Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult by Ellen Huet is the book you reach for when you sense that something is very wrong at the glossy edge of the wellness world but you can’t quite name it.
The problem this book solves, at least for me, is how to understand why intelligent, progressive people end up in a place where orgasm, empowerment, debt and coercion blur into one. Empire of Orgasm lifts the lid on OneTaste, the San-Francisco–born “orgasmic meditation” company that sold itself as a sexual-healing revolution while acting, in many ways, like a classic high-control cult.
Reading it, I finally had a language for that uneasy feeling I have whenever wellness brands promise transformation but quietly demand total surrender.
Empire of Orgasm argues that when a charismatic founder, a booming multi-trillion-dollar wellness economy and unresolved sexual pain collide, a “healing” practice like orgasmic meditation can become an empire of control and exploitation.
Huet shows, in painful detail, how the promise of liberation becomes the mechanism of bondage inside OneTaste’s “research” houses and classrooms.
Evidence snapshot – Huet builds her case from more than 125 interviews, thousands of pages of internal documents, legal filings and court transcripts, layered on top of the Bloomberg reporting that helped prompt an FBI probe in 2018 and, eventually, forced-labor convictions for founder Nicole Daedone and sales chief Rachel (Racheli) Cherwitz in June 2025.
Empire of Orgasm is for readers who want a deeply reported, emotionally complex story about sex, power and belief, and not for anyone hoping for a simple self-help manual or a prurient catalogue of orgasmic techniques.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult is Huet’s first book, published in November 2025 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US, with a roughly comparable UK edition from a Penguin Random House imprint, and clocking in at about 400–430 pages depending on format, based on publisher catalogues.
Publishers slot it under narrative non-fiction and true crime—specifically in the “Con Artists, Hoaxes & Deceptions” corner—which fits, though it also works as cultural history of the wellness boom.
Huet herself is an award-winning investigative journalist at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, where she specialises in deep pieces on tech culture and strange subcultures, including her 2018 exposé “The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company.”
She also hosted seasons of Bloomberg’s Foundering podcast on WeWork and OpenAI, experience you can feel in this book’s rise-and-fall architecture.
The book arrives after the BBC Radio 4 series The Orgasm Cult and Netflix’s 2022 documentary Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, yet still feels like the definitive narrative because it pulls together years of reporting and the full arc of the criminal case.
Huet’s central argument, as I read it, is that OneTaste is “a cautionary tale of sex and salvation for the wellness generation,” showing how spiritualised sexuality plus entrepreneurial hustle can harden into a wellness cult where consent, labour and money are systematically warped.
Orgasmic meditation, marketed as a fifteen-minute clitoral-stroking mindfulness ritual, becomes the lens through which she interrogates what we mean by empowerment and what we’re willing to overlook in the search for healing, intimacy and community.
From here, I’ll walk through the book the way it unfolds on the page: background, story, analysis and, finally, what I think Empire of Orgasm adds to our conversations about wellness, cults and desire.
2. Background
Huet situates Empire of Orgasm in the late-2000s moment when “wellness” stopped being a niche and became a way of life, especially for urban professionals with disposable income and spiritual hunger.
Around 2017, the global wellness industry was already estimated at $4.2 trillion, having grown from $3.7 trillion in just two years, and by 2023 it had swelled to about $6.3 trillion—almost a parallel economy to mainstream healthcare.
San Francisco, where OneTaste was born, had long incubated experimental communities, from Esalen and the Human Potential Movement to EST and Landmark; by the 2000s that lineage had fused with tech money and optimisation culture. In that environment, the idea that orgasmic meditation could be a “regenerative human technology” for connection felt plausible and oddly business-friendly.
Orgasmic meditation (or OM) is presented in the book as a tightly scripted practice: a clothed, usually male “stroker” touches the upper-left quadrant of a woman’s clitoris for exactly fifteen minutes while both partners keep their attention on sensation, then share brief reflections.
According to both Huet and, more neutrally, Wikipedia’s summary of OneTaste, the ritual was framed as a sort of sexual mindfulness, with fixed roles, latex gloves and time-boxing to make it feel “safe and palatable” rather than pornographic or therapeutic in a conventional sense.
Huet opens with a vivid prologue at a house in Stinson Beach, where Nicole Daedone lies on a massage table for a live OM demonstration—a moment carefully reconstructed from video, down to the dialogue and body language.
In that scene, Huet notes that Nicole “envisioned a future where the study of female orgasm was as widespread and as celebrated as yoga and meditation,” a line that captures both the utopian promise and the scale of her ambition.
3. Empire of Orgasm Summary
Huet starts by tracing Nicole’s personal history: a complicated childhood, including alleged sexual abuse by her father (supported by interviews and legal filings), her flirtations with bohemian San Francisco art life, and her time in precursor communities like Welcomed Consensus and Morehouse.
She is careful here—she cross-checks Nicole’s own early blog posts, the unpublished memoir description Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, court records and interviews with ex-partners and colleagues, and she is explicit about what can and cannot be corroborated. Out of this tangled biography, Empire of Orgasm shows a woman who learns, step by step, that sex, story and spiritual language can be turned into both intimacy and power.
OneTaste itself begins in 2004 as a kind of urban commune in San Francisco’s SoMa district, combining a café, yoga studio, performance space and communal living in what residents called “the Warehouse,” with OM as the inner sacrament.
Day-to-day life, as Huet reconstructs it, is a mix of open-mic erotic poetry, naked yoga, shared meals and relentless emotional processing—plus the constant grooming and elevation of Nicole as a teacher whose bed becomes an informal throne room.
She also doesn’t shy away from the absurd: she spends time on the infamous bedbug infestation, which spread as residents rotated beds and partners, and which some later mythologised as a cleansing plague that drove out the half-committed.
Huet then follows OneTaste’s evolution into a “digital startup” that speaks fluent Silicon Valley: OM as a human-connection technology, Nicole on the TEDx stage with “Orgasm: The Cure for Hunger in the Western Woman,” and a slick book deal for Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm, published by a Hachette imprint in 2011.
In Slow Sex, Nicole rewrites her origin story into something far more palatable—no communes, no Theosophists, no explicit childhood trauma—just a woman taking “a course in sexuality” with a friend, a shift Huet highlights as an early example of strategic self-mythologising.
One of the most chilling narrative threads, for me, is Racheli Cherwitz’s trajectory from an anorgasmic woman in a chaotic relationship to Nicole’s feared and admired head of sales, Rachel.
Racheli arrives at the Warehouse with her boyfriend, is almost immediately dumped “to get the full experience,” and is assigned a new “research partner” in the bed next to him, separated only by a curtain—a tiny detail Huet uses to show how intimacy and cruelty were often braided together.
In what Noel Morales recalls as a typical move, Nicole then prescribes intensity as medicine: she assigns Racheli to have sex with every man in the Warehouse, and later pairs her with Jeff, an older man who, Racheli says, resembled a male relative who abused her as a child.
Racheli tells friends that sleeping with Jeff is “the hardest thing she ever had to do,” but she does it because she trusts Nicole, and in return she’s praised as “hard-core,” fast-tracked into leadership and flown to New York to open a new centre.
Huet links this to a statistic she pulls from MedlinePlus—that about 10–15 percent of American women report significant difficulty reaching orgasm—arguing that OneTaste knowingly targeted exactly the women most likely to feel defective and therefore motivated to “do the work” at any cost.
The High-Growth Phase – From Commune to Cult-Like Company
Nicole’s charisma and ambition, amplified by OneTaste’s investors, push the group from scruffy Warehouse into polished wellness brand with global reach.
Huet shows Nicole studying classic guru playbooks: mentors advise her that “a leader should live in the penthouse,” arrive late, leave early and never be too accessible, and we watch her move out of the Warehouse into investor Reese’s mansion while students jostle for the honour of making her tea or doing her hair.
Reese bankrolls much of this expansion—Huet notes he poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into OneTaste, and scripts from his annual birthday “scenes” describe elaborate, sexualised performances staged by staff.
At the same time, Nicole and her team are aggressively courting influencers: she appears in Deepak Chopra content, flirts with a Tony Robbins partnership and, crucially, trains self-help star Tim Ferriss in OM.
Ferriss ends up devoting a chapter of The 4-Hour Body to OM and declaring, in a line Huet quotes with obvious irony, “This should be required education for every man on the planet.” That endorsement, plus millions of views on Nicole’s TEDx talk, bring a wave of young tech workers—mostly men looking for “cheat codes” to intimacy and productivity—into OneTaste’s orbit.
On paper, OneTaste is just another startup: by 2014 it makes the Inc. 5000 list, and by 2017 it claims around $12 million in revenue, with eight locations and dozens of staff.
Inside, though, the price of belonging climbs steeply: a flagship “Membership” package costs roughly $60,000 a year, and Huet documents how staff and students are urged to treat money as “just sensation,” maxing out credit cards to stay in advanced programs. Many people, she shows, work long hours for little or no pay while simultaneously paying thousands for courses—blurring the line between customer, employee and devotee.
From about the halfway point of Empire of Orgasm, the mood darkens as Huet tracks how “assignments,” emotional breakdown work and communal living turn the OM houses into classic high-control environments.
We hear about lunchtime OM sessions where residents have to drop everything to stroke or be stroked, about staff pressured to sit in on paid classes, pretend to be beginners and OM with male students to keep numbers balanced, and about women chastised for having a “golden pussy” if they set boundaries or refused sex.
Huet details thirty-day “sex assignments,” elaborate rituals and a growing hierarchy of “handlers” and “research partners” who control access to Nicole and key opportunities, with people voted in or out of the inner circle in intense group meetings that leave participants sobbing.
At the same time, the company spends significant energy on appearing legitimate: courting science (through the Institute of OM’s EEG studies), insisting that every OM begins with a verbal request—“Would you like to OM?”—and publishing Medium posts rebutting accusations that it is a cult.
Collapse, FBI and Trial
Eventually, Huet’s own 2018 Bloomberg article, “The Dark Side of the Orgasmic Meditation Company,” breaks the story of unpaid labour, coerced sex and heavy debt to a mainstream business audience, and within months the FBI opens an investigation into OneTaste for potential sex-trafficking, prostitution and labour-law violations.
According to BBC Radio 4’s The Orgasm Cult, that investigation, and the surrounding media frenzy, lead OneTaste to shut its physical centres and retreat into an online-only presence under the rebranded Institute of OM.
Huet’s epilogue then takes us into the courtroom in Brooklyn, where, after a June 2023 indictment for forced-labour conspiracy, a jury finds Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz guilty in 2025; they are jailed pending sentencing and face up to twenty years in prison. She draws heavily on transcripts and her own observations, showing how the same rhetoric that once electrified students now appears in legal filings and cross-examinations.
As a closing irony, she notes that OneTaste has hired journalist-turned-blogger Frank Parlato—who publicly questions her own earlier reporting—to “investigate the prosecution,” reportedly at $20,000 per month, a detail she sources from court hearings and Parlato’s own website.
| Category | Main Events/Dates/Points/Arguments/Themes/Lessons |
| Central Subject & Conflict | The book is an investigative report into OneTaste, the company founded by Nicole Daedone to promote Orgasmic Meditation (OM). The core conflict is the divergence between OneTaste’s public image as a “sexual revolution” and “wellness” leader versus the private reality of it being a “destructive cult”. |
| The Core Practice (OM) | Orgasmic Meditation is a partnered, 15-minute mindful clitoral-stroking technique, which Nicole positioned as a simple “hack to happiness, sexual fulfillment, and connection”. The practice was meant to focus on “sensation” and presence, not conventional climax, to achieve a transcendent state |
| Dates & Key Milestones | 2008: The OM demo described in the Prologue takes place, marking a turning point in OneTaste’s growth. 2011: Nicole publishes Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm. 2017: Author Ellen Huet begins her investigation into the company 2018: Huet publishes her first investigative article alleging sexual servitude and five-figure debts, leading to an FBI probe. 2023: Federal prosecutors charge Nicole Daedone with conspiracy to commit forced labor. |
| Thematic Argument | The overriding theme is the toxic interplay between Sex and Power. The dynamic is summarized as: “Everything is about sex—except sex, which is about power”. The book explores how the promise of sexual liberation was leveraged for financial and emotional control303030. |
| Cult Allegations & Abuse | Ex-members described being ruined financially and coerced sexually, with the company pressuring employees into sexual servitude and massive debts323232. The environment fostered was one where Nicole became the “sole source of truth,” and challenging the system or experiencing shame was deemed a failure of “service”333333333333. |
| The Role of Wellness Culture | OneTaste’s rise was facilitated by the $4-trillion-dollar wellness industry and the tech-driven, optimization-focused culture of San Francisco, where people sought spiritual and commercial alternatives to traditional institutions35. The high cost of courses (sometimes tens of thousands of dollars) was justified by the idea that the material was “life-changing”. |
| Central Lesson/Warning | The book warns that anyone is susceptible to the allure of such movements, as cults satisfy the universal human desires for belonging, connection, purpose, and the “sweet rush of approval,” which were then wielded “powerfully and destructively” by the leadership. |
4. Empire of Orgasm Analysis
As a work of reported non-fiction, Empire of Orgasm is impressively, almost obsessively, sourced; Huet constantly flags when a scene comes from interviews, when it rests on one person’s recollection and when she has documents or video to back it up.
She also includes, in the notes, OneTaste’s own public rebuttals—Medium posts, statements and legal filings that deny using sex for sales, insist they “never forced anyone to do anything,” and reject the term “cult” except for a small premium membership tier.
From an argumentative point of view, her case that OneTaste functioned as a wellness cult is strongest where she shows patterns: the way “assignments” overrode personal limits, the economic dependence created by low pay plus high course fees, the communal housing that blurred private life and work, and the intense idealisation and protection of Nicole as leader.
I found her most persuasive not in the most shocking sexual anecdotes—though there are many—but in the quieter details about who did the laundry, who slept where and who controlled the schedule, because those show power rather than just transgression.
At the same time, she is careful to show that some former members still defend OM or Nicole, and that not every experience was traumatic, which keeps the book from collapsing into a simple morality tale; she quotes, for example, men who describe the community as “legitimate” and life-changing, even while admitting to harmful dynamics.
The most contested part of Huet’s broader project, and one she acknowledges obliquely in the book and more directly in interviews, is her use of anonymous sources in the original Bloomberg story and the influence that reporting had on the FBI and later prosecutors.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
For me, the book’s greatest strength is its narrative control: Huet moves back and forth between intimate scenes (a woman lying awake in a warehouse bed, listening to her ex breathe next to a new partner) and the vast, impersonal sweep of a $6-trillion-plus wellness economy, without losing sight of individual vulnerability.
I also valued her willingness to treat sex as sex—messy, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes dull—rather than as a metaphor; she reports graphic details when necessary, but always ties them to questions of consent, money and power instead of treating them as titillation.
Another strength, especially from a writer’s perspective (and I’m thinking here of the kind of work already on Probinism—deep dives into The Second Sex, Beyond the Lines, and other books about oppression and ideology), is how carefully she draws the ecosystem around OneTaste: the tech-driven mindfulness scene, Burning Man-adjacent play parties, the Goop-ified wellness media, even Tim Ferriss’s brand of optimisation.
Emotionally, what worked for me was her empathy for both “true believers” and those who later came to see themselves as victims; she lets people contradict themselves and each other without forcing them into neat boxes. Huet doesn’t pretend that leaving a group like OneTaste makes all your choices simple or all your earlier desires false, and that nuance feels honest.
On the weaker side, I did occasionally feel the structure pressing too hard: the finite-and-infinite-games motif (borrowed from James P. Carse) and repeated callbacks to Nicole’s favourite movies sometimes risked over-explaining what the reader already feels viscerally.
From an evidentiary standpoint, critics like Frank Parlato have fairly raised concerns about how much of the original Bloomberg story relied on anonymous sources and how prosecutorial narratives can harden around early media framings, and the book doesn’t fully engage that meta-question of journalistic power.
On the other hand, Huet is transparent that OneTaste now pays Parlato handsomely to attack her work—court records suggest $20,000 per month at one point—which makes some of his criticism self-interested, and she documents that disclosure rather than leaving readers to Google it.
6. Reception, Criticism and Influence
Early trade reactions have been strong: Kirkus gave Empire of Orgasm a starred review, calling it “a carefully written exposé of an ‘infinite game’ built on lust for wealth and power,” while tech-culture writers like Emily Chang and Ashlee Vance have praised it as both gripping narrative and sharp cultural analysis.
Many mainstream outlets reviewing the book so far highlight exactly what stood out to me—the way Huet makes this “strangest of cults” feel eerily normal by anchoring it in long-running American obsessions with self-help and sexual liberation.
At the same time, OneTaste, now operating as the Institute of OM, continues to deny that it was ever a cult or used sex coercively, and its supporters have done extensive counter-messaging online, from Medium essays to legal threats against the BBC and Netflix projects; Empire of Orgasm is already being pulled into that ongoing reputational war.
Huet’s work also plugs into a larger cultural moment: alongside Orgasm Inc, BBC’s The Orgasm Cult and New Yorker and People features on the trial, her book helps cement OneTaste as a kind of “case study zero” for wellness-era cult dynamics, much as NXIVM has become for executive coaching or Scientology for celebrity self-improvement.
7. Comparison with Similar Works
If you’ve read Sarah Berman’s Don’t Call It a Cult (on NXIVM) or Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear (on Scientology), Empire of Orgasm will feel like their cousin: it’s similarly rigorous, similarly attentive to the mundane infrastructure that makes control possible, and similarly interested in why smart people stay.
Where it diverges, in my view, is its focus on female pleasure and the politics of consent in supposedly feminist spaces; Huet is writing in the same thematic territory as books on sex-positive feminism and exploitation, but with the procedural pacing of a tech-cult thriller, and that combination feels fairly unique right now.
8. Conclusion
If you are fascinated by cults, wellness, feminism, or the strange ways capitalism colonises our most intimate needs, Empire of Orgasm is absolutely worth your time; it offers enough narrative and context that, after reading it, you do not really need to go back to primary coverage to understand what happened at OneTaste and why it matters.
It is less suited, I think, to readers looking purely for a how-to manual on sexuality or a simple hero-villain story: Huet’s world is full of grey zones, compromised choices and people who are both harmed and, in some ways, helped by the same practices.
For general readers, the prose is accessible and often darkly funny; for specialists—psychologists, sociologists of religion, journalists—it offers an unusually detailed case study of how a wellness brand can evolve into something prosecutors, and many former members, now straightforwardly call a cult.
And for anyone who has ever felt the tug of a charismatic teacher or a community that seems to hold the answer to all your pain, Empire of Orgasm is a bracing, necessary reminder to ask what is being traded, who sets the terms, and what happens when you finally try to walk away.
