B (45:27)
Yeah, I mean, in her formative years, Nicole experimented with a lot of drugs. Like, there are people who told me she used meth. She has spoken about using copious amounts of lsd. She had a period of time when she was a sex worker. She has described it as being an escort as well as a stripper. And she has talked about those formative experiences later when she was, like, coaching and leading and lecturing to her onetaste students. And so there was this idea that her life was often something to be mimicked as a way to, again, get to the kind of transformation that she had access to. And then she would also make more explicit prescriptions and stuff for her students. So, for example, some of the. What I would call an extreme behavior in the sense of that it's. That's not meant to be a judgment, but it's just more intense than kind of what the average person does. So within the one taste community, Nicole would sometimes give assignments, Nicole and other leaders in which, you know, they were kind of handed out casually, but a lot of people really wanted to do them, in part because it was a chance to, like, impress Nicole with your dedication or how much you were, like, a big player in this game that they were all playing. So an example assignment would be like, oh, your orgasm seems really blocked up these days. You should go and have some sex with 30 different men in the next 30 days. And, okay, there were some women who described receiving an assignment like that within one taste and doing it and maybe finding some value in it, but also really confronting afterward being like, that was really intense. I'm not sure, like, how I felt about that. Other women described, like, starting it, being, like, really overwhelmed, stopping. So, again, it's like no one was, like, capital F forcing the completion of these assignments. But those women would describe to me how ashamed they felt that they couldn't finish. Finish it. So you can sense that social pressure of, like, you were so approved of and celebrated if you did this thing and you were kind of seen as like, oh, she tried, but she couldn't really hang. She, like, couldn't do it. You know, people described. Yeah. Other assignments where, like, in classes that they would be, you know, assigned. Like, okay, you need. You two need to go off and, like, have sex in the corner while these other two people go do this other sexual act together as. Just as a way of loosening people up. So there was this sense that these kind of. Of, like, behaviors would lead to, again, sexual and spiritual growth. But they were often quite confronting. And in more serious arrangements, there was, you know, something that later came up in the criminal trial is that in order to support the business, Nicole, in the late 2000s, made an arrangement with a venture capitalist who she met, named Rees Jones, who was her boyfriend for a period of time. He was also interested in one taste. They supported the company financially by lending them money, paying for business expenses. And in exchange, this is according to. To court testimony and what people have told me. There was an arrangement set up where he was repaid in sexual favors from OneTaste employees. So that looked like either these elaborate immersive theater BDSM experiences that were put on for his birthday. Imagine, like, a whole cast of actors recreating, like, a sexual scene for an audience of one. And then those were sometimes themed after the wizard of Oz or the seven deadly sins. And then there was another system which was. Was essentially that a series of female OneTaste employees were asked to serve as sexual handlers for Mr. Jones, which meant that they would do something like live at his house, do some housework, maybe take care of his dog, and then also sexually service him every day. That often looked like a hand job, or it could be like some sort of other sex act. And keep in mind that for the women who did that role at the time, that they accepted, they also thought of it as an honor within the community. This idea that it meant that you were helping the business thrive and you were close to Nicole because all of a sudden, you had this relationship with romantic partner. And it's a very confusing setup within one taste, but you can see how it ties back to, again, Nicole had been a sex worker. There was a lot of discussion within the group that, like, this kind of exchange of Sex for money wasn't bad. And I mean, that's also up for debate kind of like more broadly. But this idea that within one taste, they tried to teach you you could have sex with anyone, and that it was better to, again, let go of your preferences and, like, lean into your aversions and be open and not resistant. All these things, like, like, helped fuel this system that then led to financial support for the company. So to bring us ahead to current day or close to it, the company was active from 2004 to, you know, into the late 2010s. And in 2017, that's when I first heard about the company. They had actually pitched me to write a story about them because I was covering startups at the time, and they were like, oh, we're like a sexual wellness startup run by women. Like, are you interested? And so I met with their leadership and I learned a little bit about the company. And that's when I also started poking around on my own and finding people who said, like, actually, I'd had a terrible experience with this company. There's this whole side to it that has never been made public. Like, I want to tell you more. So of course, I spent several months, like, really digging into it. I ended up writing this big investigation in 2018 about these allegations that Onetaste was a cult and about these allegedly predatory financial and sexual practices that we haven't even really touched on the finance stuff, but people say that they were pressured to take on debt in order to buy expensive Onetaste courses. That's essentially it. And after that first story came out, a few things happened. I started to hear from sources that the FBI had started investigating that FBI agents were showing up at the houses of former OneTaste members and asking them about what had happened at OneTaste. And they were essentially trying to figure out, like, how to crime happened here. And at the same time, Onetaste went into hibernation for a couple years. They were trying to, like, figure out how to respond to this kind of, like, new era of coverage for them that went on for several years. Like, the FBI actually investigated for about five years. During that period of time, I was also working on what would eventually become this book, and all these things were happening in tandem. And then eventually, in 2023, federal prosecutors charged Nicole and Rachel Churwit, her second in command as former head of sales, with a federal crime, forced labor conspiracy. And that essentially means, like, two or more people conspired to try to obtain labor from people in an unlawful way. So in this specific case, it was through serious harm or threats of serious harm, that kind of thing. And serious harm can be physical, but also psychological, Financial, reputational, et cetera. And, you know, I was really shocked that charges were filed against these people, because I knew it was a possibility, but it just. I wasn't sure if it was going to happen. And then that kicked off all these legal proceedings that eventually led to a criminal trial in Brooklyn this past summer, where for five or six weeks, a jury heard all these presentations about OneTaste, and they, at the end of the trial, found Nicole and Rachel guilty of this crime. And so the two women were actually taken into custody the next day, and they're currently in a federal jail in Brooklyn awaiting sentencing, which could come in early 2026. We just don't know exactly when.
