I have been a dominatrix. Every gag I ever used was asked for, negotiated, and came with a way to stop it.
Then they offered to buy one: Mine…. For life.
There is a number on the page in front of me on that table. Six figures. All I have to do to keep it is promise, in writing, never to say what I saw.
Sat at the table is Alex, my partner, a lawyer.
He reads the clause out loud. Then, because I have not said anything, he reads it again more slowly, so that I hear it rather than see it.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”
If I sign, most of my money comes back, and I never speak about my years inside that organisation again. Not to a journalist. Not on a podcast. Not to you, now, in this essay.
My chest goes tight before my mind catches up to why.
Not metaphorically. The specific, located, physical tightening that the fifteen minutes practice had taught me to read my own body for years.
My body had the answer. It took me weeks to find the words for it.
You already know how this ends, because you are reading it. What you do not know is what it cost, who else was in that room, or the one thing I took with me on the way out.
Stay with me. It gets worse before it gets funny.
Who they were actually buying
One Taste was dissolving under investigation. Offices closing, one city at a time, all over the world.
I had been a director at the London branch. I brought the first coaching programme and the first intensive to the UK.
There were two sorts of people being bought off that year, and only one of them ever gets mentioned.
There were people like me. Money in. Years in. An enormous amount of work in.
Then there were the ones who had put in their lives. Worked for the organisation for years, paid next to nothing, held together by a promise of sweat equity that was now evaporating in front of them.
Both groups got the same shape of deal. A fraction of what you are owed, and in exchange you never say anything disparaging about One Taste, or about your own years inside it.
Read that twice. The silence they were buying went further than the organisation. It covered your own life. Your years. Your twenties. The thing you gave it.
I said out loud, to anyone who would listen, that it was a shit deal and we should hold out for better.
By then I was holding a large block of the shares. People had stopped wanting to be anywhere near it and had handed me theirs. Which meant I had the most to lose by refusing. Not the least.
The other director took his instructions from the US and did not push back once.
I was the only one willing to take a haircut of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
Four children. I knew exactly what that money would have meant to our future. I did the arithmetic more than once, at three in the morning, with the kind of precision you only have when you are frightened.
Which brings me back to where I started.
This one came with a cheque and no safe word.
Before you decide I was brave
I was not brave. I was unable to sign.
Brave is a decision you make and then carry out. This was a door that would not open. I held a pen on more than one occasion and could not make my hand do it, while the sensible half of my brain read me the numbers again like a shopping list.
You have had this. Not about a quarter of a million pounds, probably. About a job. A message you never sent. A relationship everyone agreed was fine.
Something in you had already decided, and you spent months trying to argue it out of its position with arithmetic.
What I did
I said no.
It was a quiet no. You say it once to a lawyer across a table, and then you keep saying it to yourself for months, every time the number comes back at three in the morning wearing a different outfit.
Bloomberg had published its investigation in 2018, naming prostitution, sex trafficking, labour law violations, the shape sitting underneath all the wellness language. The FBI opened its own. Offices I had stood in kept closing.
I kept not signing, month after month, while people who loved me gently wondered whether I was being stubborn about money I could genuinely use.
A few years later the journalists making Netflix’s Orgasm Inc. started calling. So did reporters still pulling the Bloomberg thread. I could talk to all of them, because there was no piece of paper stopping me.
In June 2025 a jury found Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz guilty on federal forced labour charges.
If I had signed, I could not have taken a single one of those calls.
That is what the money was actually for. My silence, at the precise moment it was worth most to them.
The part I will not make simple
People want me to pick a side on this, and I will not.
I did not leave because of what came out later.
I left because of the sales pressure, and the way they went about getting people in. That was what I watched happen. That was the thing I was being asked never to describe.
The practice itself is incredible.
Fifteen minutes, on a clock, held. One of the best pieces I have ever been handed. Daedone was right about the container. I kept it. I use it every week, in my own practice and with every woman I teach.
What the same fifteen minutes does now
That container is what Scrumptious Stroking runs on.
The only thing that changed is what I do inside it.
Then, it trained me to notice what was happening in my own body while somebody else talked. At a table with a lawyer in front of me, that is what caught the no.
Now I set the same fifteen minutes for my own pleasure. Timer on, my own skin, nobody watching, nothing to achieve. Finding out what I can actually feel, which it turns out is considerably more than I was told.
Here is what continues to surprise me since I started teaching this.
You will be shocked at how little touch you can take before you go offline. Nothing is wrong with you. Nobody ever built your capacity, and capacity is a muscle rather than a mood. It gets built by turning up to the same fifteen minutes on the days you would rather not.
Nobody will ever offer you a quarter of a million pounds to keep quiet. They will offer you an easy evening, and that works just as well.
So here is the question, and I will keep asking it until you stop reaching for a clever answer.
What would you have to stop being, to take this deal?
You already know. Your body told you weeks ago. You have just never had anywhere safe to say it out loud.
Knowing is the cheap part. Living in a body that knows, staying there, and not going numb again by Thursday, is what costs you. That takes capacity, and time, and somebody in the room who has done it herself.
I was lucky. Fifteen minutes a day had taught me the language before I needed it, in a room I would later refuse a quarter of a million pounds to talk about.
You can learn it without the lawyers.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette