Silicon Valley Sex Farm

OneTaste executives face prison time for a forced labor scheme

“Sex farm woman, I'm gonna mow you down. Sex farm woman. I'll rake and hoe you down.” – Spinal Tap.

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It wasn’t that executives of a freaky Silicon Valley-based “wellness” company coerced employees to have sex with potential clients and investors. It’s that they made them do it for little or no pay.

It’s what Silicon Valley does best: Get wishful people to do something for nothing. It’s called disruption. And OneTaste disrupted the feminist movement, turning vulnerable women into modern sex slaves.

On Monday, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone, 57, and her head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, 44, for conspiracy to commit forced labor. They each face up to 20 years in prison for allegations that include making employees have sex with clients and investors.

They’ve vowed to appeal the verdict, claiming everything that happened was consensual, but for now they’ve been jailed until their September sentencing hearing.

“I had to be turned on at all times,” a OneTaste employee testified during a five-week trial. “It was really frowned upon to say you weren’t in the mood.”

She was expected to service potential customers – or “anybody off the street.”

She took the job to pay for OneTaste’s sexual healing sessions that set her back more than $15,000. Before long, she was living in OneTaste’s communal housing and feeling trapped in a money-sucking sex cult.

OneTaste branded itself as a sexual wellness company. It was essentially a yoga studio where women paid exorbitant fees to get stroked in a group setting. Daedone called it OM or “Orgasmic Meditation.” Men joined to do the stroking with lubed, latex gloves. There were also bizarre rituals and preposterous doctrines – including the idea that disgusting sex acts with strangers were somehow a path to freedom.

OneTaste courses, coaching and events could cost thousands of dollars. Its leaders encouraged devotees to rack up five-figure credit card debts or become underpaid employees just to remain part of the buzzy community.

Prosecutors successfully argued that the company “subjected the victims to economic, sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse, as well as surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation.”

Daedone co-founded this racket in San Francisco in 2004 with Silicon Valley financier Robert Kandell.

She had a gift for driving her sexual and philosophical perversions into the mainstream. She received praise from Gwyneth Paltrow and Khloé Kardashian. A 2009 New York Times story made OneTaste sound like an almost-normal curiosity of the modern age. And in 2014, Inc. put OneTaste on its list of 5,000 fastest-growing companies.

Daedone combined corporate flair with a guru’s charisma. She presented at South By Southwest, she did a Tedx talk titled, “Orgasm, The Cure For Hunger,” and she wrote a book called “Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.

“What the internet did for computers, female orgasm can do for human connection,” she boasted.

There are people everywhere who will buy anything. OneTaste expanded into New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, and London.

The dream began to unravel after a 2018 expose by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and then a 2022 Netflix documentary, “Orgasm Inc.” By then, though, Daedone had cashed out.

“In 2017, Ms. Daedone sold OneTaste – a company built on the backs of coerced and unpaid or substantially underpaid labor – for $12 million,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in its news release.

Daedone had named her company after a Buddhist saying that translates to something like this: “Just as the great ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation.”

The taste of liberation? How about the taste of incarceration?

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Smell the Glove

The 1984 film, “This is Spinal Tap,” famously satirized blatant sexism with songs like “Sex Farm,” “Big Bottom,” and an album cover titled “Smell the Glove.” It never even came close to imagining a digital future rife with free porn and prostitution at the click of a mouse pad. Or strange men with lubed latex gloves facilitating “Orgasmic Meditation.”

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And the moral of this morally bankrupt story?

No HR professional should have to say this but, don’t force employees to have sex with customers and investors – even if you’re running a sex farm.

And don’t force employees to work grueling hours with little to no pay. They will defect and rat out your dubious business practices.