Hamza Tayeb was one of the few named sources in the 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article about OneTaste. Ellen Huet states, “[Nicole] Daedone heard Tayeb’s story and said the mother’s choice to have the child shouldn’t dictate his choices. She absolved him of responsibility toward his son.” Although Huet interviewed the mother of Hamza’s child for the article, from what the mother told us, it appears that Huet did not ask her perspective about Hamza’s relationship with his son. If she had, Huet would have gained a completely different perspective.
We asked the mother of Hamza’s child if what the Bloomberg article alleges was true, and this is what she said:
Do you think that Nicole is the reason why [Hamza] made the choice that he made?
Oh, if anybody has, like, things to say about this one, it’s us [the mother and adoptive father]. That’s a big fat no. There is zero percentage of me that blames Nicole for my son not having a proper, like close, relationship with his father.
And why, why do you not blame Nicole for that?
Because it predates this whole, the whole relationship predates her, like the like before we even walked into OneTaste in the first place.
In addition to the mother of Hamza’s child disputing Hamza’s stated excuse for not having a relationship with his child, conflicting with Huet’s account, Hamza himself wrote a blog post in days after Huet’s article came out, rejecting the allegation that Nicole had absolved him of parental responsibility. In the blog post, Hamza said:
There is abundant evidence that Nicole and OneTaste were supportive of family relationships and parental responsibility. For example, when asked by a student in 2014 how he should reconcile his personal desires and the needs of his family, Nicole said: “Here’s where the real work is. This is where desire is a practice as opposed to desire being just indulgence.
The real work is to massage through this new awareness that you’ve gotten and this very real responsibility and love for your children and I would say, your potential ex-wife. And, here’s where people stop because the power of desire has an element of ‘I want what I want’ in it. But the adult form has, ‘and what I want is for everyone in my sphere to win.’ There is some way that those children, in my realm, they cannot lose because of orgasm, that’s not acceptable.” (Orgasm in this context refers to the father’s decision to pursue an interest in the practice and philosophy of Orgasmic Meditation).
Before her article was published, OneTaste introduced Ellen Huet to two former OneTaste customers, both of whom are fathers. They each have told us that when Huet spoke to them, they formed a clear impression she was not interested in their experiences of how OneTaste had supported their responsibilities as fathers and improved their ability to show up for their children.
One man said, “At the time, I was pretty much caring for my daughter as a single parent. And someone from OneTaste asked me if I [could] speak to this journalist about what it’s like to be a father and be heavily involved with the OneTaste community, which I was very prepared to do…when I left the call, I remember thinking that was kind of useless because she didn’t really care about any of what I had to say.” When asked about why he thought his interview was not included in Huet’s article, he said, “In my personal opinion, it felt like the article took a really biased direction.”
Another man said, “I told Ellen that Nicole certainly recognized that my children are a big part of my life and as a critical part, and she supported that, and she supported me. And also that self-development work I did through OneTaste and OM made me become more of the father than I ever knew I could be.”
He went on to say, “My ex-wife told me the other day, she’s like, ‘you’re now more the man that I knew was in there but never seemed to have actually had access to before.’ And she’s just, like, shocked on the floor that I’m so much more of a father and present and with the kids than I ever was …. before doing Orgasmic Meditation.”
