Federal Trial of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz Begins Soon
The federal jury trial of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz is set to start in less than a month in Brooklyn.
Defendants Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone
The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York has charged the two women with one crime: conspiracy to commit forced labor. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison.
This is the first time the Department of Justice has charged anyone with a single charge of conspiring to force labor without also accusing them of actually forcing someone to labor.
Without having forced anyone to labor, the case has no victims—only potential victims. The prosecution cannot have it both ways. You cannot fail to charge forced labor, then claim you have victims of forced labor, a crime you did not charge, and therefore do not have to prove forced labor—just call people victims in front of the jury.
No, it doesn’t work that way.
The EDNY’s Unique Legal Approach
No, the U.S. EDNY is going for new grounds. The U.S. EDNY likes to do that. They have some pretty accommodating judges—many of them former prosecutors—who don’t mind making life a little easier for prosecutors everywhere by setting new precedents.
In this case, prosecutors may have depended too much on a friendly judge. Though U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati was a prosecutor, she appears to be weighing on the side of reasonable neutrality so far in the OneTaste prosecution.
Of course, it is still too early to judge if prosecutors can get away with a standalone forced labor conspiracy and how hard they will try to conflate forced labor conspiracy with forced labor to a beleaguered and usually intimidated federal jury.
Brooklyn as the Surprising Trial Venue
But this is Brooklyn, which is why this case is being tried at all. The company is based in San Francisco, and in San Francisco, it would be hard to find a jury too shocked by women having a little more sex than they should be allowed to have in, say, Brooklyn.
For that is what the case is about, really. Sex. Women having sex. And the potential victims of forced labor—of which we know of one—are victims of having sex.
Sex they maybe later regretted.
Nobody alleges anyone forced anyone to have sex. But this was San Francisco mores on sex as tried in Brooklyn.
OneTaste’s co-founder, Nicole Daedone and public demonstation of OM
And the watery charge—the standalone charge—all the prosecutors have to prove (hopefully, for them) to the most prudish Brooklyn jury they can find is that the two women—Daedone and Cherwitz—conspired to commit forced labor, to try to scheme up a way to force some women and a few men to have too much sex, some of it kinky, as they do in San Francisco.
EDNY’s History of Poaching Cases
Yes, it is curious. None of the conspiracy allegedly happened in Brooklyn, but the EDNY are great poachers. They like to take alleged crimes that allegedly happen all around the country and try them in Brooklyn before friendly judges and jurors tailored for shock.
They took Douglass Mackey from Republican-mixed Palm Beach County to Brooklyn with its Republican-rare jurors to charge him with a crime targeting Democrat voters.
Douglass Mackey to 7 months in prison for his role in a conspiracy to interfere with potential voters’ right to vote in the 2016 election.
They snatched Carlos Watson from San Francisco and Keith Raniere out of Albany with the thinnest of nexus to Brooklyn. Daedone and Cherwitz may never have set foot in Brooklyn, but that is where they are being tried.
Carlos Watson is being sentenced Monday, December 16 by EDNY Judge Komitee
The Forced Labor Charge: A Watery Claim
But any way you slice it, the prosecutors do not have to prove forced labor. And if there is no forced labor, there can be no victim of forced labor. At best, the prosecutors have potential victims or intended victims—like the star of the conspiracy show, Jane Doe #1.
The charge, as contained in the indictment, is that two women—Daedone, the founder of OneTaste in San Francisco, and her head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, also in San Francisco—conspired from 2006 to 2018, for 12 years, to force certain potential victims to labor, but apparently failed. The only known so-called “victim-witness” the prosecution has disclosed by name is Jane Doe #1—whom the prosecutors revealed last week is Ayries Blanck, who uses the aliases Ares Milligan, Cassidy, and Diana and currently lives in Ireland.
Up until last week, the prosecution referred to her as a victim-witness. Now they, perhaps cognizant that there can be no victims of a crime that was allegedly only planned but not committed, identify her by her next-to-last name, Ayries Blanck.
Ayries Blanck worked for OneTaste in 2014. She quit in January 2015. She left behind a journal now at the center of the OneTaste case.
The Journal at the Center of the Case
The entire unprecedented case may turn on journal entries that prosecutors say Ayries wrote in 2015, shortly after she left the employment of the defendant’s sexual wellness company, OneTaste Inc.
In our next installment of “The Journal Is Key“, Frank Report will look at the journal entries, which the defense attorney for Daedone, Jennifer Bonjean, has called “fabricated evidence.”
On the other hand, the prosecutors are standing by their woman—Ayries Blanck—and her journal entries, dated 2015, which the prosecutors are sure she wrote in 2015. According to court filings, they plan to use it as their bombshell evidence (it is so well-written).
Ayries Blanck’s journal made its debut on November 5, 2022.
Defense Challenges the Journal’s Authenticity
The defense claims Ayries did not write her journal in 2015, just after she left OneTaste—and maybe did not write it at all. But whoever wrote it did not write it until 2022, and Ayries or whoever wrote it wrote it for a Netflix documentary.
Which is the truth? We aim to find out.
