NEW YORK (AP) — The leader of a sex-focused women’s wellness company that promoted “orgasmic meditation” was sentenced Monday to nine years in federal prison for a scheme that a judge said exploited vulnerable women and coerced them into performing sex acts with the company's clients and investors.
Nicole Daedone, co-founder of OneTaste Inc., was also ordered to forfeit $12 million, and seven victims were awarded roughly $890,000 in restitution, federal prosecutors said.
“Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation and it is a crime that causes harm to vulnerable victims,” Joseph Nocella, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York said in a statement.
Daedone declined to speak in federal court in Brooklyn on Monday, but one victim told the judge that she had believed in Daedone's “so-called feminist mission” only to be “left with significant financial damages and emotional harm,” the Daily News reports.
“In reality, I fell into Nicole’s trap,” the woman said, according to the newspaper. “I was the perfect target.”
U.S. District Court Judge Diane Gujarati, in handing down her sentence, said Daedone didn't appear remorseful as more than two dozen supporters turned out for the packed hearing.
“What she was doing wasn’t about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension,” the judge said, according to The New York Times. “It was criminal.”
Prosecutors had sought a 20-year prison term for Daedone, arguing in presentencing court filings that her scheme left “scores of victims financially, emotionally and psychologically scarred.”
“Daedone and her co-conspirators exercised control through economic pressure, psychological manipulation, physical exhaustion and emotional degradation, leaving behind a trail of financial ruin and lasting trauma,” prosecutors wrote.
Her lawyers argued that imposing a lengthy imprisonment would be “bonkers” as they sought a term of around two years for Daedone.
They noted that the 58-year-old New York resident had no prior criminal record and that more than 200 people had submitted letters to the court “attesting to her character, her generosity, and her positive influence.”
“She has lived an uncommon and impactful life, and she is deeply respected by people from all walks of life, including many entirely unconnected to OneTaste,” the defense lawyers wrote in their sentencing memo.
Among those who penned letters of support was Van Jones, a CNN correspondent and former adviser to President Barack Obama. He described Daedone as “a woman of uncommon wisdom, grace and moral courage” who has “dedicated her life to helping others find healing, empowerment and a deeper sense of human connection.”
Actor Richard Schiff, of the television series “The West Wing,” wrote that Daedone was deserving of the court's leniency because she has “spent her life trying to bring compassion, awareness, and honesty to a part of human experience that is often shamed or misunderstood.”
Daedone's lawyers said after the sentencing that they're focused on appealing her conviction and that she's been teaching meditation to other inmates at the federal detention center in Brooklyn since her conviction last June on a charge of forced labor conspiracy.
Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz has said he'll also seek a pardon from President Donald Trump for Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, the company’s former sales director.
Cherwitz was sentenced to six and a half years on Monday for her role in the scheme. Her lawyers didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
During the roughly one-month trial, prosecutors said the two women ran a yearslong scheme that groomed adherents — many of them victims of sexual trauma — to do their bidding.
They said Daedone and Cherwitz, 45, used economic, sexual and psychological abuse, intimidation and indoctrination to force OneTaste members into sexual acts they found uncomfortable or repulsive, such as having sex with prospective investors or clients.
The two told followers the questionable acts were necessary in order to obtain “freedom” and “enlightenment,” and to demonstrate their commitment to the company’s principles.
One of Daedone’s lawyers, meanwhile, cast her as a “ceiling-shattering feminist entrepreneur” who created a unique business centered on women’s sexuality and empowerment.
Daedone co-founded OneTaste in San Francisco in 2004 as a sort of self-help commune that viewed female orgasms as key to sexual and psychological wellness and interpersonal connection.
A centerpiece was “orgasmic meditation,” or “OM,” which was carried out by men manually stimulating women in a group setting.
The company enjoyed glowing media coverage in the 2010s as a cutting-edge enterprise that prioritized women’s sexual pleasure, and quickly opened outposts from Los Angeles to London.
Daedone sold her stake in the company in 2017 for $12 million — a year before OneTaste’s marketing and labor practices came under scrutiny.
The company’s current owners maintain its work has been misconstrued and that the charges against its former executives were unjustified.
FILE - Nicole Daedone, center, founder and former CEO of OneTaste, departs Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday, June 13, 2023 in New York. (AP Photo/Jeenah Moon, File)
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday threatened to target Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the country's desalination plants. Such a move — and Iran's possible targeting of the plants of its Gulf Arab neighbors — could have devastating impacts across the water-starved Middle East.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said if a deal to end the war isn’t reached “shortly” and the Strait of Hormuz, where much oil passes via tankers, is not immediately reopened, “we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched.’”
The biggest danger, analysts warn, may not be what Trump could do to Iran, but how Tehran could retaliate. Iran relies on desalination for a small share of its water supply while Gulf Arab states depend on it for the vast majority.
Hundreds of desalination plants sit along the Persian Gulf coast, putting individual systems that supply water to millions within range of Iranian missile or drone strikes. Without them, major cities — such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates or Doha, Qatar's capital — could not sustain their current populations.
“Desalination facilities are oftentimes necessary for the survival of the civilian population and intentional destruction of those types of facilities is a war crime,” said Niku Jafarnia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.
After a fifth year of extreme drought, some Iranian media reports say reservoirs supplying Tehran, the country's capital, are below 10% capacity. Satellite pictures analyzed by The Associated Press also show reservoirs noticeably depleted. The country still draws most of its water from rivers, reservoirs and depleted underground aquifers.
Israeli airstrikes on March 7 on oil depots surrounding Tehran produced heavy smoke and acid rain. Experts warned the fallout could contaminate soil and parts of the city’s water supply.
“Attacking water facilities, even one, could end up being harmful to the population in such a severe water scarcity context,” Jafarnia said.
Before the war that Israel and the United States launched on Feb. 28, Iran had been racing to expand desalination along its southern coast and pump some of the water inland, but infrastructure constraints, energy costs and international sanctions have sharply limited scalability.
In Kuwait, about 90% of drinking water comes from desalination, along with roughly 86% in Oman and about 70% in Saudi Arabia. The technology removes salt from seawater — most commonly by pushing it through ultrafine membranes in a process known as reverse osmosis — to produce the freshwater that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture across one of the world’s driest regions.
Even where the plants are connected to national grids with backup supply routes, disruptions can cascade across interconnected systems, said David Michel, senior fellow for water security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“It’s an asymmetrical tactic,” he said. “Iran doesn’t have the same capacity to strike back ... But it does have this possibility to impose costs on the Gulf countries to push them to intervene or call for a cessation of hostilities.”
Desalination plants have multiple stages — intake systems, treatment facilities, energy supplies — and damage to any part of that chain can interrupt production, according to Ed Cullinane, Mideast editor at Global Water Intelligence, a publisher serving the water industry.
“None of these assets are any more protected than any of the municipal areas that are currently being hit by ballistic missiles or drones,” Cullinane said.
The Gulf produces about a third of the world’s crude exports and energy revenues underpin national economies. Fighting has already halted tanker traffic through key shipping routes and disrupted port activity, forcing some producers to curb exports as storage tanks fill.
“Everyone thinks of Saudi Arabia and their neighbors as petrostates. But I call them saltwater kingdoms. They’re human-made fossil-fueled water superpowers,” said Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. “It’s both a monumental achievement of the 20th century and a certain kind of vulnerability.”
Trump’s comments came as the conflict intensified, with Tehran striking a key water and electrical plant in Kuwait and an oil refinery in Israel coming under attack, while U.S. and Israeli forces launched a new wave of strikes on Iran.
A 2010 CIA analysis warned that attacks on desalination facilities could trigger national crises in several Gulf states, and prolonged outages could last months if critical equipment were destroyed. More than 90% of the Gulf’s desalinated water comes from just 56 plants, the report stated, and “each of these critical plants is extremely vulnerable to sabotage or military action.”
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested in pipeline networks, storage reservoirs and other redundancies designed to cushion short-term disruptions. But smaller states such as Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait have fewer backup supplies.
Desalination has expanded in part because climate change is intensifying drought across the region. The plants themselves are highly energy-intensive and emit massive amounts of carbon, while their coastal locations make them vulnerable to extreme weather and rising seas.
During Iraq’s 1990-1991 invasion of Kuwait, retreating Iraqi forces sabotaged power stations and desalination facilities, said Low, from the University of Utah, while millions of barrels of crude oil were deliberately released into the Persian Gulf, which threatened seawater intake pipes used by desalination plants across the region.
Workers rushed to deploy protective booms around the intake valves of major facilities but the destruction left Kuwait largely without fresh water and dependent on emergency water imports. Full recovery took years.
In recent years, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have targeted Saudi desalination facilities as tensions escalated.
International humanitarian law, including provisions of the Geneva Conventions, prohibit targeting civilian infrastructure indispensable to the survival of the population, including drinking water facilities.
Follow Annika Hammerschlag on Instagram @ahammergram.
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FILE - Workers walk in an area at a degassing station in Zubair oil field, whose operations have being reduced due to the Mideast war triggered by the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, near Basra, Iraq, March 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)
FILE - The Mina Al-Ahmadi oil refinery operates in Kuwait, March 20, 2026. (AP Photo, File)
FILE - A man rides a bike as fires and plumes of smoke rise after debris from an intercepted Iranian drone struck an oil facility, according to authorities, in Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri, File)
FILE - Two women from the Iranian Red Crescent Society stand as a thick plume of smoke from a U.S.-Israeli strike on an oil storage facility late Saturday rises into the sky in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)
FILE - Smoke rises from an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, Beirut's southern suburbs, March 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar, File)
FILE - The Sorek desalination plant operates in Rishon LeZion, Israel, May 4, 2014. (AP Photo/Dan Balilty, File)
