Downloaded from YTS.MX
[calming music playing]
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
The only thing that ever heals, the only thing that ever awakens
is connection.
I do think we have a pleasure deficit disorder in this country.
It's getting faster and faster, our world is getting really hyper-connected,
but human connection is beginning to dissolve.
I do think, though, that there is a cure,
and that cure is
female orgasm.
[crowd cheering]
[upbeat electronic music playing]
Hi. My name is Nicole Daedone,
and I'm the founder of OneTaste Urban Retreat Center.
She really was a celebrity to me. Like, I'd seen her TED Talk 30 times.
[Nicole] I have this vision
that someday you'll see yoga and meditation and orgasm
all on the same bill.
Welcome to the Orgasm Is pop-up shop.
-Is. Orgasm Is. -[crowd chattering]
Yeah.
Hi!
[Nicole] People began to flood into our doors,
person after person after person.
That's one reason why I love living in Silicon Valley.
[Elana Auerbach] Every single option you could imagine available in this city.
It was all about exploring orgasm, exploring pleasure.
To feel that open and that safe with another human being,
every single woman should know she can feel that.
I'm a lot more conscious just of my own power in my sex.
The next thing we knew, we were invited into all of these tech circles.
[Mike Marinacci] She wants to have this elite group
of turned-on, hip men and women.
[Chris Kosley] I was a lonely, nerdy guy.
OneTaste opened up a world I didn't even dream was possible.
That feeling that had driven me my whole life,
seeking or trying to connect in relationship or sex
or any of those things, it was like…
"This is it."
[upbeat electronic music continues]
It went from, like, utopia to a hellhole.
She would just become fascinated with what she could get people to do.
That was kind of, like, her secret thrill.
People were getting hurt.
People were getting hurt badly.
[Ruwan Meepagala] She thought she was
saving the world by taking people's money and messing up people's emotions.
-[Nicole] Welcome to hell. -[people laughing]
When you look at orgasm,
what I found is it has the same fundamental goal as the internet,
and that's human-to-human connection.
[Ellen Huet] OneTaste was a fast-growing startup
in the health and wellness, and sexuality space.
It was started by Nicole Daedone.
Having spent a lot of time thinking about Nicole,
I think of her as a very skilled craftsman.
She seems to know what people will gravitate toward.
People wanted to hear from a woman.
People wanted to see a woman like her at the top of a company like this.
This was really women-led,
and I think that was important based on what OneTaste were teaching.
[crowd laughing]
Orgasmic meditation is a way to connect to yourself, connect to your partner,
to feel more in your body.
I'm a lot more physically close to people and less afraid of more affection,
and it's teaching me to really ask for what I want
and say the vulnerable thing that might be scary to say.
At the fundamental level, we all want the same things.
We want to love, be loved, see, be seen,
know our purpose and feel connection.
-[people chatting] -[Huet] Nicole is very compelling.
She's someone who put others at ease when she was around them…
We love you all. Happy birthday!
…and whose special gift was setting a vision that people were excited about
and were willing to do a lot of things in order to help advance.
Go ahead and take a moment to really feel where you are
and the people that came here tonight,
maybe noticing, "Oh, I want to talk to that person later."
Making contact.
Maybe you're avoiding contact.
Noticing
the patterns.
Women and relationships were always a mystery to me.
[upbeat electronic music playing]
And I didn't understand how to, like, find a girlfriend.
But I wanted to get laid,
and that was, like… [laughs]
this, like, fly in the ointment, you know?
I'd heard about OneTaste,
and then finally, a friend of mine at the time was like,
"Oh, we're gonna go to an in-group at OneTaste."
"Do you wanna come with us?"
The building was at 1074 Folsom.
We walk in, and it's like this big, open space.
Everybody's hanging around, talking, like,
kind of like a cocktail party, almost.
It's just, like, a warm, friendly vibe,
which, to me at the time, is, like, odd, almost suspect.
I was used to all the cocktail parties in the whole tech scene,
where, you know, everybody's aloof.
But this was totally different.
Warm, open, friendly, and the person I'm sitting next to,
there's this kind of presence that you feel,
and then I look at her and I go, "Oh."
'Cause on the website was the picture of the woman that founded OneTaste,
Nicole Daedone,
and I'm like, "Oh, you're Nicole."
And then we just immediately started talking
about the idea of integrating sexuality and spirituality.
I don't think that there's anything…
of a higher order than having my body feel so good
that I emanate a good feeling…
[relaxing ambient music playing]
…and that that good feeling can catch on to you,
and that we can begin to pass it on to each other.
And when we feel good, strangely enough, we act well.
So, there's this way that, it seems to me, all there really is to do is to be happy,
so happy that it overflows and I have enough for you,
and I want to share it in any way I possibly can with you.
What happens in the face of really intense sensations
is that the mind wants to go either toward really good or really bad.
And that's what we tend to do with sexuality.
It's either beautiful and beloved,
or it's this nasty, evil thing.
But we don't know how to move
in the dynamic reality that occurs in between those poles.
Hi.
We are redefining what orgasm is.
Everything you see on the wall is written by somebody who just came in
to write what orgasm is for them.
[Huet] OneTaste would have really low-key events,
and the people who were working radiated this happiness or attractiveness.
They invite you to do yoga with them,
they invite you to help them run another event,
and you get sort of swept up in it.
Orgasm is awesome, orgasm is amazing, orgasm changed my life.
[upbeat electronic music playing]
[Kosley] Not only were all these happy, friendly people I was hanging out with
part of this organization, they all lived together.
Whoo! OneTaste rocks!
Welcome to OneTaste San Francisco.
I'm gonna take you all on a little tour inside the building. Come on in.
This is Alicia, and she does orgasmic haircuts.
Hi, guys. Hi.
My, how she uses her hands.
There's some yoga going on.
Maybe we could take a quick little peek inside.
-[woman] You can't film that. -This is the front of our warehouse.
A little messy right now.
Who left their laundry here?
And this is our center during the day.
[Kosley] I started reading online. There was, like, an online forum
where people would post their comings and goings,
like threesomes, foursomes, n-somes.
So-and-so having a make-out with so-and-so,
and so-and-so watching someone making out.
I was like, "What is going on? Like, this can't be real."
"This has gotta be all made up. I'm sure this isn't actually happening,
and if it's happening, there's no way they're gonna let me in."
But then, sure enough, no, it was the real deal.
One night I was living on a boat by myself,
and the next night I was living in a warehouse with, like, 40 people
and sharing a bed with my "research partner."
I was, like, this nerdy techie guy by day, you know,
fixing people's computer problems,
and then I'd go home at night
and, you know, be in the middle of this craziness.
[all laughing and cheering]
Welcome to OneTaste. [laughing]
[man] Tell us, how do you do it, Alicia? How do you stay so sexy?
I use my Amorepacific Treatment Cleansing Foam.
Is that your secret? I thought it was orgasmic meditation.
-I OM… -[both laughing]
I OM every day and I use Amorepacific.
I OM and I don't eat any sugar.
And I always tell the truth.
[both laughing]
[Nicole] What does it mean to say that I'm a practitioner of orgasmic meditation?
For purposes of simplicity, I'm going to describe it as a man and a woman,
just so that I can say "he" and "she,"
but it can be all different, crazy configurations.
[Auerbach] Nicole is certainly a genius.
Brilliant idea to name it an OMing session.
An orgasmic meditation.
Because there's so many seekers, so many spiritual seekers in the Bay Area
and around the world.
You've turned this sex practice into a spiritual practice.
She will lie down.
There'll be a pillow underneath her head,
a pillow underneath each leg.
She'll butterfly open her legs.
And then he will get his finger onto her upper left-hand quadrant of her clitoris.
The upper left-hand quadrant is a location that they have found, scientifically,
to have a bundle of nerve endings.
Some say 8,000, some say 800,000, I don't know.
But they cannot find any reason for this bundle of nerve endings
other than pleasure.
The thing that will prevent you from knowing you hit the spot
is hoping you're hitting the spot, not sure you hit the spot.
"What's the spot? I'm never gonna find the spot. It's impossible."
That will be the thing that will stop you
from the natural human intuition of feeling this little, slightly electric…
[high-pitched humming]
You'll also know because she'll go… [gulping]
[crowd laughing]
…and she will not, in any way, at all,
move her hips.
She won't be doing weird moans.
She'll just be what we call "nailed."
So, then you will just stroke up, down,
up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.
-What am I gonna say next? -[woman] "Up, down."
There you go. For 15 minutes.
It's so simple.
The man, if he's a good doer, he'll start to say,
"The lips of your pussy are starting to fill with fluid,
and the shades of pink and coral and ruby."
"And starting to build tumescence," is a word that they used a lot,
which was to build the turn-on, to build the energy.
Lighter, faster strokes will bring somebody up,
and then slower, firmer strokes will bring somebody down.
So, you bring them up, and then you plateau them,
then you bring 'em up, and then plateau 'em.
[Nicole] This is how you hit
the other dimension that you sense, in your body,
is possible when you're having sex,
and maybe that you glimpse,
or that moment that you glimpse in orgasm, where there's just nothing…
This is how you get to exist in that place sustainably.
The stroking practice was phenomenal.
And for me as a human being, you know,
putting that much attention on just that one tiny spot on your index finger,
touching the woman's clitoris, just stroking…
And from that one point, it opens up all these channels as a man
that I just never even knew were accessible to me.
-[woman moaning loudly] -The idea that her toe would wiggle
and I could feel a little tingle in my finger,
that was, like, connected.
And it was like, "What? Like, how is that even possible?"
So, these are things that unfolded in the practice.
Of course, when I started, I had no idea what I was doing,
and I was lucky if I could even get on the clitoris.
[Nicole] The guys here said,
"All I want is to have more sex."
-"Please, please." -[crowd laughing]
They didn't realize they're immersed on an island of women who want sex.
And so they were having, like, 20 OMs a day.
Their little fingers were in braces,
and they were, like, locking themselves behind the door.
"Nicole, get me out of here. Please, no more sex!"
[crowd laughing]
[Kosley] I was like a lot of guys I knew in the tech world in San Francisco,
starved for just basic physical affection.
And OneTaste opened up this world of intimacy and connection and sex.
[Huet] What she was selling was an innovation in relating to your sexuality.
The Bay Area is a place where people are gonna be attracted to
and open to that kind of idea,
and where they, frankly, might have a little extra money to buy courses.
[calming music playing]
He said to me, "I'm gonna describe your pussy now. Is that all right with you?"
I remember thinking I've never had somebody do that before.
It felt like somebody touched
the deepest part that existed inside of me.
I felt so exposed and so vulnerable,
and I remember thinking, "Oh my God,
I don't think I've ever been that intimate
with another human being before in my life."
I've talked to many people who said orgasmic meditation changed their life,
that it helped them experience sexual pleasure
that they thought was unreachable for them.
And especially women who said, "I've never had an orgasm before,
and this helped me redefine what sexual pleasure could mean for me."
"You know, I had felt like there was something wrong with me,
and now there was this alternative that was presented to me
that allowed me to embrace my body rather than feel ashamed."
My first introduction to orgasmic meditation
was when I saw a demo of OM.
And I remember that night, it was like…
It was like… [sharp exhalation]
Like, the finger found the spot.
And I was just like, "Oh, I feel like my whole body, just, like, opened up."
That's beautiful.
-[Vang] Thank you. -Yeah.
[OM interviewer] Describe your sex to me.
Timid and shy,
which is frustrating at times, but I feel like I'm in the right place.
Over the course of my four years living and working at OneTaste,
I became more relaxed and social in a way, and I think people could see it.
I became okay with men giving me attention at work,
I became friendlier towards them, and my career took off.
I guess I owe that to learning a lot about men at OneTaste, you know.
They were really, like, encouraging us to see
the soft, sensitive, emotional sides of men.
So this is the building that was what we called the center, 1074.
That's where we would hang out most of the time during the day,
and then upstairs was the yoga studio, but also the main classroom space
where we would hold practice every morning.
And then this is 1060.
This was the warehouse.
I always loved that there was that behind-the-red-door quality.
Yeah, so now it's a BDSM dungeon and a play space.
I remember the first bed I had was on this side, in the corner there,
and then later on I had one here.
I was sleeping in one right here at one point.
I was up in the loft.
Ten, 12, 13, 15…
I mean, at least 15 beds.
And I remember the first night I moved in,
and it was nuts.
Like, there was so much energy in my body.
All the… Yeah, that buzzy, lively energy of… Of people… [chuckles]
…you know, exploring sex.
You know, my mom died when I was 13 years old,
and there's nothing that a 13-year-old kid can possibly be prepared for in any way
to have that experience or lose someone that close to them.
So, I think on some level, I was learning how to connect with women
so that I could be able to let people come and go in my life
and not feel the grippy attachment.
[Ken Blackman] I was a software engineer in Silicon Valley.
I was pretty successful, except in my personal life.
I was just kind of a walking encyclopedia
of all the ways you can be bad with the opposite sex.
I had a few different nicknames at OneTaste.
One of them was Yoda, and I think it's partly because of my stature.
I'm 5'0".
I'm five feet tall.
And so, in a way that was good because
I was a counterexample to all of the men who thought they had to be a certain thing
in order to actually have good relationships with women.
We're in this place now where women are actually self-sufficient.
They don't need men to protect them anymore,
or to care for them anymore, or to, like, provide for them anymore.
So, what can men do, right?
What women want is someone who's actually there meeting them as an equal
and ready to play.
I think OneTaste was a place where
really what we were doing was increasing human connection,
and researching human connection.
Like, what happens when you are vulnerable with someone?
What happens when you are more truthful than you've ever been with someone?
And what happens when you expose your clitoris to someone?
All of this stuff that people avoid because it's so scary
is precisely where people need to go
in order to have true, nourishing human connection.
The best thing you have to lose is that sense of hopelessness
that you will ever… [exhaling deeply] be reached deep inside.
[Ruwan] I probably re-watched that TED Talk, like, 20 or 30 times.
I really felt like something she was saying in that talk touched me.
Like, something about it was more than sexuality,
it's about real connection and realness.
You get to have this most profound and deep experience
with another human being.
There's a certain magic that comes from putting attention on other people,
instead of always focusing on your needs and your wants and your goals, which…
[Ruwan] In OneTaste, through OMing,
we learned how to really put our attention on other people's feelings,
which is basically what empathy is.
But not just, like, "I can feel when you're happy or sad."
But like, I can feel the moment that you think I'm lying,
or I can feel the moment that, like, you pull back.
Precision with empathy.
[serene music playing]
-[woman grunting] -[people laughing]
It felt so good to feel like you're helping them help people.
-[man] Whoo! -[all clapping]
It's like our lives are such a good TV show.
[woman chuckling]
Just to watch it, like, in real, like, real time.
[woman] Hmm.
And I'm so grateful that, like, life is just so interesting.
Mm-hm.
In high school, my anxiety was, like, almost debilitating.
In my early twenties, I learned how to put a mask over it.
I still had anxiety
and I still felt terrible most of the time.
So, to be, you know, in a space where I could really be real,
it was like incredible medicine for me.
We're gonna do this exercise three times.
[Ruwan] My first class, the first half of the day was Nicole speaking to people,
giving impromptu coaching. Giving them "strokes" was the term.
That was life-changing,
because she could cold-read people with such accuracy
that, if you're open to it,
it could maybe change your life, give you a new perspective.
She'd say, like, "What are you here for?"
For some people she'd just say "Thank you'" and move on.
And when it got to me, I was starting to say something mundane like,
"Oh, sex is interesting, so I signed up for this class,"
and I could see she was already turning away from me,
like that wasn't a good answer. So she was gonna shift,
and then I just blurted out, "I want to connect with people for real."
And she turns back to me, and it felt, you know…
It felt really good to get her attention.
Ultimately, what we're aiming for is to create a permanent meeting space.
So, no matter how whackadoodle she gets when she's stuck up here in her ego,
she knows that I can get in there.
And she read me and she said, "I know why you don't connect with people."
"It's like you're trying to stay in this tonal range."
"It's a nice range, but you're denying people the whole spectrum."
"You trying to act like a super cute frat boy,
who says everything's cool all the time,
when really you're a dark, dangerous man."
And no one had ever spoken to me like that before.
I don't know if she was reading something in me for real
or reading something that I wanted to be true,
but it felt like the most resonant thing anyone had said to me.
I did feel like I put up a facade with people to be liked,
but inside I was angry, I was frustrated, you know, I felt dark inside.
It was life-changing, just that beginning before I ever OMed.
I got over a fear of being seen,
a fear of vulnerability that I had my entire life.
[man] Hey, would you like to have an OM?
[woman] Sure.
[man] Okay. I've only done it once or twice though.
[woman] That's okay.
[funky electronic music]
-[man] When's a good time? -[woman] Uh, now if you're not busy.
[man] All right, let's go.
[Kosley] OneTaste, the idea was to get this thing out into the world, right?
Well, it became evident pretty quickly that I could, like,
shoot video and tell a little story,
and, like, boom, we've got, you know, some media.
[upbeat electronic music]
So this is what you need to know to truly learn how to handle a woman's pussy.
That's right. We just said, "Learn to handle a woman's pussy."
[Kosley] Nicole, she wanted to leverage that, you know, right away.
And so that sort of became my raison d'être…
and eventually became my real raison d'etre.
Like, I quit my job so that I could be the video guy for OneTaste.
[Opera music playing]
"Your sex is not a problem."
"We've been living in a paradigm of wrong for too long."
[presenter] And what if you could learn how to become a master of the vagina?
Today, we're going to discuss why everyone is going to be happier
when you learn how to give a woman a 15-minute orgasm.
[Justine Dawson] If you all don't know, Nicole's first book was released
on May 25th, Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm.
And it's come out to some really great reviews and publicity.
Just this weekend, Nicole was at TEDxSF giving a lecture to 750 people…
This was a practice that intrigued reporters whenever they heard about it.
It was like, "Orgasmic meditation? Like, what is that?"
Fifteen minutes?
Fifteen minutes.
That's a lot of orgasm.
-That's a lot of orgasm. Yeah. -[both laughing]
[reporter] The OneTaste Urban Retreat, not your average yoga studio.
The pants come off the women, and soon, the studio erupts in female ecstasy.
[Huet] Nicole knew that it couldn't be so kooky,
you know, and it had to become more about wellness,
more about women feeling empowered.
[reporter speaking Spanish] A visual testimony
on how orgasmic meditation is practiced.
[Huet] They started having offices in Los Angeles, New York, London.
They started expanding internationally…
[presenter] The statistics are terrible.
Thirty percent of women self-report that they don't reach orgasm when they want to.
[Huet] In 2013 and 2014, they held these conferences,
weekend-long conferences with thousands of attendees.
Thank you for coming to OMX!
[Huet] They just started collecting more and more money from sales of courses.
At one point, OneTaste started selling a thing called membership
that was, like, $50,000-plus,
which allowed whoever the customer was to take any class for the whole year.
By the time 2017 came around,
the company had about $12 million in revenue.
That was the year that they were on a list of fast-growing startups by Inc. magazine.
And it was a reflection of Nicole's desire to make OneTaste mainstream.
I'm Gwyneth Paltrow,
and you're listening to the Goop Podcast.
Today's guest is the very magnetic Nicole Daedone. She's a…
[Huet] OneTaste caught the eye of really influential people,
in particular, Gwyneth Paltrow,
who was not only someone who's very influential in Hollywood,
but also someone who's this, like, wellness god.
[Paltrow] Nicole is also the author of Slow Sex,
which is a book I often recommend to women
who are looking for more desire in their relationships.
I really wonder if she was trying to do an L. Ron Hubbard.
"Let's get some famous people in."
That was one of the many brilliant things the founder of Scientology came up with,
was the power of celebrity.
"If we can get movie stars, music stars,
and people like that in our ranks as our public face,
boy, that makes us really attractive to your average Joe or Jill out there."
And he was absolutely right.
And so, I could see her kind of following that lead as well.
[Huet] In late 2017,
I was contacted by a woman who works in communications,
and she said, "Hey, can we talk on the phone?"
"I have a story I think might be interesting to you."
"It's about a fast-growing company run by women in the wellness space,
and it's called OneTaste."
And this was in 2017, and the #MeToo movement was just getting going.
And I remember the way she pitched it was,
"You know, this is a company that's gonna help people
connect with each other in a way that is gonna help mitigate
some pain we've seen come up with the #MeToo movement,
because it helps people be more sensitive to each other's needs."
And I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was considering writing about OneTaste.
And my friend told me, "I know somebody you should talk to."
"They used to be a customer of this company
and they had a pretty bad experience."
So, I ended up having a long conversation with this person for several hours,
hearing their story.
And at the end of that, I thought to myself,
"Wow, this is really different
from any of the reporting that's out there about OneTaste currently,
and this might be a big story."
[Auerbach] When you are looking at Nicole,
you're looking at Nicole and she's looking back,
and she locks into your eyes,
it is like you are being completely seen, like, down to your soul,
including everything, yuck and all, especially yuck.
And while you're being, like, embraced in this gaze,
also being, you know, picked apart like you're under a microscope.
And so she starts playing this game with me, which is pulling desires.
And so she says, "What do you want?"
So, you know, she's fish… She's pulling them out, so I say,
"I want to have more sex, I to have want more orgasm."
"I want to have more fun, I want more community."
So, she's going, "Come on, what else?" This is how this goes.
And so, finally, I get down in my belly, in my womb, to like,
"Wow." And I had never spoken it out loud, and I said,
"I want to have a baby."
And I was like…
And she's like, "Not so fast. What else?"
I was like, "That's it."
"What else?"
And so finally I say, "Okay, I wanna have a demo."
A demo is a demonstration of a woman in orgasm for an hour.
And Nicole goes… And she looks around.
"Did you hear that? We hit bottom."
"That was it. That's the bottom desire."
And so, here I have said, in front of all these people,
that I wanna have a demo,
knowing full well that that was not at the bottom.
That was Nicole's desire.
So, I was just fully giving over to Nicole.
[blowing]
The type of personal reflection that they encouraged us to do
was all about finding your deeper desire.
Yet, they would do this complicated psychological thing
of inserting their desire into you and telling you that it's yours.
[OM interviewer] What's your real big desire?
What's your real big, deep desire? What turns on your pussy?
-I want to coach and teach for OneTaste. -Fuck, that's awesome.
[Auerbach] "This is how Nicole manipulated people."
"She agreed that something was true if it matched what she wanted to hear."
"If you said something she didn't like, she called it a lie,
or, 'That's not the end of your desire.'"
"If you had any doubt, she knew how to increase that doubt
until what she told you was true became what you believed."
So, Bill and I pay Nicole $15,000,
which, according to Nicole, at the time was a very good deal,
and my course begins.
[Huet] A lot of people described to me going to some event
where they were first exposed to OneTaste,
and maybe there was an explicit pitch for the company or taking a class.
I'm gonna have one of our sales associates Lindsay come up and talk to you
about a special offer for all of you for attending tonight,
and also for being on the web.
[Huet] And then the pitch just gets bigger and bigger.
"Why don't you take this week-long, intensive class?"
"Come and learn from Nicole, or come help us teach a class."
"Why don't you come help us with sales?"
We need an initiation ceremony or something edgier.
We need something that they are locked in,
they are in for the full weekend, for the full ride.
[Ruwan] Rachel would be pitching the $15,000 coaching program.
And at the time, I was just barely making ends meet as a freelance writer,
but somehow, it felt so good to meet with her for a sales call anyway.
I told her in the beginning, "I don't have money, I can't buy anything,"
and she just made it feel good to come hang out with her and talk about my life.
And similar to my experience with Nicole,
I felt so good and so seen afterwards.
So when she asked, "Do you want to take the coaching program?"
"We can put you on our payment plan,"
I found myself giving her my credit card before I even realized.
So I gave her, you know, this card.
It was $1,000 a month, which put me into debt immediately.
But then afterwards, I had to justify my purchase, and that put me in deeper.
[Huet] I've had people describe to me this sales tactic of,
we play some sort of communication game like hot seat.
Someone's sitting in the middle, being asked a bunch of questions.
And in the back, OneTaste staff are taking notes.
They're writing down, you know, "This person's recently divorced."
"This man feels unsure how to approach women."
And then they strategize about who's the best OneTaste staffer
to be sent over to that customer to try to win them over.
Imagine you come to me and you say, like, "Well, yeah, I'm interested in OneTaste
because, you know, I've had trouble keeping a long-term relationship,"
and I'd ask you something like,
"Can you imagine if that were true for the rest of your life?"
You make the pain bigger,
so that what you offer as a solution sounds more appealing.
[Auerbach] Nicole's very brilliant at seeing wounding.
And so that's what she hooks into,
and then becomes the salve of that wounding.
So then, you're not feeling the wound when you're in her presence,
but you're reliant upon her to guide you.
[Huet] And then, on top of that, there was this very strong connection between
how well you were doing spiritually in the OneTaste teachings
and your ability to sell courses.
They really saw that as connected, they thought that
a more turned-on woman would sell courses better
because they would be projecting their turn-on to the customers,
where it was almost like channeling this divine force
that would help you in such an earthly pursuit as closing a sale.
"I'm a turned-on pussy,
feeling and savoring every stroke going through me,
sent back out with power and love to shine."
[woman] Yeah!
We were supposed to talk about cock,
like, talk about, like, crass, nitty-gritty sexual stuff,
'cause that's hot, that's what we're trying to do at OneTaste.
You know, it turns people on
when they get that flutter in their stomach
when you just said, like, "cock" or "pussy,"
which actually probably, like, embarrasses people.
I don't know if that's turn-on or discomfort. [laughs]
[Nicole breathing heavily]
[Nicole moaning]
[Kosley] At one point Nicole is, like,
"We're gonna teach this thing called 'orgasmic rebalancing.'"
And she did a demo of what orgasmic rebalancing was.
You know, you can kind of see from the footage,
the closest thing would be like reiki, where you're moving energy in the body.
I'm sure the footage… I haven't looked at it in a while,
but I'm sure it looks crazy.
[woman moaning]
[Marinacci] I was immediately taken by Nicole.
I thought she was just very charismatic,
but at the same time, I could see that she was a hustler.
[Nicole moaning]
[woman grunting]
[interviewer] Tell me a bit about that. Is Nicole Daedone a con artist?
Yeah.
You got to dissect that word though.
It means "confidence."
It's like, yeah, she can say things in such an enthusiastic way
and have so much knowledge around it that she is a fantastic salesman.
[serene music playing]
[video crackling]
[ominous music playing]
[Nicole] I am interested in letting my body be used
in the transmission of the experiences that have been given to me.
There is an experience of beauty
that one feels when something is in harmony.
This was that kind of beauty.
Today, I am immersed in it.
I feel here that there is something inside of me connected to everything.
There's an intimacy that I feel with my partner, the bed, the plants.
The world becomes one giant network of neurons,
and this entity that I call Nicole is part of this.
[ominous music continues]
[inaudible]
[Kosley] If you're looking at that footage from the Stinson demo,
what you're seeing is…
batshit nuts. Come on.
Someone's up there, completely naked, getting her pussy stroked,
there's someone with snakes there and…
Right? Like, all this stuff… Like, what is going on?
And to me… [laughs]
…all that stuff was just there to create a certain kind of aura
for the people in the room, like investors.
I wonder if the New York Times reporter was there.
[Huet] The Stinson Beach demo,
it's very intense. It seems like…
Sometimes she's laughing, sometimes she's crying.
There's a lot of moaning.
You hear people in the audience expressing their sensations.
You know, "It's like a warmth in my belly, or like a tingling in my face."
Rachel Cherwitz shepherds some of the audience members up
to, like, touch Nicole's thigh while the demo is going on.
They describe it like it's meant to be like
you can feel the energy of this experience.
You realize, "Holy shit, I'm actually experiencing things
in tandem with this woman who's getting stroked in front of me."
"Like, I'm actually feeling stuff in my body too."
And even though I think most people would watch that and think, like, this is
bananas… [chuckling] Um…
it looks like the people in the room feel like something really is happening.
I hope you really got a sense tonight
of what it's like to have a woman, a fully-trained woman, get off.
And see the places that she can go.
It's just unmatched.
I mean, there's nobody else that… who I stroke,
that can do what she does,
and I want all of you to be able to do what she does.
[Rachel] I'm in agreement.
-Please. -[Nicole] Me too.
[people chuckling]
[Marinacci] When I took the course,
by that point, we had both female and male OMing,
and my partner was very skittish about doing a male.
So, Nicole stepped in personally,
and I had a meltdown.
I started shivering, crying.
Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
Then she sort of moved me to her breasts and started stroking my head.
And the part of me that wasn't having a meltdown,
the rational little control center there,
was thinking, "Oh yes, Nicole, I know what you're up to."
"You're making yourself my mommy."
"You're holding me gently, tenderly in your lap
next to your breasts, and stroking my head and looking lovingly at me."
"You're trying to imprint me as mom."
It didn't work. [snickers]
I guess if I didn't have that little skeptical bit in my consciousness,
maybe I would've really bonded with her. Maybe I would've gone all in for OneTaste
and been one of her really fervent members and defenders.
But I didn't.
You're all welcome to come get stroked,
and we have darshan from 11:00 to 1:00, Monday through Friday.
and it would be my honor to stroke anybody in this room
and have you have…
If you look at Zen Buddhism or any of these things,
there's levels of being ready for the next piece of truth.
Whenever it became public that there was also a male stroking practice,
all the men were like, "I want that, I need that."
Like, "I empathize with what these women experience about starving."
"I'm starving too, I wanna get stroked as well."
And it would become a quagmire.
So, we kept it private.
As soon as that was on the table, it changed everything.
So we just had it not be, "It is not on the table."
"It is not on the table that there is a male stroking practice."
[interviewer] Someone joked around, "Oh, it's like a spiritual hand job."
And right, so that's the problem, is,
it can devolve into a hand job,
and we wanted it to be something very different than that.
Like, a woman stroking a man's penis brings up a whole bunch of cultural things
that the reverse simply does not.
What it means for a woman to be a sexual service provider
and for a man to be in the position of being
on the receiving end of sexual service providing.
So, like, you couldn't just have them reverse and say, "Now this is OM."
It ends up not being an OM.
We have a female identity in our culture, right?
The female is the victim.
And if I, in any way, don't buy into that,
then there's only two options with victim.
There's villain.
[man] Your practice session where women are being OMed,
orgasmic meditation, by men who are not present,
don't know who they are, aren't clear in their sense of purpose.
A woman cannot open her legs to a man at that level,
and I think it's really important for you or someone who's highly trained
to be here in these practice sessions.
When the man impresses his shape into her, her whole body feels that,
her whole consciousness is ignited,
but I think that you need to tighten up the practice sessions.
What you say, for me,
feels like, uh, protection of women
in such a way that it continues an idea that we need to be protected.
And that idea keeps me not taking responsibility for my sex.
So, I have a story, and I am no victim.
The problem with the victim story,
it takes away your power.
If you wanna know the real way to deflect rape,
it's to turn on 100%.
Because then there's nothing to rape.
Nicole had some very barbaric messages
when she talks about the darkness that she has
or the darkness that she came from.
Trauma is just stuff that's stuck in the body that needs discharge.
I think what you do…
I mean, this is gonna be my suggestion every time, is you OM a lot.
As you OM, whatever is in there begins to come out.
It just progressively and gently opens you and releases,
and then you can just face and be rid of, face and be rid of.
And then pretty soon what you just notice is your capacity to sit in pain decreases,
and you just gotta get that shit out fast, and then you're clear again.
You know, my dad was a child molester,
and he had experiences with young girls and used me as bait.
And so that exact behavior…
Whoa, of me colluding with somebody who would cause harm.
And I got that seed out.
I got free.
I could forgive everybody in the whole experience
'cause I got free of that.
I think I told the story in here when I was a stripper
and they put a knife up to my throat.
[Huet] Nicole's biography is kind of a matter of mystery.
You're never really sure what's actually true.
I think her biography went through a lot of revisions
as the company became more and more prominent.
But she did talk about having worked as a stripper.
[Nicole] Well, I have great cred. I come from darkness.
She was a very highly paid call girl.
She would tell stories about, you know,
getting $700 for a trick, I think is the term.
Then she had a thing where she would play around socially with people,
like, mess with their heads.
Guys, especially.
Friend of mine was like, "Oh, she's a monster."
"She's a monster." Like, "Stay away from her," and stuff.
And that was very intriguing.
We had done some LSD earlier one day, and she proposed to me.
Having your wife be a sex cult leader was like…
It was pretty interesting for me.
It's like, I was totally ready to go buy a Harley and ride up the coast
and be in a sex cult, are you kidding?
And take LSD. I totally wanted to do all that stuff.
Our mission plan, our business plan was this:
800,000 people trying to practice orgasmic meditation,
10,000 people at the level of mastery, or teachers,
and a center in the major cities, all the major cities of the world.
[Huet] Rob Kandell was Nicole's first business partner.
He was a guy who used to work kind of in a tech-finance job,
and met Nicole, and they decided to start OneTaste together.
[Auerbach] When I first met Rob, he was married to Carol.
They were part of Nicole's little cadre of followers.
Nicole wanted Rob for his unending devotion,
and also his bank account.
You know, he was kind of like a nebbish-y guy, looking for approval,
and Nicole had a really good sense of style,
and so she would groom him, so he became hot.
I was stroking a hot young thing on a warm Tuesday morning.
[crowd cheering]
[Marries] She would borrow things from Scientology
or, like, these different cults,
even going back to stuff like Lifespring and est.
The shamans say that a medicine man begins by falling into the power of demons.
Now, in Kabbalah, it's called chesed and gevurah.
In the darshan…
There's a thing called Satguru…
The desire sutras…
It's sacred…
In the more esoteric practices.
I want to go see Amma.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
Kalimah said… Wilke said…
Think about the Buddha.
Malcolm Gladwell.
Rumi. BKS Iyengar. Krishnamurthy.
The Tibetan Buddhist…
Sort of like Mother Teresa.
A universal sanctuary light-bearer.
Shabbat. The love of Jesus.
That is religion, and the dukh has it.
All of this fucking crazy shit about sacred and spiritual and woman.
Usually, if you touch the absolute, you have this realization.
The realization is, "I am God."
One taste, which is a Buddhist concept.
The Buddha said, "Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt,
so also this teaching and discipline has one taste, the taste of liberation."
[calming music playing]
[Nicole] My religion really is orgasm.
By "orgasm," what I mean is, like,
this underlying something that seems to move through the world.
When you walked into OneTaste,
most people have one definition of orgasm, the common definition,
a sexual climactic experience, right? That's orgasm.
And then you go into an OM class, and orgasm kind of changes a little bit.
Like, it's not just the event of climax.
It's like climax is one of the eight stages of orgasm.
And then orgasm starts to mean something more like qi,
energy that flows through the universe and flows through you.
If you follow it, you'll be more in tune with nature, and that was also orgasm.
Most people don't realize their definition of orgasm
is changing week to week or month to month.
And at a certain point, by the time I was leaving,
God became synonymous with orgasm,
and orgasm was Nicole.
[bell ringing]
[man] I looked at her and I said, "You're starting a religion, aren't you?"
And she goes, "Yeah, I want to start a religion, but the thing is,
you can't sell God because you can get God on Amazon."
"What I'm selling is sex, because you still can't get that."
[sinister music playing]
So, it wasn't a long leap from there that the priest ceremonies began.
[Marinacci] I get a call from Nicole saying,
"Mike, OneTaste is going to be doing something
we call the Magic School, and I would like your help with it."
"We'd like you to help out with some rituals we wanna do."
"Help design them, help stage them,
and we want to initiate
some Priests of OM."
The cynical part of me says,
"Okay, well, if she got it successfully incorporated as a religious body,
well, you know, no taxes."
She said, "We want to have myself
and the other main women who were involved with this
sort of being the initiators, being the Goddess figures,
taking the men into the whole thing and saying, 'You are now a priest.'"
[Kosley] When someone becomes a priest,
they're agreeing they're stepping into kind of a different level of life,
and really it was a way for us to just feel super bonded and connected
and, like, part of something that we were super committed to.
[Wright] I volunteered so I could get into the room and see what it was like.
Otherwise, it would have cost, I think, at least 15 grand,
maybe 30 grand.
[Marinacci] I said, "What you guys should be wearing is
black face coverings, wraparound."
"But below that, nothing."
What this is communicating is you are the Goddess, this female force
that's faceless, that's egoless, that's now saying to these guys,
"I welcome you to be my servants."
And I remember watching and just feeling this power.
I said, "I hope this is working on other people, 'cause it's working on me."
"I'm feeling this Goddess energy, I'm feeling this, you know,
that sacred female sexuality."
[Ruwan] These Priests of Orgasm
would do the OM practice in this ritualistic fashion,
where they kept, like, moving from woman to woman.
[Kosley] Nicole was a showman, you know?
She's got a little bit of P.T. Barnum in her.
[Marinacci] I sort of joked to myself and I said,
"Well, she's trying to put together the sexy Illuminati here."
And it was interesting being around 200 young, beautiful, very turned-on folks
that were attending it.
They were paying a pretty penny for it.
I could easily imagine the gross take for the five days
being about a million dollars.
But they were getting their money's worth, I think.
[Rachel] "God, in His wisdom, selected this group of men and women
to be purveyors of His goodness."
"He went not to the proud, the mighty, the famous, or the brilliant."
"He went instead to the humble, to the sick, to the unfortunate…"
[Huet] Rachel was head of sales
and she was this powerful figure within the company.
I'm Rachel and I teach Dark Arts.
-[woman] Yeah! -[laughing]
[crowd cheering]
I would say… I would say that is the fourth-dimensional class that I teach.
The third-dimensional class that I teach is sales.
[Huet] Very close to Nicole. She was like Nicole's right-hand woman.
Watch this. Come on.
[all laughing]
See, you do that and she comes closer.
[Huet] And she inspired a lot of admiration because
she really projected this sense of being a woman who was really,
like, in charge of her sexuality.
All right, so, Rachele… [singsong] Your time has come, my dear.
[Rachel] I didn't write anything.
Oh, see what I mean?
She didn't write anything either. We have another pussy channeler.
[crowd laughing]
[woman] Yeah!
Oh, pussy.
-Pussy! -[both growling]
She's so…
[all laughing]
I can touch her, right?
[all laughing]
You guys really are my family.
[voice breaking] And I've been thinking all week how to say it,
like, how to just say how good it feels to be here.
And to be ignited… [inhaling sharply]
…and turned on, and have that be from a very authentic place.
So, I think that's just what I wanted to say. [laughs shyly]
Rachel was willing to do anything Nicole wanted her to do in terms of, um,
advancing OneTaste and protecting OneTaste.
When I was 25, I was told by a therapist that I was anorgasmic,
meaning, like, I couldn't climax.
As a woman, if I have to go through life not enjoying sex, what's the point?
So, in my first OM, I felt this one moment of electricity,
and I thought, "Oh, that's what it means to be a woman."
[Huet] She was also kind of Nicole's enforcer.
That was important because as Nicole rose and rose in stature,
a guru has to kind of stay above the fray.
You're gonna do it quick, like… Where's Raphael?
-[Raphael] Quick like a bunny. -Quick like a bunny.
Good?
[all] Good!
We're excited?
[all] Yeah!
We're gonna stay…
-[all] Sane! -[woman laughing]
[Wright] OneTaste employed a lot of people who
hadn't really gone into their careers yet.
People were jumping at the chance to be working at a startup about sex.
People were waking up at 7:30, going to OMs,
going to a staff meeting right after that.
There was no boundary between work and the other things we did.
When I was hired, I was told I would get
20% of the revenue that the New York branch made,
which was a lot of money at the time.
It seemed like an obscene amount to be getting paid.
OneTaste New York was bringing in ten to $20,000 a day sometimes.
So yeah, that was a huge amount of money.
Later I found out, "No, it's actually 20% split up amongst five people."
Later it was, "Oh, 20%, but only if you help with a certain sale."
Like, it kept changing, and every time I asked what our compensation was,
I got a different answer, and sometimes it'd flip back on me,
like I was being a jerk for asking about money or being money-focused.
I was told to OM with people when we would have arguments.
It was this very, like, deep part of the philosophy that
if you're not getting along with someone
or if someone constantly rubs you the wrong way,
then you're supposed to fuck them.
-[interviewer] Did you have to do that? -[scoffs]
I felt like if I didn't,
I wouldn't be important, and I wouldn't get attention.
And I was very much wanting to be
higher, like, management level at OneTaste.
So, there was that period of time where I did things that were suggested.
[swallowing]
[Huet] It was operating in a sphere of such unusual
interpersonal dynamics, right?
So, usually the relationship between you and your manager
is not one where your manager is going to tell you who to have sex with.
Yeah, there's an adage at OneTaste.
"When the sensation is high, you can either fuck or fight."
And one time I had this tension with one of my co-workers,
and Rachel said something like, "Right, this, no, we're not doing this."
"You guys go have sex, don't come back to work till you've done it."
She and I, like, walked out.
We were both looking at each other like, "Is this… Like, this is really strange."
"Is this okay?"
"Like, our employer who is telling us to have sex."
It was also part of OneTaste culture that you were encouraged to do
emotionally challenging things or uncomfortable things for your growth.
So, this was like…
Yeah, we had this very awkward sexual experience
and then went back to work, and that was that.
[Auerbach] Whenever there was a course, there were always women from OneTaste,
because the courses were always male-heavy.
So, you had to get the women, you know, to partner with the men
and have their pussy stroked so that all the men could have partners.
There were, you know, ten men and two other women who had signed up.
By the way, often the women didn't have to pay,
or had to pay very little to be in courses,
but we had the guys pay full amount.
They were paying for it, so if there's only two women,
we need eight more women to pair up with these other guys.
Where are they gonna come from?
So, that'd be us.
For the women in the community,
they were willing, and yet,
it's not like we had a choice.
[Huet] When I talked to many ex-members,
they would describe something that an outsider might look at and think,
"Oh, you were being told to have sex with a customer
in the hopes that that customer would pay money to the company."
And I get the impression that within OneTaste,
it didn't seem so obviously bad.
There were other explanations. It was like,
"You should have sex with this person because
your orgasm is kind of blocked up these days
and you need to blow your lines clean by having sex with a lot of people."
And this is advice coming from someone above you in the group
who seems like they really have their sexuality figured out.
So, maybe you wanna take this advice, maybe you want to do it
because you're like, "Well, maybe it'll help."
[Wright] We would get shamed for being a victim.
She used this semantic trick of reframing
to make really scary reframes. [chuckles uncomfortably]
For instance, no value judgment to rape,
no value judgment towards predatorial men.
[Nicole] So, you know how we have the t-shirts, like, "Powered by Orgasm"?
This could be our new shirt:
"I got raped and all I got was a victim story."
-[crowd laughing awkwardly] -[scattered clapping]
Or it could be like, "I raped someone and all I got was a perpetrator story."
[Huet] When people later try to make sense of what happened to them in this group,
they think, "Well, it was all my fault, because I could never be a victim."
[Wright] I question my experience there all the time,
trying to figure out what actually happened.
[OM interviewer] Describe your sex.
Sort of craving more and, um, reluctantly coming out.
[Wright] So, it felt like, for me as a queer woman,
that there was all of this pressure to be either feminine or masculine.
So a lot of the things that I thought were wrong with me and I needed to fix
had to do with not being feminine enough for OneTaste,
not behaving like the other women.
You know, I'm a woman who works backstage. Like, I wear a tool belt.
I do things that are considered pretty masculine.
So, I was sort of teased a lot.
[Nicole] Preference is an unconscious, habituated response.
So the only thing that you're ever held bondage by is your own set of beliefs.
On the other side of every single one is freedom.
That's what we're looking for.
And we're not looking for it by only going to places we like.
The places you hate are your practice.
They're the places where you… They're actually your biggest gift.
They're the places you get free.
[flogger cracking]
[Kosley] This was me teaching a class of BDSM.
I loved teaching it. It was really fun.
So these are kind of two of my passions,
Disneyland and BDSM.
You look at these things and you think,
"How could anybody possibly enjoy being beaten with a flogger?"
But if you can separate from the judgment of good, bad, right, wrong,
and just feel the sensation of it,
then you can actually just enjoy it.
Like, we all have primal urges, you know?
We all have the desire to just ravage someone
or to be ravaged by someone.
I felt that pull, I felt that desire.
I had a lot of conditioning and coding telling me that that desire was wrong,
and OneTaste allowed me to overcome that, in a way.
Uh, that's after a scene with Nicole, I think.
And that's where the initials came from.
These two floggers and the single-tail were Nicole's.
You are always going to be a desperate slave to women.
Thank you.
You blink your eyes a lot because
you're unwilling to put your attention on anybody but yourself.
Thank you.
You're inept in the cafe.
Thank you.
You'll never make it out of the bounds of your tight personality.
-Thank you. -You're fat.
Thank you.
[solemn music playing]
[Ruwan] They did a thing called "killing,"
getting under people's skin
and saying the things that are gonna dismantle them emotionally.
And I remember we had a team meeting where
this particular woman was being groomed to be, like, the next Rachel.
Like, she was very articulate, very attractive.
And because she was struggling with really surrendering to OneTaste,
she was getting hammered by Rachel and the other staff members.
'Cause we knew each other's secrets, like,
we knew our vulnerable parts, we knew where people were insecure.
They were just saying all these things to her that were so biting
that it was beyond the point of tears for her.
When she finally looked up from crying, she was, like, dead.
That's why it was called killing. She was blank.
Like, 'cause her ego was gone. And that was abusive.
And one of the things I really regret was not backing her up in that moment,
because I actually felt shitty in that moment.
It wasn't like I look back on it and felt bad.
Like, I felt bad in that moment,
but I convinced myself it was for her own good,
so I didn't say anything.
[Nicole] Somebody was saying to me
that the people here don't have very skillful scalpels, you know?
And we don't, but we all agree to slash each other…
[all laughing]
…for a higher purpose.
[laughing continues]
[Auerbach] There was a woman who was wanting to leave.
So Nicole sent Bill and I down to go and kind of work her over
and get her to stay.
And she was really upset,
and she was just telling us that she didn't trust Nicole,
and that she felt like this was not the right place for her.
Bill told her that he thought…
"You know, Nicole's all about honesty,
and so you should go and tell Nicole that you don't trust her."
She starts telling Nicole she doesn't trust her.
Nicole starts breaking down crying.
"I can't believe you're gonna leave me."
"I can't believe you're just gonna abandon me like that. I can't believe it."
Nicole's, like, sobbing.
This woman's like, "No, no, no. No. Nicole, I would never leave you."
"Okay, I'm gonna stay."
She leaves the room.
Instantaneously, the tears dry.
Nicole looks at us and goes,
"That didn't go the way you thought it was gonna go, did it?"
[man] Love and affection and energy are given and withdrawn strategically
in order to create dependence.
And, you know, it's like if you leave,
you'll never have access to those things again.
[Ruwan] I do know with one individual, basically, while he was tripping,
they had him have a personal experience
and then tried to get more money out of him,
convincing him to give them another quarter million or something.
[Marries] People were getting hurt.
People were getting hurt badly.
I saw her starting to take more and more license.
And what it is is that she would just become fascinated
with what she could get people to do.
You know, that was her entertainment.
That was kind of, like, her secret thrill, is, like, having control over people.
[lion growling]
[Marries] She did some things with some of her staff people.
She would make them watch lions, like, hunting in a pride, ripping things apart,
and she'd go like, "We're like that."
"We're the lions, we aren't doing anything wrong."
"That's how we eat."
[man] The "beast," this violence, this rage that gets normalized.
People were encouraged to be psychologically brutal with each other.
The first time that they do something vicious towards someone else,
people get encouraged.
"Yeah, you really showed your beast."
There's the knowledge that you've done something awful,
but now you've completely rewired what good means and what evil means.
I had a regular, and he had this thing where he wanted to strangle me.
His beast was locked in there and it hadn't had a place for expression,
and I just happen to love beasts.
I had to surrender so deep that I could absorb him all the way in.
And invariably, all of a sudden, it'd hit this point, and he'd just start bawling,
and that was all…
And he paid me a lot of money to just come strangle me and cry. That was it.
We think they're so tough, they're just little love bugs crying.
They're just our little companions that wanna love us.
They're just tough because they're met with fear.
You know, my dad died in prison for 52 counts of child molestation,
and I never took on the idea that he was a bad person.
I took on the idea that he was just so expansive and fourth-dimensional
that he couldn't confine himself into the arbitrary laws of the third dimension.
That was his only crime in my mind.
Now, other people may have different ideas. Uhhh…
[OM interviewer] Describe your sex.
[distorted voice] There's a lot of anger in my sex.
Um… And there's also a lot of sweetness.
And I'm hoping to bring even more anger in.
[Wright] OneTaste was encouraging women
to appreciate the predatorial nature of male sexuality.
And that's supposed to be some very evolved practice.
[woman] Help!
[Ruwan] There was a term often used called "skillful violation."
You're not really violating what she wants,
you're violating what she says she wants.
[woman] Stop!
[Ruwan] The idea of letting out your beast was basically
the equivalent of, like, being a savage or just, like, being totally expressed,
which is a pretty common idea in personal development.
I think it was healing for guys
who maybe, like, had so-called Nice Guy Syndrome.
In many ways it was healing.
Obviously, everything in OneTaste was taken a little too far at times.
My name is Autymn Blanck,
and I am here to tell the story of my sister,
that she was in a cult,
and her experience of going through that.
[solemn music playing]
So, my sister and myself,
we were both raised in a very traumatic childhood.
Some things happened to us, sexually,
and I know my sister struggled with having sex, having connection,
and having just that community and love,
because we didn't really have that as children.
And so, when she talked to Rachel, someone older than her
who went through the same exact experience,
and she said, "OM has cured it all,"
of course, that's the path that my sister went down.
"Why not try it?" I suppose.
This is my sister before all of it happened.
You can tell that she's very happy
and there's a lot of light in her eyes, still.
When I had gone to visit her,
like, the light had disappeared from her eyes.
And that's when I really knew something was wrong.
These people would tell her that she needed to go sleep with all these men,
or she needed to OM four to five times a day
to release herself from the trauma of her childhood.
My sister started sending me journals when she got out of OneTaste.
It was part of her therapy.
"I woke up today, filled with rage. Rage at my boyfriend."
"He punched me in the face and split my lip
and bruised my eye."
"At first, I was shocked. We had fought many times before,
but I had never thought he would go that far."
"I found little sympathy."
"This, I was told, was my fault."
"I had forced him to do it."
"His beast was only fulfilling what my body had asked him to do."
"Since I was a survivor of childhood domestic violence,
this was my pattern and what my body was asking for."
"He was only doing as my body asked,
and now I was shaming and blaming him for doing what I had asked for."
"I looked around the room. All eyes were downcast."
"Nobody was willing to stand for me."
"I never spoke again about the other times he hit me or dragged me around."
"Looking back now, I can't believe I stuck through it."
"I so wanted to believe he would change."
"I was told that sometimes our soulmates must do violent things to help us grow."
"It was only a way to condone violence."
"They did not want me to, one, go to the authorities,
two, have my boyfriend leave and take his money with him."
"This evening, this community member let his beast out."
"He picked me up, my arms pinned to my sides,
and began to shake me in front of everyone."
"Nobody did anything
as he screamed at me how he would like to rape me, beat me, use me,
that he knew where I slept and he would find me in the night."
"I was reprimanded afterwards for showing fear in the face of his beast."
"A true turned-on woman
would have taken his beast's cry for help with grace and love."
"I look back on it now and I'm not surprised
I was unable to sleep anymore,
that I left my body to survive."
[Huet] After my story came out in 2018,
general readers, many of whom had never heard of OneTaste,
a lot of them were pretty shocked.
It's kind of a wild story, and I think it tugs at people's heart strings
to see people who are looking for answers in their life
ended up more jumbled
and more confused and more hurt than before.
And then separately, the response from the community was very strong.
You know, I heard from dozens of people after the story came out,
and they were really moved to see that a national magazine had captured
this very dark, sometimes shameful experience that they'd gone through
that they'd sometimes struggled to explain to their friends.
There were impacts at the company right away.
The CEO, Joanna Van Vleck, stepped down.
She remained at the company, but she stepped down from her role as CEO.
They stopped doing the coaching program, which was their flagship course.
They stopped holding in-person classes, and they started going virtual.
Press "How to OM,"
then you'll find the OM 101 online free class.
And then a few months later, you know, I got a call from a source saying,
"Yesterday I got a knock on the door, and it was two FBI agents,
and they wanted to talk to me about what happened at OneTaste."
I think it's fascinating to think about people who think that
if only women ran the world, then everything would be perfect.
But this group, which had almost, like, a matriarchal spirit
from the very first day that it was started,
still fell into these patterns of alleged abuse of power.
[Wright] I'm back in Tucson, where I grew up.
I'm about to have a phone call
with an FBI agent who's based out of New York.
He contacted me about two months ago.
They were really pushing this idea that
it's inherently natural for men to be predatory,
and that we should, like,
be welcoming of the predatory nature of men,
that we should find it hot, attractive.
And so when that thing about them
finding some strangers to rape her happened,
totally made sense to me as far as what the conversations I heard
and the behavior that I witnessed.
At one point, my sister called me.
She had been forced upon multiple people,
and that her boyfriend had beat her,
and she was at the bottom of the stairs, vomiting.
And I remember just sitting there being, "What are you doing?"
And this was right before she got out,
and I think this was one of the last things.
And I remember just crying on the phone,
"Why? Why are you doing this?" Like…
"I never wanted to OM with other people."
"I never wanted to have my body touched."
"It all was forced, and my body feels filled with shame and disgust."
"I remember being told not to go to the hospital,
that all the shaking,
the vomiting, the weightlessness, the sickness was just an orgasm."
"It was me alchemizing trauma and pain from when I was younger,
that if I just stuck with it,
I would ascend to my next level of awakening and freedom."
[interviewer] This is your sister's body reacting to
the sexual assault and the beatings.
Yes. Yes. Yep. Yep.
And the sexual assaults and the beatings,
and I think the manipulation
of trying to convince someone that that is right.
[somber music playing]
[interviewer] What prompted you to tell her story when she couldn't?
[Autymn] I want other people to see.
I want to potentially stop…
[sighing deeply]
I wanted to… speak out for someone who couldn't speak for herself.
I wanted to tell the story of someone that was, I guess, silenced in all of it
and pushed under the rug,
and I had the availability to do so,
and I only hope that other people don't fall into it,
and that other people see this
and understand that it's just… it's, it's not worth it and it's dangerous.
"When I decided to leave, I went and talked to Nicole."
"When I arrived at her apartment,
it was like the rose-colored glasses had finally fallen off."
"When I told her how the organization had hurt me and continued to hurt others,
when I told her it was a cult and she needed to fix it,
she acted innocent and confused, shocked even."
"She insisted she had no idea."
"Either she is an idiot and so completely lost in her lack of reality
she doesn't allow herself to see it,
or she's deeply twisted and very sick
and finds it perfectly okay to use, abuse, traumatize, and destroy others' lives
for her own personal gain."
[waves rolling]
[Wright] I was having a hard time, having left OneTaste and living on my own,
and I was questioning a lot of their practices.
It was all very rattling to me, because as soon as I left,
I kept hearing things.
I think as a result of, like, having this lingo and these secret words…
when I left that,
I could almost not understand the way that other people spoke.
So, I'd just hear, like, a word out of nowhere when there was no one around.
[birds twittering]
[Ruwan] For basically two years after I left OneTaste,
I kind of accepted that maybe I had ruined my life.
I couldn't really think straight.
It was hard to relate to normies, you know.
So all I could really do and feel sane was blue-collar work, working with my hands.
And yeah, I kind of entered this space
where I accepted maybe I had fried my brain.
I mean, I think it just took time.
When the Bloomberg article came out
it made a lot more noise than I expected.
Obviously, my parents freaked out
'cause they read about me being in a sex cult.
A private investigator left a bunch of voicemails late at night.
He was kind of insinuating I was gonna be in a lawsuit.
[interviewer] Would your sister be here today telling her story if she could?
She would, yes.
My sister always wants better and always pushes forward,
and right now, she is getting her PhD
and living the best life that she can, in spite of everything that happened.
[voice breaking] Not because, but in spite of.
[Huet] People who used to be in OneTaste
are always curious about what exactly is going on with the company now.
There's still OneTaste staff members who live at The Land,
which is their farm in Mendocino County.
[Wright] So, I've heard that Nicole is living up on The Land,
she's back in the United States and that she's at The Land right now.
I'm surprised that she came back,
given that there's an active FBI investigation.
The times that I've gone back,
it's like I know that I was in a cult
because I automatically feel… like I'm back home
and I wanna stay there forever.
And they're not actually… Like, they never cared about me.
I basically took a swan dive into this project
without really… um… thinking of
how people will feel when they see it.
Yeah.
[interviewer] And how do you think people will feel?
I have no idea. Like, that's something that's really hard to gauge
with OneTaste and Nicole.
You know, we have that precept of, "Stay connected no matter what."
[Autymn] "I'm so tired of hearing it,
that 'you are such a smart girl. How could that happen to you?'"
"'How could you let that happen?'"
"They start off with love. Experts call it 'love bombing,'
bringing you into the fold, making you feel special and seen,
cared for and valued."
"Then they pull it away,
push you down to the very bottom,
expel you from the community, take away your access to purpose and meaning,
and even at times, take away your connection to God."
"We cling to this idea that we have control,
that people who are abused and manipulated are somehow dumb or lesser,
that they should have seen it coming."
"What I see now is those people who believe
that this would never happen to them
are only grasping for control,
clinging to this idea
that they would never allow this to happen."
[Kosley] I want the people who are capable of understanding what OneTaste was…
-[all yelling joyfully] -…to know this thing existed,
this thing that had somehow
called each of us out of the lives that we'd been living.
I can't even say what that thing was exactly.
It was sex, it was orgasm, it was exploration, it was growth,
it was fear,
it was trauma.
It was all of these things, like, woven and wrapped together.
And while we were in it, it lit us up
in a way that we had scarcely even dared to imagine that we could be lit up.
[Huet] I think it's important for us to understand,
what is it about a group like OneTaste that people are drawn to?
The things that all people want.
Love, connection, belonging.
Who wouldn't want those things?
And at the same time,
if you have a leader and a culture that goes too far,
things can become dangerous.
[mellow electronic music playing]
[upbeat electronic music playing]
[music fades out]