cope, she said, she sought spiritual sustenance and at one point had even intended to become a Zen Buddhist nun.

Instead, she says she met a Buddhist monk at a party in 1998 who demonstrated on her a technique she repackaged and trademarked as orgasmic meditation, starting her OneTaste brand in 2004.

Based in San Francisco, the spiritual home of free love and New Age hippy communes, she initially drew little attention.

Within five years, she had 38 followers – men and women mostly in their late 20s and early 30s – living full-time together in a trendy loft 'urban retreat' and even showering communally.

Two or three times a day, they would gather in a velvet-curtained room for group OM 'practice' sessions and pair off with what OneTaste coyly called their 'research partners'.

By the time the group first started making headlines in 2009, former members were already complaining that power had gone to her head and Daedone was telling members who they should pair off with romantically, while relentlessly pushing her members' sexual boundaries.

And yet OneTaste thrived and glossy magazines queued up to cover it. In 2011, with a book about it all under her belt, Daedone was invited to address the global cognoscenti in a TED talk.

Hers was pompously entitled 'Orgasm – The Cure For Hunger In The Western Woman', and she assured her audience it would be 'turned-on women around the world who change the world'. To date, the TED video has been watched at least 2.3 million times.

Insiders claim that Daedone was behaving like a Messiah and trying to turn OM into a religion, with one commenting: 'Orgasm was God. Nicole was Jesus.'

The group held quasi-religious ceremonies such as ones called 'Magic School' at which men and women dressed in white as 'priests and priestesses of orgasm' and conducted a group OM watched by hundreds.

Then, in 2018 – a year after Daedone had stepped down – Bloomberg News published a damning investigation that portrayed OneTaste as a ruthlessly cynical commercial operation in which staff, sometimes working seven days a week, were put under huge pressure to make people sign up for its classes.

Sources said potential customers were referred to as 'marks', criminal slang for easy targets, while sales staff were called 'fluffers', a porn-industry term for the female assistants who get male performers sexually aroused before filming.

Meanwhile, male recruits to OneTaste claimed they were told to have sex with older, wealthier women who had joined the group to be stroked. All in the cause, they said, of increasing profits.

And in case anyone felt unable to comply, the group taught so-called 'aversion practice' to convince members that they'd gain more sexual energy by performing erotic acts with people they found unattractive.

The investigation also uncovered that in 2015 OneTaste had paid a $325,000 out-of-court settlement to a former staff member who said that she'd been ordered to sleep with prospective male customers and suffered sexual assault and harassment on the job.

OneTaste insisted at the time that it had never made any employee engage in a sexual act.

A few months after the Bloomberg report, OneTaste announced it was closing its offices and had stopped offering in-person courses and retreats. It is still going, albeit under new management, but reportedly operates at a loss.

Claims to Bloomberg that OneTaste disciples ended up heavily in debt and in 'sexual servitude' were repeated in subsequent investigations, including a 2022 Netflix documentary.

The FBI began an investigation into Daedone and Cherwitz that resulted in the two women being charged in 2023.

Daedone once told her TED-talk audience that she would always advise sceptics to try OM, insisting: 'The worst thing you have to lose is 15 minutes of your life.' She now faces the prospect of losing rather more than 15 minutes of hers.