Did America incarcerate a health pioneer before the science had a chance to mature? OneTaste’s CEO believes the organization’s growing body of research, public-service work and pending federal appeal demand a second look.
Anjuli Ayer does not have the luxury of running an ordinary health and wellness organization.
Ordinary CEOs worry about growth, product quality, partnerships, public trust and the future of their brands. Ayer has to do all of that while Nicole Daedone, the founder of the practice at the center of OneTaste, sits in federal prison and the word “cult” follows nearly every public discussion of the company.
The easier business decision might have been to change the name, bury the history and pretend the practice arrived from nowhere. Ayer has done the opposite.
She believes Daedone was prosecuted under a distorted theory that ignored the truth about the organization, the voluntary experiences of thousands of participants and the scientific research that was already underway. She also believes OneTaste cannot build a serious future by running from its past or treating its founder as an inconvenience.
“The practice saved my life,” Ayer said publicly after Daedone and former OneTaste executive Rachel Cherwitz were sentenced. Her job now is to make sure the public understands why she said it.
A CEO With Two Jobs
Ayer and her partners acquired OneTaste in 2017, and she assumed the CEO role the following year. She did not enter the company as a distant investor looking for a distressed brand. She had experienced Orgasmic Meditation, commonly called OM, and believed its effects on attention, intimacy and emotional connection deserved serious study.
Today, she effectively has two jobs.
The first is to grow an organization devoted to teaching OM as a structured, 15-minute attention practice conducted within a defined consent protocol. That means expanding access, training practitioners, supporting credible scientific inquiry and building an institution capable of surviving beyond the personality of any single founder.
The second is far more difficult: challenging a public narrative that has already hardened into accepted fact.
Daedone and Cherwitz were convicted in June 2025 of conspiring to obtain forced labor. Prosecutors argued that OneTaste used psychological, sexual and financial coercion to extract work from employees and participants. In March 2026, Daedone was sentenced to nine years in federal prison and Cherwitz to 78 months. Their appeal is pending before the Second Circuit.
The conviction is real. So is the appeal.
Ayer is not pretending that a federal jury did not reach a verdict. She is arguing that the government turned a complicated community of adults, relationships, work arrangements and unconventional spiritual ideas into a forced-labor conspiracy without proving the kind of force most Americans would ordinarily associate with slavery or human trafficking.
That distinction is now part of a wider legal debate. Religious-liberty scholars and advocates have warned that an expansive definition of psychological coercion could eventually be used against religious, therapeutic and intentional communities whose members later regret their participation. OneTaste is not itself a religion, but critics of the prosecution argue that the precedent may reach far beyond this one organization.
The Science Did Not Go to Prison
The most important part of Ayer’s argument may not be found in the courtroom record at all.
It is found in laboratories.
Researchers have used functional MRI and PET imaging to study the neurological effects associated with OM. The published findings do not reduce the practice to either conventional meditation or ordinary sexual stimulation. Instead, the researchers observed a hybrid pattern containing characteristics associated with both meditative practices and sexual response.
Other research has examined whether practitioners report experiences resembling the “mystical” states studied in connection with meditation and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Additional studies have explored emotional affect, partnered attention and the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and arousal in a structured, consensual setting.
None of this proves that OM is a medical cure. Ayer does not need it to.
Science rarely begins with certainty. It begins with a signal worth investigating.
A small Phase 1 pilot trial studied OM among participants experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress. The trial was unblinded, uncontrolled and involved only 28 participants, so it cannot establish clinical effectiveness. It was primarily designed to evaluate safety and feasibility. The researchers nevertheless reported substantial reductions in measured PTSD symptoms, including a 47% decline described by the organization supporting the research. The published paper concluded that further research was warranted. The study also disclosed that the Institute of OM Foundation commissioned and helped design the research and that several researchers had prior experience with the practice, factors that make independent replication especially important.
That is not a reason to dismiss the results. It is a reason to test them more rigorously.
Ayer’s position is straightforward: when preliminary research produces potentially meaningful results, the responsible response is more research, not ridicule.
The human accounts behind the data are equally significant, although they should not be confused with clinical evidence. Combat veterans Bob Sabado and Andy Garcia have publicly described OM as helping them reconnect with emotions that trauma had shut down. Garcia, who served a 13-month combat tour and was medically discharged with PTSD, said the practice helped him stop feeling “like a machine.”
Those stories do not prove that every person will have the same experience. They do, however, complicate the easy caricature of OM as nothing more than a sexual gimmick or manipulation device.
The Evidence That Changed Before Trial
Ayer’s concern about the prosecution is also rooted in what happened to some of its most explosive evidence.
Before trial, journals attributed to a key government witness had been publicly presented as contemporaneous records of her time inside OneTaste. Excerpts appeared in the Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc.: The Story of OneTaste and helped shape the public understanding of the organization.
The witness later acknowledged that she had created the documents years afterward. Prosecutors informed the court that they would not use the journals at trial, and the witness was ultimately not called.
To Ayer, that should have caused a much broader reconsideration of the case.
It did not.
The prosecution continued under a forced-labor theory rather than charging Daedone or Cherwitz with a sex crime. The government prevailed, but Ayer believes the original cultural narrative remained embedded in the proceedings even after one of the most damaging pieces of public evidence collapsed.
This is where her role as CEO and her advocacy for the defendants become inseparable.
Ayer is not merely trying to rehabilitate a founder’s reputation. She believes the same narrative that helped produce the prosecution continues to interfere with the public’s ability to evaluate the practice, the science and the organization fairly.
The Work That Continued
While the criminal case consumed most of the attention, organizations influenced by Daedone’s work continued operating outside the courtroom.
Unconditional Freedom reports that its Art of Soulmaking curriculum has reached more than 250,000 incarcerated people through tablets distributed across more than 1,500 correctional facilities in 48 states. Those are the nonprofit’s own figures, but the scale reflects a program that has grown far beyond a small local experiment.
Its Prison Monastery model began with programs at the Mendocino County Jail and later expanded to the Central California Women’s Facility. The model combines contemplative practice, restorative justice, writing, yoga, gardening and other forms of structured personal development.
At the women’s facility, the program was introduced into a housing unit associated with high levels of violence. According to the organization, women from other units soon began requesting transfers into it. The model was later discussed in The Criminologist, the publication of the American Society of Criminology, in an article co-authored by Marcus Ratnathicam and Kate Feigin.
Daedone’s influence can also be found at Free Food Harlem, where guests experiencing food insecurity are served chef-prepared meals in a restaurant-style setting at Emanuel AME Church.
The distinction matters. Guests sit at tables with cloth napkins, flowers and attentive service. The concept is not merely to provide calories, but to provide dignity. The program reports serving more than 700 meals each week while also offering culinary training and employment pathways for people affected by the justice system.
In January 2026, The New York Times featured the program in an article titled “In a Harlem Church, a Free Three-Course Dinner, No Questions Asked.” The model was subsequently recognized on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
None of these programs resolves the legal questions surrounding OneTaste. They do, however, run against the idea that everything connected to Daedone’s philosophy was designed merely to exploit people.
For Ayer, the programs represent the practical expression of the same underlying idea: sustained attention and human connection can restore dignity to people who have been treated as disposable.
Growing Beyond the Scandal
OneTaste says approximately 35,000 people participated directly in its programs during its earlier years, while its books, videos, digital courses and mobile applications reached a much larger audience. The organization also says more than 100 outside teachers participated in its courses and that Daedone earned approximately $48,000 annually during the years she ran the company.
Those are company figures, and Ayer understands they will be scrutinized. Her challenge is to build the kind of organization that can withstand that scrutiny.
Growth, in this context, cannot simply mean selling more courses.
It means defining the practice clearly. It means maintaining explicit consent standards. It means supporting research that can be reviewed, challenged and replicated by scientists with no organizational connection. It means separating health claims from marketing language. It means creating training standards that do not depend on charisma or personal loyalty. It also means allowing former participants to describe negative experiences without automatically treating every criticism as an attack.
Those steps are not concessions that the prosecution was correct. They are the responsibilities of an organization asking to be taken seriously.
Ayer’s long-term strategy appears to be built around proof rather than persuasion alone: publish the research, strengthen the institution, make the practice accessible within clear boundaries and allow the results to be examined over time.
She is also refusing the standard crisis-management advice to say as little as possible about the people who came before her.
Daedone remains part of the story.
From prison, she has continued writing and organizing meditation practices among incarcerated women. Her book, Jailbirds in Flight, presents prison not only as punishment but as another setting in which women can attempt to recover agency, attention and inner freedom.
Whether the public views that work as inspiring or self-serving will depend largely on what it already believes about her. That is precisely the problem Ayer is trying to confront.
The Question That Remains
History is filled with unconventional thinkers whose ideas were initially rejected and later reconsidered. It is also filled with charismatic figures whose claims did not survive serious examination.
Ayer is not asking OneTaste to be placed automatically into the first category.
She is asking that it not be permanently assigned to the second before the science, the appeal and the organization’s continuing work can be evaluated honestly.
The ultimate question is not whether every criticism of OneTaste was false or whether every person had a positive experience. No organization involving thousands of people could credibly make that claim.
The question is whether the government accurately distinguished criminal coercion from influence, persuasion, belief, demanding work and voluntary participation in an unconventional community.
It is also whether a sensational cultural narrative became so powerful that contradictory facts no longer mattered.
More than a year after the convictions, Ayer continues running an organization that many people expected to disappear. The research continues. The prison programs continue. The meals continue to be served. People continue to seek out the practice.
A federal jury has spoken, but the courts have not spoken for the final time.
Neither has the science.
For Anjuli Ayer, building OneTaste is no longer simply a business challenge. It is a test of whether an organization can survive a verdict, confront its failures, defend the people it believes were wrongfully prosecuted and still create something credible enough to be judged by what it does next.
Medical note: Orgasmic Meditation is not approved by the FDA to diagnose, prevent or treat PTSD or any other medical condition. The scientific research discussed above remains preliminary and should not replace professional medical or mental-health care.
