In June of 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published an “exposé” of OneTaste. We found their depiction of our organization unrecognizable. Our rapidly growing education company and personal empowerment movement — formed to help people grow and heal — had been flipped upside down and cast as one organized to exploit and harm. 

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The reporting in the June 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article, October 2018 Playboy article and the November 2020 BBC podcast is underpinned by the false notion that Nicole Daedone enriched herself.

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Underpinning the negative media coverage of OneTaste following Ellen Huet’s June 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article is the imputation that OneTaste exploited staff and students for money, to get rich. She reported, based on accounts of a few disgruntled and mostly unnamed former employees, that OneTaste “ran on predatory sales” and that “management pushed employees to stop caring about their own money” and “used the workers to bring in more of others’ cash”.

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There is a narrative in the media that OneTaste exploited customers for money, and forced them to sign up for courses they could not afford or did not want to be enrolled in. Bloomberg’s Ellen Huet describes it as, “Some former members say it pushed them into sexual servitude and five-figure debts.” Nastaran Tavakoli-Far in the BBC podcast said about OneTaste, “Their sales tactics were often described as predatory people would be pressured into paying tens of thousands of dollars for courses.”

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The narrative in the media is that OneTaste had “predatory” sales practices. Ellen Huet wrote in her June 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article, “many who’ve become involved in the upper echelons describe an organization that they found ran on predatory sales and pushed members to ignore their financial, emotional, and physical boundaries in ways that left them feeling traumatized.”

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Reese Jones is an inventor, former venture capitalist and technology futurist. He was instrumental to the establishment of OneTaste Inc as an innovative business operating in support of the OneTaste community. Reese helped introduce many of the measures that ensured OneTaste was a safe and entirely consensual adult environment for personal exploration and development. Early safety policies he championed remain in place today. These include no drugs, alcohol, weapons or minors allowed in or around OneTaste events, courses and activities.

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The 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article featured a woman named Michal as a primary source. The article kicked off with the allegation that Michal felt “compelled” to get married. This could not be further from the truth. Here are the facts about the relationship between Michal and her boyfriend, who became her fiancé and then her husband. 

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Ellen Huet’s 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article on OneTaste made further assertions about the primary named subject, a woman named Michal. Huet reported “OneTaste quickly swallowed Michal’s life. She quit her teaching job, gave her dog to her parents, and moved into a crowded OM house in Brooklyn to sell OneTaste classes.” Michal’s decision to move into an OM house was from her own enthusiastic desire and volition, and not coerced or encouraged by OneTaste. 

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Hamza Tayeb was one of the few named sources in the 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article about OneTaste. Ellen Huet states, “[Nicole] Daedone heard Tayeb’s story and said the mother’s choice to have the child shouldn’t dictate his choices. She absolved him of responsibility toward his son.” Although Huet interviewed the mother of Hamza’s child for the article, from what the mother told us, it appears that Huet did not ask her perspective about Hamza’s relationship with his son. If she had, Huet would have gained a completely different perspective. We asked the mother of Hamza’s child if what the Bloomberg article alleges was true and this is what she said:

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A frequent media strategy to discredit OneTaste and Nicole Daedone is to allege that OneTaste was a cult or religion which treated Nicole Daedone as a prophet or cult leader. This is a very confused distortion of the community culture that OneTaste was advocating. 

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Several of the negative media reports on OneTaste focus on so-called “aversion” practice. This is something they claim OneTaste encouraged . For example, Ellen Huet writes in her June 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article: “‘Aversion practice’ is the company’s teaching that you gain power and expand your orgasm — within the group, a broad term for sexual energy — by performing sexual acts you don’t want to do, or doing them with people you find disgusting.”

This is wildly inaccurate.

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Ellen Huet claims in the 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article that people had a “relentless” schedule at the OM houses. Huet claims: “Life at the OM house was relentlessly scheduled. Every morning at around 7 a.m., staff convened for two rounds of OM, switching partners midway.”

This is not accurate.

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Nicole Daedone, the founder of OneTaste, is the subject of a 2022 Netflix film called Orgasm Inc.: The Story of OneTaste. Nicole was the founder and teacher of OneTaste from its inception in 2005 through 2017 when she sold the company. In Orgasm Inc., an August 2013 clip filmed in Manhattan is shown of Nicole speaking to a room full of advanced students where she provocatively jokes, “Ok, this joke is so funny. This is going to be our new shirt: ‘I got raped and all I got was a victim story.’ Or it could be like, ‘I raped someone and all I got was a perpetrator story.’” This was a teaching technique meant to shock the students and open them up to reframing their perceptions about a sensitive topic, not a heartless joke made at the expense of the suffering.

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The second out of context quote used in Orgasm Inc. is plucked from the same August 2013 lecture as the first. This excerpt, where Nicole Daedone says to a room of advanced students, “If you want to know the real way to deflect rape, it’s to turn on 100% because then there’s nothing to rape” has a few ideas to unpack.

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In May of 2022, VICE aired an episode on OneTaste, in which a key theme repeated throughout the episode was the allegedly unknown whereabouts of Nicole Daedone, OneTaste’s cofounder, who they suggested had fled the country. Given the formulaic nature of their “reporting”, this narrative is as predictable as it is wrong.

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In its attempt to portray OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone as an emotionally abusive sadist, Netflix’s Orgasm Inc. relies on cleverly edited video as well as misinformation related by a primary source. In terms of the footage, a clip is shown at 1:02:18 that shows Nicole, expressionless, speaking seemingly harshly to a man in front of her. She speaks each statement using a neutral tone while the man in front of her replies with a similarly neutral “thank you”. While this exchange seems to confirm what the filmmakers want you to believe about Nicole being cold and abusive, the rest of the footage from that situation paints a strikingly different picture.

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I met Nicole Daedone on a dating site in 2013. My profile identified me as a black queer woman. Our initial contact on the site blossomed into a distance friendship over the course of nearly a year. I eventually came to visit Nicole in person and was introduced to OneTaste at that time. Shortly thereafter, I was hired by OneTaste to be an executive assistant. I had neither participated in OneTaste courses nor tried the practice of OM before taking this position. I had, however, read Nicole’s book Slow Sex roughly two years prior to meeting her online. Reading that book was part of my journey to explore my attraction to women more deeply and courageously.

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In November 2020, the BBC published the inventively titled podcast The Orgasm Cult, a ten-part “true crime” style audio drama on OneTaste narrated by Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. The podcast includes false and distressing allegations, further exaggerating and adding to the false allegations originally published by Ellen Huet of Bloomberg Businessweek in June of 2018.

Read the full article here.

Both the BBC’s podcast and Netflix’s movie about OneTaste accuse OneTaste and its co-founder Nicole Daedone of teaching and condoning male predation through a concept called the Beast. These media pieces rely on scant evidence aside from often anonymized quotes from second or third-hand sources claiming knowledge of alleged abuse.

Read the full article here.

In November 2020, the BBC published an inventively titled podcast “The Orgasm Cult,” a ten-part “True Crime” style audio drama on OneTaste narrated by Nastaran Tavakoli-Far. The podcast includes a number of false and distressing allegations that build on false allegations originally published by Ellen Huet of Bloomberg Businessweek in June of 2018.

Read the full article here.