A 2025 federal trial — a single charge of forced labor conspiracy without the underlying charge of forced labor, known by many as the OneTaste trial — is our textbook case for testing whether a judge can be entirely biased, favoring the prosecution without a tip of the hat to the defense, and get away with it in broad daylight.
The principle is as old as the republic: the trial judge should not care who wins or loses.
Her only concern should be to act as a referee, ensuring both sides are treated fairly. There is a possibility that US District Judge Diane Gujarati cared very much who won.
Her motives, if this is true, are hard to say. We work with three theories.
- She was impartial. She didn’t care who won. She wanted to ensure every side had its chance to bring out the truth, for what is a trial but an adversarial proceeding to get to the truth?
- She favored the prosecution actively. As a former federal prosecutor herself for 21 years, arriving on the bench with almost no experience presiding over a criminal trial, her natural predilection was pro-prosecution. If she put her thumb on the scale of justice, it was because two decades of seeking to put people in prison made it a habit ingrained.
- She cared about the outcome, not because she was a prosecutor in black robes, but because she was afraid. This theory deserves consideration. For if the FBI and prosecutors can intimidate a federal judge, the problem is greater than judicial bias.
We will let the record speak for itself. We will present her critical rulings — before, during, and after trial. We ask the reader to conclude she was biased only if the evidence compels it. And so, we will present all the evidence — the rulings that favored the defense alongside those that favored the prosecution. The standard should be the same standard a jury applies to the accused: beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sentencing is scheduled for March 30, 2026.
Who Is Diane Gujarati?
Diane Gujarati was born in 1969 in New York City. She graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College in 1990 and received her law degree from Yale Law School in 1995. After clerking for Judge John M. Walker Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — the same appellate court that would later be asked to intervene in the OneTaste case over her rulings — she spent three years at Davis Polk & Wardwell, then joined the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant United States Attorney in 1999.
She would remain a federal prosecutor for the next twenty-one years.
From 1999 to 2020, Diane Gujarati’s professional life was devoted to a single enterprise: prosecuting people on behalf of the United States government. She tried cases, argued appeals, and rose to Deputy Chief of the entire Criminal Division of the Southern District. For her entire career before taking the bench, Gujarati sat at the prosecution table.
She was confirmed by a vote of 99 to 0 in September 2020, becoming the first Indian American to serve as an Article III federal judge in New York. By the time United States v. Cherwitz and Daedone landed on her docket in June 2023, she had been on the bench for approximately three years. During that time, she had presided over one criminal trial.
One.
What Was Charged and What Was Not
OneTaste was a San Francisco-based wellness company founded in 2004 by Nicole Daedone. The company offered courses and community living arrangements centered on Orgasmic Meditation — a partnered, 15-minute clitoral stroking practice the company framed as mindfulness. Over roughly fourteen years, approximately 35,000 people participated in its programs. The company attracted venture capital, mainstream media coverage, and a devoted following. It also attracted critics, former members who described the experience as psychologically damaging, and eventually the FBI.
In June 2023, a federal grand jury returned a one-count indictment against Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, OneTaste’s former head of sales. The charge was conspiracy to commit forced labor, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1594(b) — the conspiracy provision of the federal forced labor statute. Not forced labor. Conspiracy to commit it.
In its own filings, the government stated it did not need to prove that any person was in fact subjected to forced labor. It needed only to prove that the defendants agreed to do so. No sex crimes were charged. No human trafficking. No physical violence was alleged. No one was alleged to have been locked in a room, drugged, physically restrained, or prevented from leaving. Every person the government identified as a victim was an adult who voluntarily joined OneTaste, and not one of them testified at trial that they did not consent at the time to the activities in which they participated.
The indictment ran approximately eight pages covering a twelve-year period. It named no specific victims, provided no dates for specific acts, and identified no locations where specific things happened to specific people. What it described, in essence, was a high-pressure organization with communal living, ideological conformity, demanding work expectations, and a charismatic leader. Whether that description fits a federal crime or a hundred lawful institutions in America — from religious orders to the Marine Corps — is a question the indictment did not pause to consider.
The indictment also alleged that “some” OneTaste members were directed to “engage in sexual acts” for the company’s financial benefit. Yet the government never charged a sex trafficking offense. It never charged criminal sexual abuse. The sexual allegations sat in the indictment as narrative color — uncharged, untested by any jury — but available to be resurrected at sentencing.
Before Judge Gujarati entered this case, there was a five-year FBI investigation led by Special Agent Elliot McGinnis.
In January 2021, McGinnis and another agent visited former OneTaste IT contractor Mitch Aidelbaum, who had been terminated in 2016. Aidelbaum told the agents he possessed a document from OneTaste that was entitled “Attorney Client Privilege,” was marked “Attorney Client Privilege,” had been created after he left the company, and was taken without OneTaste’s knowledge. The agents’ own handwritten notes confirm Aidelbaum told them the document was privileged. Rather than segregating the material and establishing a taint team — standard Department of Justice procedure — the agents took it. They left the privilege designation out of their official 302 report, though their handwritten notes reflected it.
Within five days of obtaining the documents, an agent sent a “bullet point list of information” that appears to have been derived from the stolen privileged materials. Within two weeks, the FBI contacted at least seven persons listed in the privileged risk assessment. By year’s end, at least twenty witnesses had been interviewed — none of whom had been contacted before the agents obtained the documents from Aidelbaum. During these interviews, agents asked about specific incidents that were not public but were discussed in the privileged materials. The government did not establish a privilege review team until May 2024 — three and a half years later. It did not disclose to the defense that it possessed the stolen documents until September 2024, and only after the defense confronted it with evidence.
Then there was McGinnis’s handling of the government’s star witness, Ayries Blanck. In November 2022, when Blanck asked McGinnis whether she should cancel an email account containing communications covering the entire period of her involvement with OneTaste, McGinnis replied: “I would cancel it if it’s only bringing emails like the ones attached. It really serves you no purpose other than making you feel uneasy.” Ms. Blanck’s lawyers in a California civil case later characterized McGinnis’s words as “guidance” that Blanck “followed.” The emails were destroyed.
Blanck’s sister Autymn testified under oath that when she had handwritten journals the government wanted, McGinnis told her to send the originals to him without making copies. His words, according to her sworn deposition: “What I don’t have, I don’t have to give over.” Autymn confirmed she understood this to mean she should not retain materials subject to a civil subpoena from OneTaste. A California Superior Court judge later ordered the FBI to return those journals — a state court compelling a federal agency to give back evidence a witness had sent at the agent’s direction, without copies, in a manner designed to remove them from civil discovery.
Then there were the fabricated journals themselves. In May 2022, Blanck created electronic journals in Google Docs — entries dated 2015 but composed, revised, and embellished over a three-week period in 2022 for a Netflix documentary. Her sister was paid $25,000 for the material by the production company. The metadata tracked 54 major revisions. One entry cited a book not published until December 2019 in a passage supposedly written in January 2015. When the defense proved the fabrication through forensic metadata analysis, the government withdrew Blanck and all journals. The lead prosecutor, Gillian Kassner, resigned from the case. No sanctions were imposed. No inquiry was conducted. No referral was made to the Inspector General. The government received the fabricated electronic journals on March 9, 2023. Less than a month later, on April 3, the grand jury returned the indictment — five years into an investigation that had not previously produced charges.
This was the investigation that produced the case Judge Gujarati was asked to referee.
The Rulings: Before Trial
The defense did what any competent defense would do with an indictment covering twelve years and naming no victims. It asked for details. The motion for a bill of particulars, filed in January 2024, outlined the problem: over 35,000 people had attended OneTaste events, and the defense could not determine which of them the government considered victims, what the alleged force was, or what the alleged forced labor consisted of. The government had produced 2.7 terabytes of discovery — mostly OneTaste’s own corporate records recycled back through subpoena — and disclosed more than 69 witnesses who had provided information contradicting the government’s theory. Sixty nine witnesses. The defense’s position was blunt: we have a mountain of material showing our clients did nothing wrong, and we still cannot determine what the government thinks they did.
The government’s response introduced the theory that would define the case. Because it charged only conspiracy — not the substantive offense — it argued it was not required to prove anyone was actually victimized and therefore not required to identify any victims. Prosecutor Lauren Elbert told the court: “The Government need not prove that anyone was, in fact, victimized by a conspiracy.” When the judge asked what the conspiracy targeted, Elbert gave the most expansive answer possible: “It is all of it. Different people were directed to perform different types of labor in different ways.”
Judge Gujarati denied the bill of particulars in fewer than 300 words of analysis. She did not engage with the defense’s case law — including a First Circuit reversal for a more specific indictment that failed to name its victim, and a judge in her own district observing that even the NXIVM forced labor count raised serious notice concerns. She found the indictment sufficient and moved on.
What followed was a cascade of denials. The privileged documents motion was denied on four independent grounds — untimeliness, failure to establish privilege, lack of standing, and the conclusion that even if the defense prevailed on all four, dismissal would not be the remedy. The spoliation motion based on Blanck’s deleted emails was denied — the judge found that McGinnis’s words, “in context, paint a very different picture than the one defendants paint.” The constitutional challenge to the forced labor statute itself — arguing that criminalizing nonphysical psychological harm exceeds Congress’s Thirteenth Amendment authority and that the definition of “serious harm” is void for vagueness — was denied as a “third bite at the apple.” The request for grand jury minutes was denied after the judge reviewed them ex parte and declared the defense “wrong.” The request for a Kastigar hearing to examine whether the prosecution was tainted by the stolen privileged documents was denied. Every request for an evidentiary hearing — every request to put witnesses under oath and develop a factual record on contested issues — was denied. The motion for a trial adjournment was denied in a single paragraph, even as a representation crisis was unfolding and one defendant faced the possible loss of her entire legal team.
The defense’s requests regarding Agent McGinnis — for all communications between the agent and witnesses, for a certification of complete production, for a hearing into his conduct — were denied in three paragraphs. The judge characterized the defense’s arguments as “based largely on speculation” and “inaccurate information and/or mischaracterization.” The Autymn Blanck deposition — sworn testimony that McGinnis told a witness not to copy evidence before sending it to the FBI — was dismissed in the phrase “speculation.” A California court order compelling the FBI to return evidence was not addressed.
There was one defense victory. The government moved to allow its witnesses to testify anonymously. Gujarati denied the motion, quoting the defense approvingly: “it is far easier to come to court and lie anonymously than it is to stand on testimony with one’s true name.” But the ruling came wrapped in a warning: if anyone the court associated with the defense engaged in conduct the court considered threatening or harassing — “not limited to threats or harassment by the defendants” — the ruling would change.
Then, at the final pre-trial conference, the bill of particulars returned in a way that exposed what the defense had been arguing for nine months. The defense pointed out that in 2006, the earliest year of the charged conspiracy, essentially only two people were involved in OneTaste. A conspiracy requires an agreement. The judge put it directly to the government: “Do you have two people in 2006 who had a meeting of the minds?” The prosecutor acknowledged: “I don’t know that we have specifically answered that question with respect to that specific year.” Nine months after denying the bill of particulars. Six days before trial. And the government could not answer the most basic question about its own case.
Trial began May 5, 2025.
Video Evidence Debunks False Testimony Of Witnesses Against OneTaste
The government’s case rested on a theory of culture — that OneTaste’s environment itself was the mechanism of forced labor. Nine women testified that the organization was psychologically oppressive. Not physically restrained. Not locked in rooms. The culture. The atmosphere. The social dynamics.
The defense had witnesses who lived in the same environment and would have told the jury the opposite — that they experienced no coercion, that they participated voluntarily, that they left when they chose. Judge Gujarati made sure the jury never heard from them. Her standard, stated months before trial and confirmed during it: a defense witness could contradict an alleged victim’s testimony, but only if the defense witness had been with the alleged victim “24/7.” No human being meets that standard. It functions as a categorical exclusion of every defense witness who would contradict the government’s culture-of-coercion theory.
The defense had videotapes of the government’s own witnesses — filmed while at OneTaste — showing them enthusiastic, engaged, laughing, surrounded by colleagues. These videos directly contradicted the testimony the same witnesses gave from the stand years later, filtered through an FBI investigation, a Netflix documentary, and an indictment. The videos were excluded. The desire contracts witnesses had written, expressing their own wishes and plans in their own words, were excluded. Social media posts reflecting contemporaneous enthusiasm were excluded. Instead of letting the jury see the evidence, the judge forced the defense into a cumbersome workaround — refreshing each hostile witness’s recollection one statement at a time, while the witness begrudgingly acknowledged or denied each point. The Supreme Court in Old Chief warned against exactly this — robbing evidence of its “fair and legitimate weight” by forcing a party to substitute a “naked admission” for the real thing.
The defense had nine peer-reviewed scientific studies showing that Orgasmic Meditation produces measurable neurological and psychological effects comparable to psilocybin and traditional meditation — evidence that OM is a legitimate practice, not a tool of brainwashing. The judge excluded them, ruling that OM was “not on trial.” But the government’s entire theory characterized OM as the sexual practice used to manipulate participants. The prosecution got to define the practice as predatory. The defense was barred from showing it was therapeutic.
Evidence of what the defendants knew and understood — what the people around them said and how they behaved at the time — was blocked. The defense attempted to establish what witnesses understood contemporaneously about the relationships at OneTaste. Attorney Michael Robotti told the court: “Throughout this trial every witness who has gotten on that stand has testified about their understanding of their time at OneTaste in retrospect.” The defense wanted to show the jury what things looked like in real time. If the defendants saw voluntary, enthusiastic participation — because that is what everyone expressed — they lacked the criminal intent to coerce anyone. Gujarati demanded foundations that the defense was never able to satisfy, blocking the defense from presenting evidence that negated the central element of the crime.
Defense attorney Jennifer Bonjean — the lawyer who freed Bill Cosby from prison on constitutional grounds — told the court on the record: “We have plenty of witnesses that we would have presented, but it’s very clear that what we want to present, the Court has disagreed would be admissible. We are not going to sit here through three days and just get beat up with sustained objections.” Bonjean did not quit because she had no case. She quit because the judge had made her case inadmissible.
When Bonjean attempted to preserve objections for appeal in front of the jury, the judge’s response was captured on the transcript: “Overruled. Overruled. Overruled. And please be quiet.” The right to make a record is not a courtesy. It is the mechanism by which appellate courts check judicial power.
During rebuttal summation, a federal prosecutor told the jury: “They connected OMing to spirituality for legal protection, not because OMing was actually spiritual.” The government told the jury that the defendants’ spiritual beliefs were fraudulent — not that they committed a crime despite their beliefs, but that the beliefs themselves were a lie. The defense moved for a mistrial and requested a First Amendment limiting instruction. Judge Gujarati’s response, on the record: “You mean more elaborate than the nothing that I’m putting in about the First Amendment?” When Bonjean pressed, five words: “I’m not going to do that.” The jury that convicted Daedone and Cherwitz was never instructed that the defendants had a constitutional right to their spiritual beliefs or that disapproval of those beliefs was not a basis for conviction.
On the first day of jury selection, at least twenty FBI agents walked into the courtroom and sat down. They filled the public benches. They occupied the front row of the defense gallery. One defendant’s husband was turned away. The agents had no operational purpose — the U.S. Marshals handle courtroom security. Hours earlier, a member of Congress had written to FBI Director Kash Patel, accusing McGinnis of fabricating evidence. McGinnis was absent. Twenty of his colleagues were not. The judge, who controlled every aspect of the trial, did not take action when the FBI occupied her courtroom.
On May 23, the government admitted it had withheld a 302 — an FBI report about its own witness, Margaret Pixley — until after Pixley had already testified and been cross-examined. The report apparently revealed that Pixley did not remember the very event she described from the stand. The defense had shaped its cross-examination without knowing the document existed. The government called it “a contained mistake.” It just didn’t go over. The judge told the prosecution to check its files over the weekend. No sanction. No curative instruction. No order to recall the witness. The jury never learned about the discrepancy.
After the Verdict
On June 8, 2025, the jury convicted both defendants.
The government had told the court before trial that it did not need victims. It built the entire trial on the victims. And now, at sentencing, it would seek enhancements for conduct it never charged — role enhancements, vulnerable victim enhancements, abuse of trust — based on the sexual allegations that sat in the indictment as “narrative color,” uncharged and untested by any jury. Convict on conspiracy. Punish for substantive crimes never proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
On June 10, one day after the verdict, Judge Gujarati held a bail hearing. Both defendants had been fully compliant with every pretrial condition for over two years. Neither had missed a court date. Neither was accused of violence. The judge spent most of the hearing asking about press agents, blog posts, and a swastika graphic that appeared near a news article. She asked: “You think a swastika is helpful to the defendants?” She referenced “gestures” and “faces” by supporters. She acknowledged that no one had actually obstructed the trial. Then she took a fifteen-minute break, returned, and remanded both women to federal custody. No finding that either defendant personally directed any harmful conduct. No less-restrictive conditions tried — no home confinement, no GPS monitoring, no gag order. Two women with perfect compliance records, convicted of a nonviolent conspiracy, jailed because of what other people said about their case.
Then came the ruling that may matter most of all. In April 2025, Judge Gujarati had referred a parallel proceeding — OneTaste’s petition for return of the stolen privileged documents — to Magistrate Judge Robert M. Levy. Levy held a three-hour hearing. “Following lengthy oral argument and careful review of the parties’ submissions.” He ruled the documents were in fact privileged, that OneTaste had not waived privilege, and he ordered the government to return and destroy all copies. A judicial officer under Gujarati’s own supervision, after hearing witnesses and examining evidence, reached the opposite conclusion from every finding Gujarati had made.
In July 2025, after the conviction, Gujarati reversed Magistrate Levy’s privilege finding. She did so without taking testimony, without holding an evidentiary hearing, without hearing from a single witness. She simply declared that no privilege had been established — overturning a factual finding by a magistrate who had actually heard witnesses and examined the evidence. The matter is now on appeal to the Second Circuit, Case No. 25-1721-cv.
The Verdict on the Judge
If Judge Gujarati was impartial, then every ruling happened to favor the prosecution by coincidence. The excluded evidence, the denied hearings, the silenced defense, the tolerated FBI courtroom display, the overruled magistrate — all of it was the product of sound judicial discretion applied to a case that simply came out one way. The defense’s arguments were genuinely unpersuasive. The government’s conduct was genuinely acceptable. The stolen privileged documents genuinely did not taint the prosecution. The fabricated journals genuinely warranted no sanctions. The judge who spent 21 years at the prosecution table genuinely did not favor the prosecution.
If her predilection was prosecutorial habit, then the record makes sense as the product of a career spent seeing every case from one side. A judge who spent two decades putting people in prison sees defense motions as obstacles, government representations as credible, and the benefit of the doubt as something that flows naturally toward the people she used to work alongside. The habit would not be conscious. It would not need to be.
If she was afraid, then the 20 FBI agents in the courtroom were not just a message to the jury. They were a message to the bench. And the judge who overruled her own magistrate on a factual finding — without hearing witnesses, after the conviction was secured — acted not from conviction but from the understanding that the institutions she serves are more powerful than the principles she swore to uphold.
The anonymous witness ruling went against the government. The judge pressed the government when it couldn’t identify its co-conspirators. She told the prosecution to produce the hard drive documents and said she didn’t need to be “schooled in firewalls.” These facts are in the record alongside everything else.
Beyond a reasonable doubt.
Sentencing is March 30, 2026.
