Pressure on Donald Trump to obtain pardons: a company likened to a sexual sect at the heart of an edifying investigation

For the past month, the OneTaste company has been working behind the scenes. After having seen two of its former leaders sentenced, convicted of “criminal conspiracy to use forced labor”, this company compared to a sexual sect is trying to put pressure on Donald Trump to obtain presidential pardons.

As reported by a long investigation by CBS News, OneTaste specialized in “orgasmic meditation” seeking clemency from the White House tenant towards its former CEO and founder, Nicole Daedone, and its former sales director, Rachel Cherwitz.

At the end of March, the two women were sentenced to 9 and 6 years in prison respectively for having been at the origin of an abusive system aimed at forcing their employees to perform traumatic and degrading tasks, including sexual acts, for little or no remuneration.

“Wasted money”

According to federal documents obtained by CBS News, OneTaste initiated a traditional process of submitting clemency requests to the Department of Justice. In addition to these authorized steps, the company deployed a whole strategy, behind the scenes, to try to win its case with the president.

Since the start of Donald Trump’s second term, unofficial protocols have been put in place to enable presidential pardons by soliciting and maintaining relationships with those close to the president.

“It’s on an unprecedented scale for me. It seems that we do not have a functional pardon procedure for everyone who does not have these relationships,” explains Rachel Barkow, professor of law at New York University and expert on presidential pardons.

CBS News thus reveals that, in the space of a few weeks, the OneTaste company obtained interviews with Alan Dershowitz, the famous lawyer close to the president, Matt Gaetz, the former Republican elected official from Florida, and Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, two pro-Trump influencers.

Asked about the effectiveness of these covert methods, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted that anyone “spending money to lobby for pardons is stupidly wasting their money.”

“The administration has a rigorous pardon review process, which includes White House Counsel, the Department of Justice, and ultimately the President himself as the final decision maker,” she concluded.