My Encounter with the Orgasm Messiah

They had scheduled half an hour for my interview with Nicole Daedone. We wound up spending two hours together, blissfully unaware that the OneTaste guru would eventually wind up in federal prison.

Nicole Daedone’s dream of making it big in the orgasm industry was intimately connected to the Internet marketing skills of former OneTaste president Joanna Van Vleck. She’s the woman Daedone brought on board in 2010 to make the transition from a San Francisco orgasm commune to a multinational orgasm corporation.

Joanna had not exactly set modest goals for herself. “My vision is how do we get the practice of OM (orgasmic meditation) to a billion people,” she told me back in 2016.

When Joanna discovered OneTaste, she’d just moved to the Bay Area for a new job at an online fashion business. She was a single woman with a seemingly successful life. She had set up her apartment in San Francisco and was commuting down to Silicon Valley in her Lexus. Joanna had grown up in Dallas in a religious family of Christian Scientists. She’d rejected all that as a teenager. Then, a decade later, on the eve of her 27th birthday, newly arrived in San Francisco for her new Internet marketing job, she found herself feeling so empty and depressed that she says she started to think about killing herself.

Then she found OneTaste.

“The woman I was supposed to be always looked really good, had great lip gloss, great make-up, great hair, and had really nice things, like good shoes and handbags,” she recalls in testimony at a OneTaste convention. “Layer by layer I kept putting these facades on me so that when I met people there was nothing to feel. There might have been something to look at, but there was definitely nothing to feel.”

Her first OMing experience (workshops where men gently stroke a woman’s clitoris for exactly 15 minutes) reminded me of Alice, the woman profiled in part one of this series. It was far from revelatory, but it started her thinking, and then feeling, in a new way.

“The first time I OMed with someone,” Joanna told me, “I wasn’t really attracted to him. I wasn’t going to date him. I certainly wasn’t going to marry him. But I was letting him see my genitals. And I started thinking, if I can break this rule of mine, what other rules do I have that can be broken — even outside of sexuality.”

Eventually, she said, OMing was a way for her to “feel and sense all that was happening in my body and my life. I wanted to have more and more and more of that visceral experience.”

Today, she said, she feels “more empathy, more able to relate to people.” Before, she “wasn’t present to those moments.”

To Joanna Van Vleck, the “orgasm industry” is an updated version of the oldest profession.

Looking back from the perspective of today, this comment from our interview on July 13, 2016 is particularly telling. Nine years later, in June 2025, Nicole Daedone and OneTaste CEO Rachel Cherwitz were convicted of federal “coercive labor” practices. They were accused of turning their most trusted devotees/employees into sacred prostitutes, assigning them to sexually service wealthy clients and potential funders.

This was all done for the reputedly higher good of spreading the Gospel of Orgasm, seen by OneTaste acolytes as a tool for personal growth and spiritual enlightenment.

“The sex industry is the oldest profession we have,” Van Vleck said in 2016, but it’s dominated by pornography and prostitution. “That’s what we call production-based sex — going for the climax.”

One Taste, she told me, was different.

Joanna had no problem with movies that include sexually graphic images. In the OneTaste world, she was infamous for an instructional video showing how a woman can give a man a long blow job for her own pleasure. It’s all about goal-less sex, of really feeling what it’s like to have a penis in your mouth and down your throat — just like both partners are supposed to really experience the fifteen minutes of clitoral stimulation.

Her blowjob video — big surprise! — got her a lot of attention in publications like Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The Cosmo reporter wrote about trying out this new meditative approach to oral sex herself, headlining her story, “How to Orgasm From Giving a Blow Job — I gave my husband an ‘orgasmic meditation’ BJ, and I liked it.”

Here’s how Joanna explained her instructional video production to the reporter from Playboy:

“That was an hour-long cock-suck, it was edited for length, and the only reason you’re able to go for an hour is because it’s goalless—you go up and you go down, and his cock gets limp and it gets hard. And that’s what you learn in Orgasmic Meditation—I mean, it’s nice to say, ‘Yeah, let’s be goalless in sex. But then you get to the bed with somebody and you think, ‘Are they going to think I’m a bad lover if they don’t come?’ ”

Joanna was following Nicole’s lead in her blow job campaign — getting the company a new wave of media attention in late 2014 and early 2015. It’s little tricks like this that had helped OneTaste steadily increase its annual revenue, which Van Vleck told me topped $8 million in 2015.

Since 2011, OneTaste had been run as a privately held, for-profit corporation.

While Nicole Daedone still owned the company in 2016, the new OneTaste strategy was to not make orgasmic meditation all about Nicole. In fact, when Joanna and I spoke in the summer of 2016, OneTaste was six months away from the time when Daedone has said she would stop teaching her advanced, and very expensive, “intensives.”

“Nicole was the founder,” Joanna said. “She has never really wanted to be a Tony Robbins where it is based solely on her. She’s the greatest teacher there is on the subject matter, but we work really hard for this to be about community. Also, I don’t know if you know this but she is a massive introvert.”

Back in 2016, in addition to cities where OneTaste had an office or retail outlet, like San Francisco, Berkeley, New York or Austin, there were thirty towns where people who’d graduated from the coaching program had organized their own circles of OM devotees. But Joanna realized that the only way she is ever going to approach her goal of turning a billion people onto orgasmic meditation was via the World Wide Web.

OneTaste’s website, which flew under the trademarked slogan “Powered By Orgasm,” had the clean, cool feel of an iPhone advertisement. It was full of hip, smiling, young adults of all races and sizes giving upbeat testimonies about how “OM gives me energy” or how “OM powers our relationship.” Free access to the site is given in exchange for an email address and a phone number. Internet users were then enticed to get more free access by taking an Orgasm Personality Quiz or having a live chat with an orgasm expert. Smart phone users could even get a virtual vagina that responded to their touch screens so they can practice on their cell.

Those taking the free Orgasm Personality Quiz would discover that their orgasm personality type was either Hypervolatile, Fixed or Dissipated. If you fell into the final category, you may be depressed, lost, lonely, and tend to “start things and can’t finish.” But don’t worry, because “At OneTaste, we love our Dissipateds.” Once you get into orgasmic meditation, you will, among other wondrous things, become “lighthearted and social” and discover “deep abiding enjoyment.”

Or that, at least, was the sales pitch over the World Wide Web, which was relentless once the company got your contact information.

Today, in 2025, with their founder in jail, OneTaste continues to offer workshops online and in person in New York City. Daedone reportedly sold the business for $12 million, but the messianic founder continues to be a major presence on the website — which does not mention her recent legal woes.

***

Back in 2016, what fascinated me about the OneTaste experience were the deep divers — people who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of hanging out for a week or ten days with Nicole Daedone. Among this elite group was a client we will call “Douglas Brown,” a 24-year-old personal development coach who had spent the last two years bouncing between OM communities in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, Texas.

Making the decision to spend $24,000 on an advanced OneTaste workshop, Brown told me, was an important part of his process. “It was worth it, partly because I paid that,” he said. “Even before the intensive started, I got a lot out of wrestling with this insane price tag and the mission of creating $24,000 to do this thing I wanted. If you want to get the most out of something, you put money on the line. For me, it’s an effective psychological advancing lever to make sure I milk the most out of everything. I respect OneTaste for diving very deep into the most taboo and shame-surrounding pockets of our psyche and culture — sex and community and money. They put the money right up in your face.”

Douglas had first heard about OMing from a college friend during his undergraduate studies in New York. Then he moved to Austin, where he didn’t have too many friends and was “trying to get some form of human connection.” He went to check out the OMing scene at a “TurnON,” where the women kept their pants on and everyone played a series of communication games designed to encourage vulnerability and foster intimacy through conversation.

People at the TurnON Brown attended were encouraged to share a thought or judgment they had about someone else in the room. A woman Douglas had chatted up before the event turned to him in the exercise and “gave me an intimacy that was so blunt and perceptive.”

Turning toward Brown, the woman said, “Out in the hallway, when you tried to hook me, I wanted to tell you that your arrogance is the number one thing stopping you from getting the kind of attention that you want.”

Moments like that intrigued him enough that he decided to go deeper into OneTaste. He started wondering, “What the fuck is the connection between clitoris-stroking practice and someone who is that perceptive and open?”

So he did the day-long workshop where he tried OMing for the first time. Douglas soon developed a network of OMing partners, first in Austin, then in New York City, and then in San Francisco. He took the coaching program and in November 2015 enrolled in the $24,000 Nicole Daedone Intensive. That workshop was described on the OneTaste website as “an extreme immersion in transformation…into what would variously be called spiritual, sacred, alchemical, mystical, magical or holy — and what we simply refer to as Orgasm.”

Douglas Brown told me in 2016 that he learned a lot about coaching from OneTaste and Nicole, but says “orgasmic meditation is no longer my business or my passion.” He does not call himself an OM coach. “I work with people who have inspiring missions,” he said, “and I help them fulfill those missions.”

Nevertheless, Brown had nothing but praise for Nicole Daedone.

“I love Nicole. She’s an amazing woman,” he said. “She’s a rare combination of a brilliant academic who has also done some very intensive effective work on embracing and opening up the power of her intuition. She has a shocking amount of approval for people’s shadows. People are more willing to hear difficult truths from her because when she is speaking to them there is a visceral sense that she doesn’t think you’re a bad person. She transmits love as she communicates difficult truths. She’s a very intelligent woman who has totally committed herself to unconditional sex and unconditional love as lifelong practices.”

Nicole Daedone

For a very different view of the OneTaste founder, check out journalist Ellen Huet’s forthcoming book, which paints a ruthless picture of Daedone and CEO Rachel Cherwitz, both of whom were convicted over the summer on federal charges of running a forced labor conspiracy. They stood accused of intimidating and manipulating young devotees into sexually servicing wealthy clients and OneTaste funders. “They needed to keep the paying students satisfied so the company could grow,” Huet writes. “They were expected to put themselves in sexual situations to help the company’s bottom line.”

(Ellen and I both worked as staff writers at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, but during different eras. I was there from 1977- 2006, while she did her time from 2011-2014.)

Huet is the same reporter who researched and wrote the first major account of employee exploitation inside the OneTaste cult. That story broke in Bloomberg Businessweek in June 2018, just as Nicole was riding high following a series of celebrity endorsements from the likes of Goop wellness guru Gwyneth Paltrow and Maria Shriver, the former First Lady of California.

By the time I met Nicole Daedone in the summer of 2016, I’d spent a month interviewing other people about her, reading her book, and watching her online video lectures. At first, it didn’t look like she’d be available for an interview. I’d been told she was pulling away from teaching workshops and talking to journalists, focusing instead on her own research and writing. She’d moved away from San Francisco and was living in Los Angeles. But I continued reaching out to her through several mutual acquaintances until I was told that she would be in San Francisco for a couple days and could offer me thirty minutes of face time.

While I was waiting for her in a small conference room at the OneTaste office on Market Street, several young staffers came in to replace fresh flowers with fresher ones, straighten things up and lay out bottles of water. “Would you like Smart Water or sparkling?” one of them asked.

“Sparkling,” I replied.

By the time I’d taken a few sips, Nicole walked in wearing a silky black blouse over tightly fitting blue jeans. Her wavy blond hair cascaded over bare shoulders. After watching videos and seeing photos of her going back ten years, she looked younger and more relaxed than I’d expected. She walked past two arm chairs and sat next to me on a gray couch, turning her body towards mine.

Others had told me she was a smart, engaging, intuitive woman with an ability to draw out your story and connect it with her own. They were right. At first, I had to resist getting into my story, aware that I had three pages of questions to go over and only had thirty minutes to do it. We wound up talking for nearly two hours.

Much of the conversation revolved around her resistance and my insistence to describe what she does as a blending of sexuality and spirituality. At the time, I was working on a book project (later shelved) that explored that tantric territory and some of the more controversial characters tilling those fields. I kept pointing out to Nicole that the clitoris is a sexual organ. If the energy generated by stroking it is not sexual energy, then what is sexual energy?

While Nicole kept her pants on throughout our conversation, she insisted that what happens at her workshops was not that much different than what was happening during our meeting. Then she reached out and touched my arm.

“It’s like us,” she said. “Just sitting here. You’re changing my respiration. I’m changing yours. We’re meant to do that. It’s like a baby’s heartbeat matching a mother’s heartbeat when she’s put her against her chest. That’s what we were born to do.”

Nicole Daedone was born in 1967 in Los Gatos, a prosperous San Jose suburb. She was born again, so to speak, in the late 1990s, when she met a guy at a party who had an unusual come-on line.

“I’d like to introduce you to this sexuality practice,” he said. “You are going to take your pants off and I’m going to leave my clothes on. After fifteen minutes, you are free to go.”

Like other women who would try clitoral stroking with a stranger, Nicole didn’t feel much at first, but something kept inspiring her to come back for more. She wound up partnering with the guy from the party and studying the ins-and-outs of orgasmic response at “weird behind-the-door places.” One of those places was the home of an aging Ray Vetterlein, who we met earlier in this series.

“They had tapped into something at Ray’s house, and had begun to tweak it and work with it,” Nicole recalled. “Ray had this truly exquisite ability to see what was inside of me with such approval and just draw it out of me. He also had an incredible gift in terms of stroking. He brought that and I brought mindfulness.”

Ray also brought Nicole to Lafayette Morehouse to meet his mentor, Victor Baranco, shortly before Baranco died of pancreatic cancer.

“Vic said, ‘What do you want?’ I gave him my usual Buddhist answer, which was ‘to be enlightened.’ ”

Baranco rolled his eyes and asked again.

“I want to do what you do,” Nicole replied, “but my own version of it.”

So that’s what Nicole Daedone did. She and a group of like-minded orgasm explorers moved in together and started offering workshops. OneTaste Urban Retreat Centers opened for business in 2004. It was Baranco, she said, who convinced her to abandon her ideas about deepening her practice at the San Francisco Zen Center and taking Buddhist vows.

She told me that her goal, despite her first answer to Baranco, was not “enlightenment,” but creating “optimal states of consciousness.”

Nicole didn’t really want people to see OneTaste as “spiritual,” even though they call their practice “meditation” and the name of her company comes from something the Buddha purportedly said. “Just as the ocean has one taste, the taste of salt, so does the taste of liberation, the taste of truth.”

Rather than classifying her as part of the “mindfulness” movement, Daedone preferred to see OneTaste as an sensual expression of the “flow movement,” as in “go with the flow.”

“It’s not necessary to mystify these states and go through a guru and make it a complex thing,” she explained. “When Ray (Vetterlein) talks about ‘psychic energy fields,’ that sounds weird to me. I loved Ray, but I used to think, ‘These people are freaks.’ If there’s not science behind it, I’m not going to do it. Buddhism has a lot of science behind it.”

In our interview, I told Nicole what Travis Jones had told me about the manipulation and cultic tendencies he saw during the formative communal period at OneTaste. There was a pause in the conversation. Neither of us knew at the time that those tendencies would eventually get Nicole sent to prison.

“Maybe when he was there it was like that,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was doing. We didn’t know what we were doing. That’s the truest thing I can say. I’d had an experience that changed my life entirely. All I knew was I wanted other people to have it. There is no school for how you do that.”

“We got kind of weird and insular. That’s one of the reasons I stopped having the group homes,” she said. “I don’t want to be a guru. That’s the opposite of what I want.”

As for those who question the high prices for some OneTaste programs, Daedone noted that information about her techniques are available for free for anyone with an Internet connection.

“My only desire is to make it available,”she said. “I want to open source it.”

“One of the things that happens is that if anybody sees you as ‘spiritual,’ you’re supposed to be an ascetic and not really charge for it,” she added. “If I do business, I want to do it well. I want it done with consciousness and heart, and we do that.”

Perhaps Nicole protested too much when she told me she didn’t want to be a guru or start a new religion. Here’s what a couple former close associates say about that in Ellen Huet’s book, Empire of Orgasm — Sex, Power and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult, to be released on November 18.

“It was a religion,” one of them said. “Orgasm was God, and Nicole was like Jesus or Muhammad.”

“In Nicole’s mind, she’s the light, she’s the guru,” another added. “She’s the one who brings people to a higher level of consciousness…And I believe that she actually thinks she’s doing a good thing.”

So it seems like Daedone does fit into a Substack series titled “Messiahs I Have Known.”

In our 2016 interview, she was downplaying the spirituality and pushing a purportedly scientific agenda. Her future plans for OneTaste included sponsoring studies of what happens in the brains and bodies of research subjects engaged in orgasmic meditation. These clinical trials would employ body sensors and state-of-the-art brain scans, similar to recent studies of research subjects who are in deep meditative states or high on psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD.

OneTaste scientists will be picking up, Daedone said, where Masters and Johnson left off.

Daedone told me that she hoped the studies would explain the neuroscience behind the states of consciousness people report during orgasmic meditation. She said she’d wait for the research findings, then said she already knew what’s happening inside the OMing body and OMing brain.

“Your vigilance center is going down, your prefrontal cortex is going down. Your limbic system becomes far more active. You become more intelligent in a limbic way. You become more empathic,” she said. “You are rewiring for that connection.”

Daedone also said that she hoped to plough her profits into a clinic where OneTaste will “build the best medical trauma team in the world” to help people dealing with psychological problems caused by a history of rape or child sexual abuse.

“What I’ve devastatingly discovered in this work is how that is not uncommon. I hear these stories and am surprised that we’re as functional as we are,” she said. “You are walking into an internal war zone with some people. We can’t afford to be reckless.”

This was a deeply personal topic for Nicole Daedone. She said she had a major crisis in her life in the mid-1990s when she learned that her father — from whom she was estranged — had been convicted of child molestation and was dying of cancer in prison. While Nicole said at the time that she didn’t think her father molested her as a child, the news of his imprisonment was devastating, coming just a few days before he died.

Her life, she said, “crumbled,” and she wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to put the pieces back together.

“If this wasn’t going to kill me, what was I going to do?” she asked herself. “We have choice points like that in our life.”

Her turn to Buddhist meditation, and then orgasmic meditation, was a way to “turn poison into medicine.” She thought of a poem by David Whyte about how “this most painful thing can become your purpose.”

Twenty years had passed, she told me, twelve of them with newfound strength and purpose.

“There’s a level of freedom I have now,” she said, “that I couldn’t have imagined.”

Today, nine years after our encounter, Nicole Daedone must find that freedom inside a jail cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. That’s where she’s been since last June, when she was convicted of forcing devotees to perform grueling labor and sexual services.

At this writing, she and her former CEO are still awaiting sentencing. They could face up to twenty years in federal prison.

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Thanks for reading. Messiahs I Have Known will continue next week with Chapter Four, Verse One, the story of my encounter with J. Krishnamurti, the reluctant messiah of the Theosophy movement. If you’re a free subscriber and enjoying these posts, please consider upgrading to paid for just $5 a month or $50 for a year.