Despite fabricated evidence, DOJ sticks with 'orgasm cult' forced labor case
An appellate court recently expedited its consideration of a defense writ petition about prosecutors' use of internal OneTaste documents. Trial is scheduled to begin May 5.
Federal prosecutors in New York recently ended a months-long argument when they admitted that evidence in a criminal case against the founders of a sexual wellness company is fabricated.
But the argument over what should happen to the case still is brewing, and defense attorneys say key information about what happened is wrongly hidden from the public.
U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati has not yet addressed a defense request to un-redact the public version of prosecutors’ March 12 letter acknowledging the inauthenticity of journals purportedly written by former OneTaste Inc. employee Ayries Blanck. Gujarati also has not said if she’ll hold the hearing that defense lawyers say is needed to uncover the extent of possible prosecutorial misconduct.
“We are aware of no case in which the government has confessed on the eve of trial that its key witness manufactured evidence intended to frame defendants,” Celia Cohen and Michael P. Robotti of Ballard Spahr LLP wrote in a March 23 letter. “Yet, rather than acknowledging its case’s collapse and joining the defense in pursuit of the truth, the government opposes further scrutiny.”
Prosecutors told Judge Gujarati the journals weren’t key to the case, and their decision not to call Blanck as a witness moots concerns about their inauthenticity.
“As the Court is aware, the instant case is not based on the testimony of any single witness or any single piece of evidence,” according to a March 25 letter from Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gillian Kassner, Kayla Bensing, Nina Gupta and Sean Fern.
The judge on Thursday ordered prosecutors to confirm by the end of Monday whether they relied on the fabricated journals when securing the grand jury indictment that was filed in 2023. Prosecutors filed their response under seal.
Attorneys for Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone still hope Judge Gujarati will dismiss the charges. But they also have another path they hope will stymie a trial scheduled to begin in May, and it involves their appeal of Judge Gujarati’s rulings that internal OneTaste records taken by a former employee can be evidence in trial. The 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said this week that the writ petition will go to a three-judge panel “as early as” the week of April 7.
Juda Engelmayer, a public relations specialist working with OneTaste, called the appellate court’s decision to expedite its consideration of the petition “a major development.”
“This case continues to raise novel questions about DOJ conduct, privilege boundaries, and the future of corporate legal protections in federal investigations,” Engelmayer said in an email.
‘Prosecutors did not uncover the truth’
Cherwitz and Daedone are charged with a single count of forced labor conspiracy related to their work at OneTaste, a company focused on orgasmic meditation.
A BBC podcast in 2020 called “The Orgasm Cult” and a Netflix documentary in 2022 focused on complaints from former and current employees about sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The indictment says the women “together with others, obtained the labor and services of a group of OneTaste members by subjecting them to to economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse; surveillance, indoctrination; and intimidation.”
But in what The National Law Review described as a “prosecutorial first,” the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t include another charge related to the substance of the conspiracy. Blanck’s journals appeared to be key evidence as late as October 2024, when prosecutors said in a court filing that the journals detail Blanck’s “relationships with the defendants and their co-conspirators, financial condition, and psychological state during and shortly after the time she performed labor and services in connection with the charged conspiracy.”
Prosecutors eventually backed away from the digital versions of the journals but defended the authenticity of Blanck’s handwritten journals until a March filing announced an abrupt about face.
“The government no longer maintains that the disputed portions of Blanck’s handwritten journals are authentic,” according to the eight-page letter from Assistant U.S. Attorneys Gillian Kassner, Kayla Bensing, Nina Gupta and Sean Fern.
Defense attorneys called for the case to be dismissed and for Blanck to be prosecuted. They also called for an evidentiary hearing into the conduct of an FBI agent who they believe tried to cover up the fabricated evidence.
Prosecutors called the allegation “baseless” and said FBI agents couldn’t read Blanck’s hard drive because it was formatted for Macintosh computers and the FBI “employs a Windows operating system.”
They also said Blanck never actually sent an email to an FBI agent that the defense said prosecutors never disclosed in discovery.
“As an initial matter, the government no longer intends to call Blanck, as the government has previously informed the Court,” prosecutors wrote. “In any event, the government confirmed through a diligent search that the email identified by the defense was a draft email that Blanck did not send. Accordingly, the suggestion that the email was “missing” or otherwise “deleted” is inaccurate.”
Judge Gujarati gave the defense until March 27 to file motions, prompting the defense to again ask for a hearing. The March 23 letter from Cohen and Robotti reminded the judge that the trial would have commenced in January had Chertwiz’s lawyer not been replaced “on the eve of trial.” Had that occurred, “the government would have introduced Blanck’s perjured testimony and falsified exhibits.”
“Although the government has now admitted as much, its delayed admission is its own fault,” Cohen and Robotti wrote. “The government insists it ‘repeatedly pressed’ Blanck for the truth, but the prosecutors did not uncover the truth. The defense did.”
‘An alarming pattern of misconduct’
Defense attorneys have long said the prosecution of Cherwitz and Daedone blurs the lines between evidence and entertainment. They said months ago that Netflix filmmaker Sarah Gibson was among the editors of Blanck’s journals, and prosecutors’ acknowledgment that even the handwritten journals were fabricated prompted them to seek more information from Gibson as well as the news organization Bloomberg L.P. and the law firm Reed Smith LLP.
They’re looking for connections between the media and FBI Agent McGinnis, and they said the filmmakers apparently acted as “de facto government investigators, influencing the stories of film participants turned witnesses and urging their participation in the FBI investigation.”
“In light of this intimate relationship, Defendants should be permitted to seek records and communications (detailed infra) between the above-named individuals/entities and government witnesses and FBI personnel,” according to a March 22 letter from Daedone’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean of Bonjean Law Group, PLLC. “This is particularly so where an alarming pattern of misconduct on the part of FBI agent McGinnis has emerged in these proceedings.”
Prosecutors said McGinnis had “no involvement with the film or any other news or media report about OneTaste,” Bonjean said, but the defense doesn’t “share their view of McGinnis’s veracity.”
“McGinnis is an agent who, inter alia, suggested that witnesses disband their email accounts, directed witnesses to evade civil discovery, obtained critical evidence without inventorying it into a chain of custody for months, used a private Gmail account for communications with one or more witnesses, and concealed exculpatory material that would have discredited the Blanck’s journals months ago,” Bonjean wrote in an 11-page filing on March 22. “This is all in addition to his misconduct of directing another witness to provide stolen attorney-client privileged documents to him on a thumb drive that has since gone missing (material that was never provided to a filter team) and plainly relied on to build a fabricated case against the Defendants.”’
Bonjean said the information “has only come to light through the investigation of dogged defense counsel — not because Brady obligations were adhered to,” referring to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors give the defense potentially exculpatory evidence.
Bonjean said she has emails showing Blanck told McGinnis shortly after the Netflix film premiered that OneTaste had sued her. Blanck told him she learned of the lawsuit through Ellen Huet, whom Bonjean describes as “the Bloomberg journalist who had written highly negative, and false, articles about OneTaste.”
Bonjean said McGinnis “clearly knew who Huet was.” She wants to subpoena Bloomberg for communications about OneTaste involving “any member of the prosecution team” and Huet and any other employee or contractor of Bloomberg.
Bonjean said the information “is not protected by any journalistic privilege.”
“As an initial matter, the documentary is not ‘journalism.’ Instead, the ‘documentary’ was clearly designed to make news, not report on news,” Bonjean wrote. “It was a biased and misleading portrayal of OneTaste — based in significant part on a fictitious diary supposedly written by Ayries Blanck in 2015 but actually written by multiple people (including a filmmaker Gibson) in 2022 — rather than an objective, truthful portrayal of newsworthy events.”
They also want communications between Blanck’s lawyers at Reed Smith and federal agents.
“Such communications are not privileged and may contain relevant information about the fabricated journals and other evidence,” Bonjean wrote. “Notably, since the government conceded that the journals were fabricated, Reed Smith has indicated that it intends to withdraw as Blanck’s counsel and counsel for Autymn Blanck has filed a motion to withdraw from the civil litigation.”
Prosecutors had not responded to the request as of Monday.
It’s not the first time defense attorneys have tried to subpoena Bloomberg.
Last year, prosecutors asked Gujarati to quash subpoenas to Vice Media, Playboy Enterprises, BBC Studios America Inc., Bloomberg and Netflix. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy deferred ruling after prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to meet and confer.
‘It is time that the public learns the truth’
Defense attorneys say prosecutors are improperly withholding information from the public by redacting parts of their letter telling Judge Gujarati the journals were fabricated.
Blanck’s false statements about the journals were “designed to secure a wrongful conviction,” so prosecutors “should not be permitted to shield those statements any longer,” Cohen and Robotti wrote in a March 14 letter.
“It is time that the public learns the truth about Blanck’s lies and the misrepresentations that have been made about the journals for years, including in a widely disseminated Netflix film,” Cohen and Robotti wrote.
On Monday, Cohen and Robotti asked Judge Gujarati to allow them to review the minutes of the grand jury proceedings, which they said qualifies as potentially exculpatory material under Brady v. Maryland “because it demonstrates the unreliability of the investigation and government’s failure to ask any questions concerning key evidence in this case.”
“While the government argues that its decision not to rely on the journals or to call Blanck solves the issues in this case, the government misses the point,” according to a three-page letter. “This entire case is infected by Blanck’s lies and her fabricated evidence because they formed the basis for this indictment.”
Judge Gujarati said during the last hearing on Feb. 26 that she doesn’t “intend to issue any other rulings in advance of trial based on what has been presented thus far.”
“Of course, I will continue to entertain appropriate requests, including on issues that arise before or during trial,” the judge said, according to a court reporter’s transcript.
Gujarati is a Yale Law School graduate and former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who was nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump in 2020. President Barack Obama also nominated her in 2016, but she was not confirmed.
Defense attorneys hoped the 2nd Circuit would stay the Cherwitz’s and Daedone’s trial as it considers the writ petition challenging prosecutors’ use of OneTaste company documents. The court rejected the stay request, but it granted the request to expedite and the announcement that a three-judge panel will consider the petition by April 7 shows the court realizes its decision will affect the trial.
I’ll continue to follow this case, including the 2nd Circuit petition, and will email another update soon.
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