At its peak, 'Orgasmic Meditation' group OneTaste was making millions and endorsed by the 'high priestess of the vagina', Gwyneth Paltrow.

Now, the defunct 'cult' faces sex-trafficking and prostitution allegations

Here's the bizarre story 👇

Thread 🧵

🌅This is a story of idealism and desire, of Californian sex communes and three-hour orgasms, of the search for Eden and the worms in the apple of power and

🗓️In 1994, Californian-born Nicole Daedoe joined a community of orgasm researchers called The Welcomed Consensus.

Here she developed a technique called ‘orgasmic meditation’

❓What is orgasmic meditation?

A woman lies on ‘a nest’ of pillows and ‘butterflies’ her legs (Daedone’s words), draping a leg over a fully-clothed man beside her.

⏰He sets a 15 minute timer.

Wearing latex gloves he then touches ‘the upper left quadrant’ of the clitoris

📅 In 2004 Daedone set up OneTaste Urban Retreat.

💕She hoped to promote OM as ‘a way to make orgasm, connection and sensuality sustainable’.

The community quickly grew to around 50 members, most in their late 20s, OM-ing 2 or 3 times a day with various ‘research’ partners

In 11 years, Donald Trump tweeted 57,160

📌 Questioning Barack Obama's birth certificate 📌

Donald Trump was the biggest public booster of the nonsense theory that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was fake, and that he had secretly been born in Kenya.

It put doubt in the minds of a quarter of Americans

📌 Rattling the stock market 📌

Donald Trump used the power of his position to target private companies.

Bank of America found that the stock market tended to fall on days when Trump tweeted more than 35 times, and rise when he tweeted less than 5

📌 Anyone for covfefe? 📌

This bizarre half-tweet was meme-ified at lightning speed and became obnoxious just as quickly, inspiring merchandise, a race horse name and a ban on "COVFEFE" licence plates in the state of Georgia

📌 Punching CNN 📌

To some, this video of Trump beating CNN in a wrestling match was a joke; to others, it was a threat to journalists.

Extremists took notice. They drew attention to their communities by injecting their ideas into the Twitter feeds of Trump's 89m followers