In June of 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published an “exposé” of OneTaste. We found their depiction of our organization unrecognizable. Our rapidly growing education company and personal empowerment movement — formed to help people grow and heal — had been flipped upside down and cast as one organized to exploit and harm. We understood the seriousness of the allegations; we knew them to be untrue. There is consensus among experts that when criminal allegations are presented, one should go silent. Having never experienced anything of this nature, we listened to conventional wisdom.
We believed the storm would pass and that the truth of our mission and conduct would prevail. We were wrong. As time passed, the storm seemed to pick up strength. Soon, other media outlets repeated the falsehoods and added to them, relying on questionable sources and little to no factual evidence. In fact, a number of those sources have complained to us about being misquoted or taken out of context. We have remained silent about our side of this story, the story of OneTaste, for over four years.
We feel we cannot remain muted any longer. Being truthful and forthcoming is embedded in all we do, and despite the significant risks associated with sharing our side of the story, we know that the path to transformation must begin with raw honesty. We are here now to set the record straight. We trust that sharing information, evidence, and our perspective will inform how you read these “news” accounts. We have tried to share this information with the reporters involved. They were not interested, so we’re going directly to you, our larger community, and the public in hopes that making these facts public will start the process of telling the complete story of OneTaste.
The development of the practice of Orgasmic Meditation (OM) and the creation of OneTaste as an expression of the philosophy of OM has always been a means for women to cultivate their deepest power. It is our belief and experience that so much of this power comes from accepting all of ourselves, including those parts that society might consider off-limits. We intentionally created a clean, well-lit space to expose the beauty in what had been deemed dirty. We cultivated an environment rooted in the fundamental principles of safety, respect, and consent, where people could explore for themselves a place rich in creativity and self-experimentation.
Participation was always voluntary, and those who chose to explore their own boundaries and push back against societal norms about women’s power felt comfortable doing so. Over two-thirds (67%) of OneTaste customers found the company through word of mouth. OneTaste sponsored a reconciliation council comprising of a specialist and two attorneys for its community and an ombudsman for its staff. In every instance where an issue was brought to our attention, we addressed it directly and with great care for the individuals concerned. To report otherwise is simply inconsistent with the facts.
Our silence thus far should not be construed as agreement with the false narrative about OneTaste. We were in uncharted territory and decided to follow the consensus of experts. We worked tirelessly to objectively evaluate our organization and the broader OneTaste community in order to understand the genesis of the false reporting. We dove deep to try to make sense of what had happened.
Dozens of OneTaste students and staff went back and reviewed text messages, emails, and Facebook chats about the events in question. We conducted an extensive review with former employees and customers who had direct experience with the people and events said to have occurred. We hired skilled, independent third parties to review all our sales transactions, our profit and loss statements, our refund policies, sales training, and more.
We needed to look at as much verifiable information as we could to know if anything had happened, and if it hadn’t, then we endeavored to understand the sources and motivations for the false allegations. After our thorough and exhaustive internal review, we came to understand that while we experienced the ordinary growing pains of any rapidly growing business, the egregious conduct alleged in the media is entirely false. We will share some of our findings with you.
We were heartened by the support we received from our community when we reached out for information. Many had already recognized the reporting as erroneous. We have attempted to share this verifiable information with the various media outlets and journalists that have adversely reported on OneTaste. To date, none have removed or corrected demonstrable falsehoods. Our decision to report the facts directly to the public was born out of frustration with the media’s lack of concern about the truth.
The allegations against us were horrifying, and we took them seriously. Claims that OneTaste coerced or forced people to do anything against their will are false and unsubstantiated. From the beginning, we put systems in place to protect all of our customers and staff, especially women. Consent was our central tenet and was taught and ingrained in all our teachings, from the most basic introductory class to our most advanced offering.
For example, throughout the time we offered classes, every single person who walked through the door was taught the importance of a “red, yellow, green” system: a universal shorthand for anyone to communicate if they were feeling good, feeling uneasy, or wanted to stop whatever they were doing. This was just one of many mechanisms to make OneTaste a safe environment. This was paramount to the practice because we believe that to benefit from OM, everyone needed to feel safe. Women’s empowerment demands that each woman have and use their voice and be able to say yes or no. Without safety, there is no empowerment.
We knew we had the proper procedures and rules in place in part because, as we’ve said, you cannot benefit from the practice without feeling safe, and therefore, the entire practice was designed, from day one, to operate in accord with this central principle.
We had to ask ourselves: if we had the protocols in place, maybe they weren’t working? Evaluating the effectiveness of our protocols became the focus of our internal review. We gathered as much verifiable information as we could. And what we have confirmed with our outside experts working to review everything we could find over the past four years is that our commitment to women’s safety and power was unwavering and that the mechanisms in place did, in fact, create a safe and healthy environment.
The facts the media left out of their storytelling are essential to understanding and contextualizing what actually occurred. We can now demonstrate that the events reported in the media accounts have been wildly misrepresented or didn’t occur at all.
As you read this blog, you will notice that the reported stories are almost exclusively predicated upon after-the-fact reflections, regrets, and personal grievances of only a small handful of individuals who have taken our courses or worked for us. The media reports contained almost no reference to contemporaneous evidence backing up their sources’ claims, and the little that was included was inaccurate.
We can only guess that when the reporters heard allegations of criminal activity, coercive behavior, or slimy business tactics, they took the sources at their word and did not verify them with corroborating evidence — texts, emails, police reports, invoices, paystubs, timecards, tax returns, internal records, marketing materials, or job postings.
In the case of the most serious allegations made in the BBC podcast, it appears that no attempt was made to verify claims with individuals accused of terrible actions, which is simply astonishing. Below, find a brief overview of the factual errors reported. More detailed future blogs will flesh out these facts.
All of the reporting is underpinned by the incorrect assertion that the company’s founder, Nicole Daedone, was taking advantage of employees and customers for her personal financial gain. Fortunately for us, that’s a really easy one to prove entirely false. Had any of these reporters asked questions about Daedone and her financial success, they would have learned that Daedone’s average salary and total compensation over her 14 years at OneTaste were well below average for San Francisco.
Her top salary and total compensation in her final years at OneTaste were equivalent to an experienced middle school teacher in San Francisco, despite the company’s rapid growth. To claim otherwise is false and frankly lazy reporting. Nicole sold her equity in the company she built in early 2017 but chose to sell it at a significant discount to ensure that its new owners would be in a position to continue OneTaste’s core mission and commitment to women’s power based on safety, respect, and consent.
A well-meaning reader might be confused into thinking there was an abundance of sources from the various media accounts. In fact, there were only very few. Using journalistic techniques like changing names or allowing for “unnamed sources’’ created this illusion. Add to the confusion that the various media outlets changed sources' names from prior accounts, and you might think there were dozens of people reporting egregious conduct when there were, in fact, only a handful of people who seem to be working in concert to defame us, using different names in each news outlet. We have no feelings of ill will against the people making these claims and so have not wanted to come out publicly against them.
Our intention here is that we share with you what we have concluded after our four-year company-wide review. We hope this will allow you to come to your own conclusions about the media, the stories, and the allegations that have been made. We need to ensure the true and accurate story is in the public domain and to mitigate the harm that we are continuing to suffer from this false portrayal of our organization. For now, this is the starting place for somebody who wants to understand the truth. We intend to publish posts on a rolling basis.
If you have information about the claims or other information you think we’re missing, please feel free to share it, either with attribution or anonymously, to [email protected].
