The 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek article featured a woman named Michal as a primary source. The article kicked off with the allegation that Michal felt “compelled” to get married.
“When Michal got married in August 2015, her family and longtime friends didn’t attend. The woman who walked her down the aisle, the dozens of beaming onlookers, her soon-to-be husband — all were people she’d met in the preceding 10 months. Wearing a loose, casual dress borrowed from one of her new friends, Michal spent the ceremony in a daze. She knew she didn’t want to get married like this, in the living room of a rented San Francisco house without her family’s support, yet she felt compelled to do it.”
This could not be further from the truth. Here are the facts about the relationship between Michal and her boyfriend, who became her fiancé and then her husband:
Michal first met the man who would ask her to marry him at a OneTaste coaching program in March 2015. Less than 10 days later, they were flirting on FaceBook. In July 2015, he proposed to her.
When describing the new relationship, Michal, originally a school teacher who relied on her family’s financial support, said to friends in June 2015, “I got swept up and unconscious in this new kind of relating that I never had before. I got intoxicated on his attention and financial help.”
Far from being ‘compelled’ to marry, these photos and texts from Michal at the time paint a very different picture.
Shopping for wedding rings In July 2015.
In August 2015, Michal texted a friend saying she was very grateful and that her fiancé’s mother had given her a family engagement ring.
When Michal and her fiancé attended a OneTaste Intensive course in August 2015, Nicole Daedone emphatically encouraged Michals’ fiancé to allow himself to slow down and to feel free to not make anymore big life changes. And to practice saying no to things. Below is a transcript:
I am not an advocate of quitting your job. Keep that stuff as long as you can, there will come a point, likely my guess is, where you can’t stand being there. But, like, if you want to be there, be there as much as you humanly can. Like, you’re going through big changes, you need familiar things to support those changes, huge change. I mean, like, it’s crazy, the changes you put yourself through. So I want to make sure anything that’s familiar, is there to hold you. So this idea of you supporting her and not like throwing shit to the wind and the New York team and stuff? Don’t do it! I mean, that’s my thought: you can do whatever you want, of course, but I want to confirm you’ve moved very fast.
Yes, I got excited about slowing down.
Yeah, yeah, let’s slow down, let’s integrate you. Like if you don’t do anything if you don’t grow not another frickin inch in this, like if you just lie with your binky, that’s awesome because you’ve been going so fast and so hard that you’ll end up blowing everything up if you don’t, like all these radical awesome changes you’ve made will blow up, yeah. I want you to practice not doing anything you don’t want to do. If you don’t want to get up and have breakfast with the group, don’t. If you don’t want to go to yoga, don’t. If you want to sleep on the chair over there instead of in bed, then you do that. I’m like, this is your safe zone. And any flak you get, you have me as your bodyguard during these two weeks so that you can practice doing that.
There is copious evidence, including (but not limited to) text messages, photographs, Michal’s personal written accounts, video interviews, and written testimony from people with direct knowledge of the circumstances and events surrounding their wedding, all of which suggest the couple was very much in love, and eager to be married. These facts contradict Huet’s narrative that Michal was compelled to get married.
In fact, as evidenced by testimony from Michal’s friends with direct knowledge, she was being counseled to slow down and consider not rushing into marriage. For example:
A OneTaste staff member suggested the couple simply have a ceremony and wait to officially get married later and that Michal was emphatic that she wanted to get officially married. While they were getting dressed for the event, the person who officiated the couple’s wedding came to Michal and her fiancé separately and reminded them that marriage was a serious commitment that would take dedication and work and that Michal and her fiancé both told her emphatically that they wanted to do it.
OneTaste had invited a licensed spiritual practitioner with Agape Spiritual Center in Los Angeles to the course who offered her services to Michal.
A close friend and roommate of Michal has gone on record saying that Michal excluded some of her closest friends at OneTaste from the bridal party because she felt that they were being unsupportive of her desire to get married.
A close friend of Michal’s fiancé has said that the staff of OneTaste counseled both Michal and her fiancé not to rush into marriage, but they were set on the idea. According to the friend, “We said several times that maybe they weren’t making the best decisions, and they were just really excited about what they were doing…I felt really quite…angry about it that that’s how everything got portrayed, as if Michal was a victim of OneTaste, and everybody was out to get her. And [her fiancé] was just some guy whose money she used…[t]he two of them thought they were very much in love.”
These are some photos of Michal and her fiancé. You can judge for yourself whether they look like people who are being compelled to marry:
This is a save-the-date that Michal and her fiancé sent out to their friends from OneTaste in October 2015 after they left OneTaste. They still had intentions of being married, even after they had left OneTaste and had no involvement with the company.
Two months after Michal and her husband left OneTaste, they broke up, also without any involvement from OneTaste. Michal described what happened in this text to a friend:
The narrative that Michal was compelled to get married and, therefore, traumatized is completely false.
While Michal’s husband makes only nameless appearances in the Bloomberg article as a “man who worked in tech” and Michal’s “soon-to-be husband,” he was actually well-known to Ellen Huet. He and Huet were friends. This relationship was not disclosed in the article. We have been advised that in cases like this, failing to disclose such a relationship is a breach of journalistic standards.
Huet knew, and her editors at Bloomberg knew or should have known, that she had undisclosed close relationships with a key source, which we believe led to biased and inaccurate reporting. We have raised this serious issue of journalistic standards directly with Bloomberg’s standards department but to no avail.
