Christians Should Oppose Feds’ Targeting Sex Company
The government’s “coercive control” prosecution of OneTaste, Inc. threatens conscience rights.
Vice President J.D. Vance rocked Europe in February when he confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference about the continent’s slide into censorship. Vance singled out the United Kingdom—birthplace of the Magna Carta—for prosecuting and convicting an army veteran for the crime of violating a “safe zone” law by silently praying outside an abortion clinic. Here at home, another legal theory pioneered in Britain is central to an ongoing Biden-era federal prosecution that raises significant concerns about conscience rights.
The late forensic sociologist Dr. Evan Stark is credited with coining the term “coercive control,” a pattern of conduct that involves men victimizing women through physical abuse and psychological tactics such as intimidation, isolation, and control. In 2015, England and Wales made coercive control in intimate relationships a crime punishable with up to five years in prison. In 2022, British authorities used the statute to imprison a Jewish man for 18 months for declining to grant his ex-wife a religious divorce.
In our country, there is no federal law that expressly criminalizes coercive control. At the state level, in 2020 Hawaii made coercive control in certain family relationships a petty misdemeanor. California and other states have imported the concept into their domestic civil laws. The response has been otherwise tepid. That is understandable. Legal scholars have questioned whether criminalizing coercive control can be squared with the First Amendment and constitutional vagueness and overbreadth doctrines.
My client OneTaste, Inc. is a sexual wellness company that teaches the practice of “orgasmic meditation.” Two former OneTaste executives, Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone, are now on trial. Given the R-rated allegations in the indictment, one would expect Cherwitz and Daedone to be up on sex trafficking, prostitution, or sexual assault charges. Not so—they face up to twenty years in prison each for something called “forced labor conspiracy.”
In the federal government’s telling, as part of a conspiracy to obtain labor from their victims, Cherwitz and Daedone prevented OneTaste members from exercising “independence and control,” isolated the members from others, leveraged “sensitive information” against them, and ultimately excluded them from the group. In pre-trial filings, the government forecast it would provide evidence about how Cherwitz and Daedone used “means of coercive control” to extract labor from their adult victims.
Whatever you think of Daedone’s Buddhist-influenced teachings, the theory undergirding the government’s coercive-control prosecution should give all Americans, including conservative evangelical Christians like me who believe sex outside one-man-one-woman marriage is a sin, reason for pause. The criminal case against Cherwitz and Daedone, replete with allegations of recruitment, trauma, and shunning, can be readily repackaged and deployed against churches, religious institutions, or other designated enemies of the moment.
Against conservative Christians, the playbook would be straightforward. Evangelization becomes recruitment. Labor is extracted through church ministries. Holding others accountable for sin and instructing the faithful to avoid temptation is control. Church discipline and excommunication become the last steps in a campaign of shame and humiliation. There is no limiting principle. The same rationale can be applied to other religions. Taken to its logical conclusion, coercive control applied to intraorganizational dynamics criminalizes what could be subjectively perceived as harmful influence.
To be clear, sex traffickers and rapists deserve prison or worse. And none of this is to say troubled and abusive interpersonal relationships are not a problem. Christians know strong churches are primed to solve such problems by reconciling people to God through faith in Jesus Christ and then to each other. But those very efforts could be chilled by prosecuting Cherwitz and Daedone under our federal criminal laws.
Vice President Vance is right about what is happening in Britain, but we should be at least equally mindful of government overreach in our country. America has imported much that is good from the United Kingdom—criminalizing coercive control is not one of those things. The Trump administration, which has acted to roll back lawfare and restore conscience rights, should shut the lid on the Pandora’s box this Biden-era prosecution is opening.
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