From Hippie Communes to Orgasm, Inc.

Messiahs I Have Known (Chapter 3, Verse 2) looks at the downfall of the orgasm messiah, Nicole Daedone, and the roots of her "OneTaste" movement.

Last month, sex cult leader Nicole Daedone failed in her bid to have a federal judge overturn her recent conviction on “forced labor” charges, unsuccessfully arguing that “the entire case was a moral condemnation of defendants’ spiritual beliefs and practices.”

Those practices centered around the sale of expensive OneTaste workshops and training programs that redefined the female orgasm as a meditative path to personal growth and spiritual enlightenment.

“While the teachings and practices may be offensive to the prosecution,” Daedone’s lawyers argued, “it is this very idiosyncratic repulsiveness that garners First Amendment protection.”

Unmoved by this line of reasoning, a federal judge upheld the conviction of Daedone and her CEO, Rachel Cherwitz.

“Nearly every trial witness described how Daedone, Cherwitz, and their coconspirators engaged in a campaign of indoctrination, grooming, isolation, manipulation, use of past trauma, monitoring, public shaming, relationship disruption, sexual abuse, physical exhaustion, and financial harm to force the labor of certain employees,” the judge ruled. “The totality of these coercive tactics caused the victims to perform labor and services under serious harm.”

What apparently shocked the jurors was not OneTaste’s workshop model, which is shocking enough. Couples — most of whom have just met — pair off so a man can gently stroke a woman’s clitoris for fifteen minutes. Like many cults, the worst practices occurred around the inner circle of the spiritual leader, not in the introductory workshops.

Former close associates of Daedone testified at her trial that they were financially exploited and masterfully manipulated into — among other things — sexually satisfying wealthy clients and prospective funders.

It’s a story I’ve seen countless times in my half-century of writing about cults, sects and new religious movements. What often brings the messianic leader down is an unholy trinity of money, sex and power.

Last week, we profiled the sexual and spiritual journey of one devotee of Daedone’s brand of “orgasmic meditation.” This week, as Daedone sits in a New York jail and awaits sentencing, Messiahs I Have Known examines how her OneTaste movement grew out of something called “Morehouse,” a 1960s-era experiment in sexual freedom and communal living.

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Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Victor Baranco honed his salesmanship skills peddling stoves and refrigerators at Friedman's Appliance, a popular East Bay store that had been selling kitchen equipment since 1922. But Baranco’s interests ran deeper than waxing poetic about the wonders of the latest all-electric range. He was interested in philosophy and spirituality. And he was at least equally fascinated by sex and all the mind-opening drugs he and his friends had begun taking.

In the mid-1960s, Victor had gotten interested in sensual exploration from a friend who’d begun going to events sponsored by the Sexual Freedom League, including what used to be called “swinger’s parties.” At the same time, Baranco was dabbling in a new kind of psychology that was emerging from the Esalen Institute down the coast at Big Sur, the birthplace of the human potential movement. Encounter groups, small gatherings where people were encouraged to drop their defenses, confess their fears and tell it like it is, were all the rage. It was all about getting real and not playing games, or at least playing new games.

In 1968, a couple we will refer to here as John and Aimee fell in with the Baranco crowd. Victor, his Sexual Freedom League friend, and a few other associates pooled their resources to buy and renovate a dilapidated Victorian in Oakland. They painted it bright purple and called their new commune Morehouse, dedicating themselves to spreading the philosophy of “responsible hedonism.”

Aimee, a social worker, had first discovered the gospel of Victor Baranco a few months before the commune was formed. She was recently divorced and found herself — like Alice, the OneTaste devotee profiled last week — living in Berkeley as a single mother with a young son. She had gone to what Baranco called a “Mark Group,” a name that reflected his in-your-face acknowledgement that, yes, you were being hosted by folks who were likely “playing” you.

There was no sex at the Mark Group. That might come later. These were small groups where someone would be put on the “hot seat” and made the focus of attention in a series of games designed to improve communication — to stop bullshitting. One game was called “Withholds and Overts.” You would face your partner and say, “Aimee, I’ve withheld something from you.” And your partner would say, “What have you withheld from me?” And then Aimee would tell the truth. “Overts” followed a similar format, “Aimee I’ve done something to you…”

Aimee showed up just as Baranco’s small group of friends and followers were getting ready to buy their aforementioned house — at 80 Hamilton Place. Over the next decade they would buy more homes on that short street near Oakland’s Lake Merritt, along with another piece of property just over the East Bay hills in the woodsy suburban community of Lafayette. As the movement spread, there would be other homes in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Louisiana, and Hawaii — all of them painted bright purple.

John, Aimee’s future partner, arrived in the summer of 1968 when a friend invited him to tag along to a lazy afternoon party on Hamilton Place. Everyone seemed happily engaged with life and each other. Aimee caught his eye, and John soon learned that the people in the house attributed much of their good feeling and confidence to a philosophy promulgated by a charismatic character named Victor Baranco, who taught weekend courses.

Like many spiritual seekers in the late 1960s, John had been thinking about going to India in his quest for enlightenment. But here was a place — right in the Bay Area — that seemed to combine the best of both worlds — the pursuit of both pleasure and truth.

John was twenty, four years younger than Aimee, when he encountered Victor and John, wife-to-be. He’d just dropped out of school at UC Berkeley. His college classes had been getting in the way of the Dionysian times he was having at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, attending concerts by the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane and other bands that were blossoming in the aftermath of the Summer of Love.

“Life,” John explained, “had become more interesting than college.”

There were four weekend workshops at Morehouse, including “Basic Sensuality,” which sounded more interesting than the course material at the University of California.

There was a class on Communications. There was one called “Jealousy, Money and Possessions” and course on “Hexing,” which was the next one being offered, so John signed up.

John would soon learn that “a hex is something you do to make someone feel ‘less than.’ It’s the opposite of a blessing, something you do to make people feel ‘more than.’ Hexing refers to things like advertising. If you make people feel like they need something they don’t have in order to be whole, you have hexed them.”

“So, basically,” I asked, “you were learning how to manipulate people?”

“Exactly,” John replied. “One of the messages was that the word manipulation is not necessarily positive or negative. People might discover they are doing it on purpose or by default all the time.”

After taking a few courses, John moved into the Oakland Morehouse. There were three couples and three unattached women living on Hamilton Place. Aimee, there with her 18-month-old son, was one of the unattached women.

Within six months, Aimee and John found themselves living as lovers at Lafayette Morehouse and teaching courses, including the “Basic Sensuality” workshop.

“It was basically information that was available from Masters and Johnson,” John recalled. “It taught you things like there was no such thing as a vaginal orgasm. But if you read that in Master and Johnson, it didn’t necessarily make you a better lover. This course did.

“There was no sex happening in the courses. We sat and talked. There was an overnight assignment to pleasure yourself in the way we were teaching you to do in a sensual relationship with a partner. You were to experience tumescence. That was a new word we learned. We were introducing the concept of peaking, which was bringing your partner closer to a climax and then backing off.

“The whole idea was to isolate the physical act and the sensations and focus on that. Remove the relationship. This seems to be what OneTaste has done. Some people think of that as cold, but it’s really a training technique. It’s a way to get out of your value judgments to learn what the body does. You allow people to experience what’s there outside of the social constructs that often inhibit an orgasm.”

Outside of the formal classes, the commune members were using each other’s bodies to discover everything they always wanted to know about sex. They also practiced something called “appropriate communication,” which meant they were careful not to tell newcomers who came to the beginning courses all of what was going on behind the Morehouse curtain. For example, Aimee said, “We didn’t tell people that we were smoking dope and taking psychedelics.” But people who walked into the house would see a “House Rules” sign on which the first item was “No Drugs.”

Couples living at Morehouse were encouraged by Victor to get married, which did not stop him from having sex with pretty much anyone he chose. Morehouse, it was thought, would be less threatening to outsiders if the couples living there were married. So, at Baranco’s urging, four couples had a joint wedding at an East Bay park that was designed, in part, as a publicity stunt. Victor wanted Aimee and John to be the fifth couple, but Aimee refused to do so, agreeing instead to be the wedding organizer.

Aimee and John would soon get married, despite Aimee’s misgivings.

“John and I were in love, and we lived together,” she said. “After the group wedding, Victor still wanted John and I to get married. He started manipulating us. By then, I’d started having an affair with Vic, and thought I was in love with him. But I see now that that was an illusion. John was a steady and reliable person and partner, just not as dynamic or charismatic as Vic. I mistook falling for the dynamism for love. I would do whatever Victor would say, so I married John.”

“Why do you think Baranco insisted that you marry John?” I asked.

Aimee paused before answering

“He just wanted to have control,” she said. “It gave him power.”

People living at Morehouse initially thought they were living in a radically democratic commune where all decision were based on consensus. All possessions were held jointly. They were trying to live like John Lennon would “imagine” in 1971. It could be sublime, but also ridiculous. “Victor went around and stamped little “More” signs on everything,” Aimee recalled. “I came home one day and found that my underwear was stamped.”

Morehouse was supposed to be a radical democracy, but in John and Aimee’s experience, it really wasn’t in the end. Victor called the shots.

“It was not equal,” she said. “There were always power struggles going on.”

She and John bought one of the old homes on Hamilton Place. “We did it at their persuasion, borrowing money from John’s mother,” Aimee said. “They made us quitclaim it over to them.”

What had begun as a lifestyle experiment was being corrupted, in John’s eyes, by a “growing and increasingly mysterious and intractable hierarchy.”

“At first, it had been all part of the game — where concessions to Victor and whomever he gave power were happily accepted and played out as interesting twists,” John recalled. “But in the end, we couldn’t play anymore.”

John and Aimee moved out of Morehouse.

“When we left we had nothing,” she said. “We had $1.50 to find something at the store to eat.”

It was 1974 when John and Aimee left Morehouse for the same reasons many people leave cults. They got tired of the power tripping and the new kinds of games. Looking back, they’re not sure if they were kicked out or if they left on their own.

“Victor used to call it the in-out game,” Aimee recalled. “All you have to do to make people get in deeper is push them away. That used to happen all the time. He would exclude you and then all you wanted to do was to get back with the in-group.”

In the end, Aimee and John got tired of the game, fed up with communal living. Aimee’s son was starting school. It dawned on them that Morehouse might not be the best place to raise a child. They had friends who were moving to Hawaii, and they decided to go with them.

Decades later, Aimee looks back on her years at Morehouse with mixed memories and emotions. After six years with the group, she was just entering her thirties when she left Morehouse. When we spoke, Aimee was just entering her seventies.

“They offered great sexual information,” Aimee told me when I asked her why people come to Morehouse. “That was the first thing most people found there. But what kept me there was a real family feeling with peers who had the same values. We were hippies looking for whatever we were looking for — a good time, I guess.”

“Before I was in Morehouse, I was a drinking alcoholic and was promiscuous. I was filled with shame about many of my sexual encounters. I wasn’t drinking at Morehouse. I was smoking pot, and taking psychedelics, but that was different. Psychedelics were super-opening. My behavior seemed more by choice. I did things that I may have never done if I wasn’t there, but I didn’t do things that felt shameful. Now I look back and I’m glad I was there.”

Aimee now sees Baranco, who died in 2002, as a cult leader. She now realizes that he did some horrendous things, but in her mind he still has some redeeming qualities. “Victor was really insightful, but went through periods when he wasn’t ethical,” she said. “There were parts of Victor that I didn’t know then.”

A few years after John and Aimee’s departure, I had my own series of encounters with Baranco’s band of pleasure seekers — not as a devotee, but as a young journalist working for the San Francisco Examiner. Baranco had started calling his Lafayette operation “More University,” and some of their neighbors were upset that members of the student body liked to run around his 20-acre spread wearing little or no clothing. When I arrived to write a profile of some of the 55 people who were then living on the property, I was met by a woman who was wearing a very tiny bikini that — like all of the buildings at More University — was colored bright purple.

Other women liked to go topless when doing their chores around the property. “If you have a right to take off your shirt, so do I,” said Marilyn Oliver, who suggested that the neighbors lighten up. “People aren’t sexing in the road,” she told me.

Lots of young children, most of them naked, were running around the commune. “We had a baby boom around 1974,” Kass Gerrick, the woman in the purple bikini, explained. “People came in single, paired up, and had children.”

Kass led me on a tour of the campus in a purple golf cart. She wasn’t sure why everything was purple. “Some yoyo even wanted to paint the tennis courts purple,” she said with a sigh.

We headed down Here Street to the Village of Here. “This whole place is called ‘Here’ and so is the road,” she explained. “You start out Here and you end up Here.”

Baranco was kept out of sight during my visits to the university named after his philosophy.

At the time, my beat at the newspaper was covering Contra Costa County, a suburban community that includes the Lafayette property where More University operated. In the late 1970s, government officials took a series of actions designed to control the free-wheeling commune. One story I wrote was about the campus doctor being charged with “massive over-prescribing of sedatives and hypnotics” to commune members, including Baranco. Two other stories were about an investigation of a three-year girl who was suspected of having contracted gonorrhea. That investigation was dropped when a county health official said he found no clear evidence that the girl had been sexually abused.

Looking back, Aimee says she saw troubling changes in the man who started it all. “At some point Victor became somewhat deliberate about what he was going to do. He was exploring his own power. He had insight that a bunch of twenty year olds didn’t have. He used it in unkind ways, on himself as well. He was drug-addled…It is always better to live an ethical life and be kind. You’re happier that way, and Victor wasn’t.”

Aimee and John split up soon after moving to Hawaii. Both went on to live — relatively speaking — rather conventional lives. John went on to court and marry a woman from Philadelphia, who had been Aimee and John’s student on their first East Coast teaching tour — and had remained friends with both of them. Soon after they married, almost ten years after John’s Morehouse escape, the couple happened to walk into a bookstore in Berkeley when psychologist Margaret Singer was giving a talk about her latest work, “The Cults Among Us.”

Halfway through the talk, John turned to his second wife with a look of astonishment. He’d never even realized it before.

“Oh,” he said, with eyes widening. “We lived in a cult.”

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(Messiahs I Have Known will continue next Monday with the third of four installments devoted to the rise and fall of Nicole Daedone. If you have not done so already, please subscribe to my Substack account. If you are already a free subscriber, and would like to support my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for $5 a month or $50 for a year.)