The federal prosecution of a company that promotes sexual wellness has been plagued by claims that a key witness fabricated evidence for a Netflix documentary and lied to government agents.
The U.S. Department of Justice for months brushed off the arguments as unfounded, but prosecutors recently acknowledged that attorneys for OneTaste Inc. founders Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz are correct: Journals purportedly handwritten by former OneTaste employee Ayries Blanck in 2015 that describe systemic abuse at the company were actually written years later, and the author repeatedly lied about their origins.
The government “no longer maintains” the authenticity of the handwritten journals, and “this letter therefore affirmatively corrects any statements to the contrary previously made to the Court and defense,” according to an eight-page letter filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.
It’s a major development in an already unprecedented forced labor case against Daedone and Cherwitz, who are accused of founding what former employees describe as a sex cult that victimized employees mentally, sexually and financially. Lawyers for Daedone and Cherwitz say the case is a sham built largely on falsified evidence that was doctored for the Netflix documentary.
I’ve been following the litigation through press releases emailed to Legal Affairs and Trials by Juda Engelmayer, a public relations specialist working with OneTaste. Englemayer has been trying to get reporters to care about the case for a long time, and his email Friday about prosecutors’ new admission opened with two questions: “Where is the outrage? Where are the media watchdogs who claim to stand for truth and accountability?”
I began looking into the case when prosecutors were still saying the journals were real, and I found a legal saga that highlights what criminal defense attorneys describe as increasingly blurred lines between entertainment and evidence. Prosecutors acknowledged earlier in the litigation that digital versions of the journals were altered, and they said they wouldn’t use them as evidence. But they defended the authenticity of the handwritten journals as late as three weeks ago, and they’ve long opposed defense attorneys who argue the issue is central to the integrity of the case.
After prosecutors said Thursday they were wrong, attorneys for Daedone and Cherwitz called for the U.S. Attorney’s Office to dismiss the case and prosecute Blanck for fabricating the journals.
“Blanck’s crimes not only have wasted extensive judicial and defense resources, but also led the government to bring a baseless indictment against the defendants,” Celia Cohen and Michael P. Robotti of Ballard Spahr LLP wrote in a letter filed late Thursday.
Attorneys also called for an evidentiary hearing into the conduct of an FBI agent who they believe tried to cover up the fabricated evidence.
The judge who will decide if a hearing is warranted, U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati in the Eastern District of New York, has been skeptical of the defense’s misconduct claims.
In a Feb. 26 hearing, Gujarati said she has “every reason to believe that the government has no interest in putting on a witness that is going to do anything other than tell the truth.”
But she also said she is “concerned enough” about the defense’s claims regarding the journals that she needs “the facts laid out in a much more clear way.” The judge ordered prosecutors to file details about the authenticity of the journals, which led to Thursday’s letter admitting they were fabricated.
A judge in California took a different tone.
Last fall, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rupert Byrdsong ordered the FBI to return the original journals to Blanck to ensure the company’s lawyers can access them for the civil litigation.
“This isn’t rocket science,” Byrdsong said.
Prosecutors’ new admission that Blanck fabricated her handwritten journals comes as the defense is challenging Judge Gujarati’s rulings that internal OneTaste records taken by a former employee can be evidence in trial. The petition with the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is the latest in coast-to-coast litigation over the DOJ’s use of OneTaste company documents to build a criminal case against Daedone and Cherwitz.
The women are scheduled to begin trial on May 5 Brooklyn federal court, but their lawyers hope the appellate court will stymie prosecutors’ case by prohibiting them from using company documents detailing “any allegations that could be made by persons associated with OneTaste … regardless of their credibility or veracity.”
Their 54-page appellate petition says the DOJ’s use of OneTaste’s internal documents has “sweeping implications for the attorney-client privilege in the corporate context.”
“Because the government relied on the Stolen Privileged Documents in building its entire case—specifically, in interviewing at least 20 witnesses—there remains no practical way to eliminate the illicit taint, other than to dismiss the indictment,” according to the petition.
OneTaste’s current legal saga began with a Netflix documentary.
BBC dedicated a podcast to OneTaste in 2020 called “The Orgasm Cult,” then Netflix released “Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste” in October 20222. It purported to expose “what really happened to the OneTaste organization, its members and its controversial leader, Nicole Daedone,” according to a promotional article, and it featured interviews with former employees who alleged sexual and psychological abuse.
One was Blanck’s sister Autymn Blanck, who read aloud from journals she said her sister wrote in 2015 before she quit working at OneTaste. OneTaste sued Ayries Blanck for breach of contract, but the company soon had a bigger problem when federal prosecutors secured a grand jury indictment against Daedone and Cherwitz in June 2023 that charges them with a single count of forced labor conspiracy.
The charge alleges a 12-year conspiracy that began in 2006 and included force, threats, physical restraint and serious harm. Prosecutors appeared ready to present Blanck’s journals as key evidence: They said in an October 2024 filing that her journals detail her “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.”
Defense lawyers, however, identified a major problem: The journals were edited years after they were created, including by a producer for the Netflix documentary. A forensics expert hired in the civil case found dozens of edits in the digital metadata that showed the typed entries had been recently edited. The handwritten entries purported to be from 2015 also matched the final version of the typed entries, which shows the handwritten entries had to have been created much later.
“The government can provide no explanation and neither can Ayries Blanck. There is no explanation other than the handwritten version was written after the final edited version, making the claim that it was written in 2015 a patently false one,” Daedone’s and Cherwitz’s lawyers wrote in a Dec. 30 motion.
Cohen said they needed an evidentiary hearing to avoid “a mini trial” about whether Blanck lied in testimony and to federal agents, but Judge Gujarati never held one.
Blanck testified in a deposition in the California case that FBI Special Agent Elliot McGinnis told her to send him the journals so she wouldn’t have them in her possession when responding to discovery requests from OneTaste.
Judge Byrdsong didn’t hesitate when he learned the company’s lawyers still hadn’t seen the journals.
“When are they going to get these journals, counsel?” Byrdsong asked Blanck’s lawyer, Randy Lopez, during a hearing last August. Lopez said the FBI has the journals, and Byrdsong asked, “So the FBI can’t give her back those journals?”
Lopez replied that he didn’t know, and Byrdsong said Blank “needs to ask them to give her a copy of those journals, and those journals need to be produced.”
Byrdsong issued a written order telling the FBI to return the journals, the original hard drive and a copy of the hard drive “that Autymn Blanck sent to Special Agent Elliot McGinnis and the Federal Bureau of Investigations.”
Judge Gujarati was less sympathetic when defense attorneys argued the indictment should be dismissed or Blanck barred from testifying in trial. The attorneys said McGinnis “engaged in serious and repeated misconduct intended to suppress exculpatory evidence.”
“Blanck’s alleged journals and testimony about the circumstances under which she wrote those journal entries are fabrications,” according to the Dec. 30 motion. “Defendants should not have to sit idly by as the government violates their right to a fair trial.”
The motion requested an evidentiary hearing, and Daedone’s lawyer reminded Judge Gujarati in a Feb. 17 letter that she hadn’t addressed the request.
“Defendant has no intention of abandoning, waiving, or forfeiting the requests for relief raised in her December 30, 2024, letter and respectfully asks this Court to rule on the issues. She is entitled to an appealable order on the question of whether Blanck’s journals are fabricated and whether the government knows/knew it,” according to the letter.
Prosecutors in January told the defense they won’t use the journals as evidence but “continue to believe that Ayries’ journals are authentic and were written on the dates disclosed in materials.”
Daedone’s lawyer Jennifer Bonjean said that doesn’t address the misconduct they believe McGinnis committed, nor does it address possible lies Blanck told to the grand jury that indicted Daedone and Cherwitz.
“Never mind that the government brazenly misrepresented for over a year that the type-written journals were authored in 2015. The government still refuses to concede the obvious, namely that the handwritten entry was written after the final edited version and not the other way around,” Bonjean wrote on Feb. 17.
In a Feb. 26 hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gillian Kassner said the typed journals were “edited and modified” but the handwritten journals “were written around the time of the facts they’re describing.”
Kassner said he believes Blanck “has been forthright about when the journals were written, and we’ve pressed her on this and really met with her and talked to her in detail about it.”
Still, Kassner said, “We’re not going to seek their admission or rely on them in our case.”
Bonjean said she’s “been ringing the bell all along about how the documents were prepared for Netflix” but prosecutors “denied that.” Even if prosecutors don’t ask Blanck about the journals, Bonjean wants to cross-examine her about creating “false evidence for Netflix and for the purpose of misleading the Government.”
“I think that’s fair game as to her credibility,” Bonjean said.
Cohen told the judge she’s “never seen anything like this in my life.”
“The handwritten journals were created for this case to cover up the fact that the journals were created for Netflix,” said Cohen, who took over Cherwitz’s defense in January. “It is beyond comprehension how the Government can still say that these handwritten journals are real.”
Cohen said they needed an evidentiary hearing to avoid “a mini trial” about whether Blanck lied in testimony and to federal agents.
That’s when Judge Gujarati ordered prosecutors to file a brief detailing their explanation for the journals “because I’m hearing the defense say that it is just so obvious that these original journals are not authentic in terms of contemporaneous, and I’m hearing the Government say they are.”
Prosecutors said the government obtained information after the Feb. 26 hearing that changed their view and “the government no longer maintains that the disputed portions of Blanck’s written journals are authentic.”
“Furthermore, should the government call any witness at the forthcoming trial to testify, and knows that witness has provided false testimony, the government will comply with its duty to correct any such false testimony,” according to Thursday’s letter.
Prosecutors and the FBI interviewed Ayries Blanck about the journals on March 7, then interviewed Autymn Blanck on March 10. They spoke to Autymn again on March 11.
Prosecutors said Blanck acknowledged what the defense had long argued: The handwritten journals were written after the digital journals were edited for Netflix, not before.
“As the government has outlined herein, prior to March 2025, Blanck repeatedly maintained to the government that she wrote the Handwritten Journals in and around the time she left OneTaste, and the Typewritten Journals were based on the Handwritten Journals—even when pressed by the government on multiple occasions. Her account was corroborated by her sister,” according to the filing from Kassner and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kayla Bensing, Nina Gupta and Sean Fern.
“However, upon continuing to be pressed by the government regarding the journals, Blanck has since acknowledged that she physically copied the relevant portion of the Handwritten Journals after typing the Typewritten Journals,” prosecutors wrote.
Cohen and Robotti called the filing “extraordinary” and prosecutors’ admission “startling.”
“In short, the government has admitted that Blanck committed federal crimes, by falsifying evidence and lying to federal agents, and that the government relied on those lies and false evidence in prosecuting the defendants,” their letter says. “The government does not indicate whether it will investigate and prosecute Blanck, nor whether it will drop the charges against the defendants. But it should immediately do both.”
The attorneys said the government “did not live up to its obligations to do due diligence on its witnesses’ false claims before presenting her testimony; rather, it repeatedly took Blanck’s word for it that the journals were authentic, even after the defense presented concrete evidence in December 2024 that they were not.”
“But for the defense’s efforts, the government would have presented perjured testimony from its star witness at trial, potentially leading to a wrongful conviction of the defendants,” Cohen and Robotti wrote.
Bonjean’s letter on Friday addressed Agent McGinnis’ conduct and the defense’s belief that he tried to hide the fact that the journals were written much later than prosecutors said. Bonjean said they recently learned McGinnis had the hard drive with the digital journal entries “for over two months prior to charging it into evidence.”
They said this “lends strong support to Defendants’ theory that he may have scrubbed it of exculpatory evidence.”
“Given the inexplicable delay in inventorying the hard drive and McGinnis’ pattern of obstruction in this case, Defendants must be afforded a hearing to explore these reasonable inferences.”
Judge Gujarati had not addressed the filings as of late Sunday.
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