The US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York has charged Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz with a single count of forced labor conspiracy. If convicted, the women face up to 20 years.
Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 is similar to Franz Kafka’s The Trial, because, like in the novel, the real-life prosecutor, US Attorney Breon Peace, will not tell the defendants what they actually did. He told them the name of the crime and heaped a pile of steamy conclusions into Indictment 1:23-cr-00146, but from it, no one, including the defendants, can have the remotest idea of what they have done that is criminal.
Presumed Guilty: The Prosecution’s Approach
In Indictment 1:23-cr-00146, the defendant is presumed guilty. We told you the crime, forced labor. You figure out the rest.
I imagine that if the prosecutors would speak candidly to the defendants, they would say:
You are indicted. Do not spend much time in discussion with defense lawyers. All their advice and all that they do manage to achieve will be unpleasant and useless. Not knowing this, you probably just want to throw everything away, leave it to the defense attorneys, and lay at home in bed and hear nothing more about it. But that, of course, would be the stupidest thing you could do, and you wouldn’t be left in peace in bed for very long either.
As Kafka, whose world we have modeled our Brooklyn justice system, said, people under indictment are better moving than at rest, since at rest you may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with your sins.
You should be seeking a plea deal, first and foremost. You do not need to bother the court for the details of the crime. Prosecutors don’t make mistakes. Do not think you can appeal for justice to the court. The court has nothing for you. It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.
It will end in court with you in handcuffs after the judge sentences you, and we will own you then as we do now. Only if you fight, we will own you longer. There will be a penalty for going to trial.
Take my warning to heart instead, and don’t be unyielding in the future. You can’t fight the Department of Justice. You must confess to guilt. Make your confession at the first chance you get. Until you do that, there is no possibility of getting out of our clutches. None at all.
The Odds of Justice
The prosecutor would not be 100 percent right if he told Daedone the above. There is a slight chance in court: The Department of Justice can boast a 98 percent conviction rate. That means an indictment and a conviction are 98 percent synonymous. That’s almost infallibility.
That means that if we interpret the name – the US Department of Justice – in any manner other than in an Orwellian sense, we must believe that power does not corrupt. It only makes prosecutors better at divination.
So, Daedone and Cherwitz do not need to know what they have done. They are 98 percent convicted anyway.
Frankly, when reading Indictment 1:23-cr-00146, I urge readers to enter the Kafkaesque world of the presumption of guilt towards the defendants. Otherwise, it will be hard to refrain from laughing.
Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 is like presenting an empty pie tin sprinkled with cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger and an apple worm, and calling it apple pie.
Dirty Them Up: The Prosecution’s Strategy
You might think that in writing this article, I am using a tactic the prosecutors used in writing Indictment 1:23-cr-00146, which is to “dirty up” the defendant. Prosecutors do this by reciting legally irrelevant facts to make the defendant look dirty, while skipping what they did that was actually a crime.
But I do not want to do that. I want you to sympathize with the prosecutors. So let me tell you a story. Stanley Ellin wrote The Question. Though I probably forgot a few details, it goes something like this:
The Question
A prosecutor confides to his son that the system is based on plea bargains and conviction stats. Sometimes, in the line of duty, he must indict an innocent man.
His son looks at him in a strange sort of puzzled way. “Only a duty? But you enjoy it, don’t you?”
That was the question he asked.
You enjoy it, don’t you?
The prosecutor ruminates:
You stand there with a universe of discretion.
You look through mountains of documents and decide who to charge, knowing the defendant will have tortured nights and frightened days and spend every dollar to stay out of prison, spend their children’s college funds, and mortgage their home.
You stood there 1000 times, looking at the evidence, thinking how so many facts can show guilt or innocence depending on how you spin them. And you got to be good at spinning, almost too good. So, you figure you must just leave it to the defense to do their spinning, and you do yours.
And console yourself with the fact that if innocence was painstakingly spared, many guilty people would be spared. Ten guilty people would go free just to spare one innocent from prison. The Department of Justice measures its success based on conviction stats, numbers, and percentages of accused who are convicted (98 percent). It would be in shambles if prosecutors were concerned with innocence.
But people do not understand that we are saddled with a godawful name—the Department of Justice. It should be called the Department of Prosecution.
My mind recalls the proffer sessions. The door across the room opens. The defense lawyer brings a defendant in. Usually, he is in a daze. He sees FBI agents and prosecutors as nine feet tall. He starts to sweat. Sometimes, he cries and throws himself at our mercy. Sometimes, they bring in a woman. They all cry when they realize we have the advantage if it goes to trial. It is not easy to have control over the fate of one human being. I have had control over the fate of a thousand. So many. I have forgotten their names.
After we make the plea bargain, I continue my duties.
At the sentencing, I find my eyes glued to the defendant until it is time to argue for longer prison than the defense wants. Then I look straight at the judge. Sentencing is an emotional scene beset with sorrow, tension, and fear.
When the judge sentences the defendant and signals the marshals to handcuff and shackle the slumping man, his family cries. They look at me like I’m to blame.
I have seen it 500 times. They handcuff and shackle the man, and 70 percent of the life current of the body takes a hit of depleting air. Rumpled, shrinking, reduced to barely filling the clothes he came to court in. The head hangs low.
I bow my head, too, in the somber moment, cognizant of the awesome power of the prosecutor.
Sure, sometimes you suspect in the recesses of your mind that he might be innocent, but you banish that specter. There is no way to always know. It is not your job to know. Your job is to prosecute.
What you do know is that when you decide to indict a man, you can see in your mind what the hurtling power of indictment does to any person, and sad as it may sound, it means the innocent get caught in the net, too. This is the price society pays to keep our nation safe.
So, yes, I have had to look at the haunting face of the innocent man hauled away to prison, his life and his family shattered – from my choice to indict him.
Enjoy it?
That was the question my son asked me. That is what he asked, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down that we all have.
Enjoy it?
My God, how could anyone not enjoy it?
Dirty Up the Defendants With Dirty Legal Sex
So refreshed by that short story, let us look at indictment 1:23-cr-00146 and watch the prosecution dirty up the defendants.
According to the indictment, Nicole Daedone’s company, OneTaste, Inc.,
“promoted itself as a sexuality-focused wellness education company” and “generated revenue by providing courses, coaching and events related to… ‘wellness practices’ in exchange for a fee”.
Among those “wellness” practices, and it is right at the top of the Indictment – “high up” as we used to say in journalism – is “orgasmic meditation, (‘OM’) a partnered practice typically involving the methodical stroking of a woman’s genitals for a period of fifteen minutes. “
Sex. The indictment starts with sex.
But this is not a sex crime indictment. True, the defendants don’t know what kind of labor they allegedly forced anyone to do, but this isn’t a sex trafficking case.
The indictment does not allege that Orgasmic Meditation is a crime because it is not.
It would be hard to make a case that women are victims, since women, as infantile as the law presumes them to be, pay money to attend classes to learn about orgasmic meditation.
In commercial sex, which is a crime, it is the woman whose task is to stimulate a man’s genitals.
At One Taste, women do not stroke men. Men stroke women.
The men are not victims for the simple reason that while the law assumes women are infants, it assumes men are adults, and when they do something they consent to do, it is not a crime.
Since everyone is an adult who practice Orgasmic Meditation. and, there are more women than men in classes, we can assume that the one and only specific thing in the indictment is a legal practice and is there to “dirty them up.”
Where’s the Beef?
So what did Deadone and Cherwitz do that is a crime?
It might help if we knew when. Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 narrows it down to a 12-year window. Somewhere, sometime, “In or about and between 2006 and May 2018,” the defendants forced a person or persons into labor.
But the prosecutors do not tell us who, how many or what year. We also do not know what anyone was forced to do.
Conclusory Allegations
The prosecutors allege, without evidence, the conclusions that a jury would decide after hearing the evidence. Daedone and Cherwitz “subjected” someone to “economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse; surveillance; indoctrination; and intimidation.”
How they did this, when they did it, what they did and who they did it to, we do not know.
Grooming Adults
Nicole Daedone
Then, the indictment returns to dirtying up the defendants.
“OneTaste members engaged in sexual activity at the direction of the defendants.”
They “recruited and groomed OneTaste members to engage in sexual acts with OneTaste’s current and prospective investors, clients, employees and beneficiaries, for the financial benefit of OneTaste and, in turn, the defendants.”
You can groom a dog or a horse. You can groom a child, and if it leads to sex, it is a crime. But these are adults. How do you groom an adult into having sex that is a crime?
You can’t.
If grooming adults to have sex is a crime, half the married people in the world are criminals. After all, they call them grooms.
The indictment never says who Daedone groomed to engage in sex acts, or with whom or how it relates to forced labor. No example is given.
For example, Adam engaged in a sexual act with Eve (who was to blame), and she was an employee of Moses who was going to invest with Sarah in a company that taught about female orgasm. But Jacob was only testing the product when he was forced to stroke Naomi because Rebekah engaged in a sexual act with Paul, who gave the defendant a coat after Ayries lost her boyfriend to Leah.
But Audrey fell down dead drunk and sued the ground for hurting her. She would not have had a drink if the defendants hadn’t groomed her into believing that it is more enlightening to be stroked than to stroke.
So, it was forced labor?
Ugly Dirty
Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 continues in its own bizarre, ridiculous vein:
Daedone “instructed” the “OneTaste members to engage in sexual acts they found uncomfortable or repulsive as a requirement to obtain ‘freedom’ and ‘enlightenment’ and demonstrate their commitment to OneTaste and DAEDONE.”
Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 is a model for something prosecutors have long wished to do: ban unconventional thinking.
Is it illegal to have sex with someone ugly?
Did they enjoy it? Did anyone wear a bag over their head? Was Elijah a six when Audrey, who never sleeps with anyone less than a nine, was instructed to engage in a sex act? Or was he a five, and she wanted an eight unless Audrey is drunk, or he has a lot of money? Then she’ll go down on a four unless he has a nine-figure net worth, then it’s a two.
But she wasn’t drunk.
Is that forced labor?
We don’t know. The names are missing. How many times it happened is also missing. In fact, the indictment does not say it ever happened. It just says Daedone encouraged them.
A math question on an IQ test: Twelve OneTaste students were encouraged to engage in sex acts with a butt-ugly person, and eight of them had a notion to do it. How many engaged in the sex act?
The answer is none.
Still, if this is a crime, who is the victim, the one who had to engage in sex acts with someone ugly or the one engaged in – the object of the “victim’s” cruel definition of ugly?
Legal Analysis
This is a brave new frontier for the law.
It raises so many good legal questions that it may survive being preposterous, and the fact that the prosecutors put it in an indictment for no other reason than to dirty up the defendants.
Did they find the ugly person attractive in the morning?
What if one person obtained nirvana by having sex with someone repugnant?
Would they still need to shower?
Did they use contraceptives?
A rubber glove?
What if Daedone told them that if they did not stroke, they’d go blind?
What if the girl was ugly, but she had a sense of humor, and he forgot her looks and got to know her on a different level?
Did anyone engage in sex acts a second time after finding him repulsive the first time because it was fun?
Or he was nice? Or they got past superficial attraction and found something different?
Was the forced labor with ugly people because there was no beer?
The prosecutors will have to show the faces of the allegedly ugly to prove the case.
What if they are not that ugly? Does the jury acquit?
Indictment Says the Darndest Things
Indictment 1:23-cr-00146 is preposterous, because it makes no solid allegations, but only wild and silly statements that deserve to be laughed at.
Even trying to take it seriously, how did Daedone force grown adults to engage in uncomfortable sex acts?
She was not armed. There were no threats of gunplay or brute force. Did she beat them with an ugly stick?
No, according to the indictment, she told them they might get enlightenment.
But prosecutors say, without citing a single instance, that “resistance to the directives of the defendants was not tolerated.” They do not say what resistance is or how it was not tolerated. Or who offered what kind of resistance, and what was the result? There were no murders, deaths, or physical beatings.
But we have the good word of the prosecutors that the defendants subjected unknown victims of unknown resistance to unknownL
“public shame, humiliation and workplace retaliation.”
And “employed harassment and coercion to intimidate and attack OneTaste members perceived to be enemies and critics.”
Coercion. Intimidate. Attack. But how?
Encourage them to engage in sex acts with someone attractive, and not get liberation?
Coercion, Retaliation, Intimidation, Shame, Indoctrination, Surveillance: It makes the acronym CRISIS. But who is having the crisis — the prosecutors?
Witchery
I can write the indictment better and more to the point:
Alleged: Daedone made a pact with the Devil to indoctrinate adults into having sex with ugly people by threatening them with nirvana. Daedone came to victims in a dream with a black cat and a mole where the Devil suckled.
She conducted Sabbaths, where they engaged in sex acts with unhandsome men with gloves who rubbed them the wrong way.
Yeah, I hear you laughing at the prosecutors.
But I know you wouldn’t have become interested in this case of your own free will, and you would never have lost any sleep over the shortcomings of this indictment if I hadn’t groomed you.
You’re here for prurient interest, for the fun of seeing someone punished, especially if they are dirty, and the prosecutors show they are (the defendants, not the prosecutors) instead of telling the defendants what they did that was a crime.
So, in our Kafkaesque Brooklyn way, let us lay at home in bed and hear nothing more about due process.
The Uncommonly Pure
Whatever a prosecutor may be, he is a servant of the Law; he belongs to the Law and is beyond our judgment.
Among our governmental authorities, the prosecutor is the only one immune from corruption. Police, Judges, Senators, Congressmen, Mayors, yes. Even Presidents can be corrupt. Only prosecutors are to be always believed.
But even you are smart enough to know that nobody is that good, not 98 percent good.
What if someone called their bluff?
What if Daedone depends on the jury, or if that fails a single juror? It is enough to think that maybe one or two of the jury will think the matter over and vote to acquit for the woeful lack of evidence – even if Daedone is a certified witch.
What if the indictment is a bluff, and there is nothing but silly prudery, and prosecutors enjoy bluffing two innocent women into confessing even if they don’t have evidence of a crime?
My God, how could they not enjoy it?
