Nicole Daedone, the founder and former CEO of the notorious “Orgasmic Meditation” group OneTaste, was sentenced to nine years in federal prison Monday, and former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz received six and a half years, following a jury conviction last June for forced labor conspiracy.

In addition to a nine-year prison sentence, former OneTaste CEO Nicole Daedone, 58, was also ordered to forfeit $12 million, with seven victims awarded roughly $890,000 in restitution, according to federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York, as the Associated Press reports. She did not speak at sentencing.

Prosecutors said that OneTaste, the once high-profile and cult-like San Francisco-based wellness brand known for its “orgasmic meditation” gatherings throughout the US and internationally, built its following through coercion and psychological manipulation, according to the Chronicle.

SFist reported last year that during the monthlong trial, prosecutors said Daedone and Cherwitz cultivated a system that targeted vulnerable followers, including people with histories of sexual trauma, and pushed them into unpaid labor and sexual acts. Per the AP, Daedone and Cherwitz told followers these practices would enable members to reach "freedom" and "enlightenment" as a symbol of their commitment to the company's principles.

Testimony described a mix of financial pressure, isolation, and intimidation, with members urged to take on debt for courses, while being discouraged from leaving.

“Coercion disguised as wellness or empowerment is still exploitation and it is a crime that causes harm to vulnerable victims,” said Joseph Nocella, the US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement.

Former employees described a workplace where sexual boundaries were blurred, including a communal residence where staff handled domestic tasks tied to Daedone’s personal life and were directed to carry out sadomasochistic sexual acts involving her partner, as previously reported. Some said they were directed to have sex with prospective investors or clients despite their objections.

“I fell into Nicole’s trap,” said one of the victims, who initially believed in Daedone’s purported feminist mission, per the Chronicle. “I was the perfect target.”

During the sentencing Monday, US District Judge Diane Gujarati noted that Daedone did not appear remorseful for the extensive harm she had caused.

“What she was doing wasn’t about enlightenment or operating in a different dimension,” said the judge. “It was criminal.”

Cherwitz was sentenced Monday to six and a half years in prison. Daedone’s attorneys said they planned to appeal, pointing to her lack of a prior criminal record and more than 200 letters submitted in support, per the AP.

"She has lived an uncommon and impactful life, and she is deeply respected by people from all walks of life, including many entirely unconnected to OneTaste," said the defense lawyers in a memo. "She is a prolific writer, teacher, and spiritual practitioner whose work has long focused on reducing suffering and fostering meaningful human connection."

OneTaste was founded in San Francisco in 2004, with Nicole Daedone drawing on Buddhist ideas and her own experience as a sex worker to shape teachings around “orgasmic meditation,” a structured partner practice performed in group settings. The company expanded internationally, with offices across the US and in London, and Daedone gained visibility through talks including a TED appearance.

Scrutiny followed years later, beginning with a 2013 Gawker article and a 2018 Bloomberg exposé that helped prompt a federal probe. The story was later revisited in the 2022 Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, ahead of federal indictments against Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz in June 2023.

In 2017, a year before the federal investigation launched, Daedone sold her stake in the company for $12 million, as the AP reports. The new owners, who rebranded the company as the Institute of OM Foundation, said the charges were unjustified and insisted the company does legitimate work.

Last June, US Attorney Nocella said in a statement, "The jury’s verdict has unmasked Daedone and Cherwitz for who they truly are: grifters who preyed on vulnerable victims by making empty promises of sexual empowerment and wellness only to manipulate them into performing labor and services for the defendants’ benefit."

Previously: Leaders of Cult-y 'Orgasmic Meditation' Group OneTaste Convicted In Forced Labor Trial

Top image: Nicole Daedone attends the 2024 Dream.Org "We, The Dream"  Inaugural Gala, celebrating justice and environmental champions, on  October 16, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty  Images for Dream.Org)

The first creepy cult to take root in California, about 25 years after statehood, had its origins in upstate New York in the 19th Century, which was a hotbed of religious zealotry and cults.

It was called the Brotherhood of the New Life, and it was led by Thomas Lake Harris, a Christian mystic and charismatic preacher who moved from New York to Sonoma County in part because of his interest in winemaking.

Harris established his utopian community in 1875 on 400 acres in the area of Fountaingrove, north of the town of Santa Rosa. As the Press Democrat recounts, Harris claimed to be a longtim celibate, but he was also clearly preoccupied by sex. His followers stayed in gender-separated dormitories on the Fountaingrove property, and there would come to be allegations of husbands and wives forced to have sex with other people, and coerced intergenerational sex.

Harris also claimed that God was bisexual — which could certainly be read as a projection and indicator about Harris's own sexual desires — and that every living person had a celestial counterpart on Earth who was the only person they should have sexual relations with. Reportedly, Harris was the one who declared who should be matched with whom.

The story of the Brotherhood of the New Life is recounted in a new book, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal and California’s First Cult Scare by Joshua Paddison (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Paddison tells of the Brotherhood's beginnings on the shore of Lake Erie, in a town called Brocton, NY, where Harris first established the group at a place he called Mountain Cove — a phonetic echo of Fountain Grove. It appears Paddison was run out of town, so to speak following a scandal involving a British writer and member of Parliament, as KQED explains, named Laurence Oliphant. Oliphant caused a scandal by leaving England to join the cult, but he later became disenchanted with harris, after moving his wife and mother to Brocton around 1873, and accused Harris of swindling them out of money — specifically his mother's jewels, filing a lawsuit to get the money back.

This forced Harris to sell the compound in New York, and he and his remaining followers relocated across the country in Santa Rosa.

Paddison's book then recounts the later eruption of scandal after one woman, Alzire Chevaillier, launched a campaign to try to expose Harris as a cult leader — saying he was trying to supplant the Bible with a "new sexology" that was "worse than Mormonism." (Interestingly, Harris and his cult had arisen in what was called the "Burned-over District" of upstate New York of the mid-19th Century, which also gave rise to Joseph Smith and the Mormons, the Shakers, and the Millerites, who were the precursors to Seventh-Day Adventism.)

Chevallier also accused Harris of forcing sexual relations, with "old men... given to comely young women, and young men to old women, according as Harris directs."

Harris dismissed Chevallier's attacks as "simply the revenge of a scorned, detested, and infuriated female." But not long after, Harris decamped for England and later landed in New York City, where he died in 1906 — about a month before the Great Earthquake.

Harris wrote, around 1891, "For nearly half a century I have been dreaming a lovely dream of the New Harmonic Civilization; of the ending of all feuds, the vanishment of all diseases, the abolishment of all antagonisms, the removal of all squalors and poverties, in a fulfilled Christian era; a new golden age of universal peace: as one."

Harris's legacy lived on in the form of Fountain Grove Winery, which long outlived him. It was built and led by one of his acolytes, the Japanese born Kanaye Nagasawa, who led the Brotherhood until his own death in 1934. Nagasawa reportedly made excellent wine — Harris encouraged both the drinking of his own wine as well as smoking tobacco — and the remains of the Fountain Grove Winery and its famous Round Barn lingered on as ruins until the last decade — as KQED documents — until the Tubbs Fire destroyed them both in 2017.

Most of what Chevallier alleged about the Brotherhood of the New Life and Harris can't be corroborated 150 years later, but later examples of groups that have been called cults around the Bay Area show that this region remains a magnet for nonconformist thinkers, and those looking for enlightenment of many kinds.

The New York Times has attempted to explain one of the still unexplained pieces of the bizarre web of Zizian "murder cult" deaths, just as a Solano County trial for two of the cult's suspects gets delayed until next year.

The full picture of what the Zizians were up to during their years either self-sequestered in solar-powered box trucks in Vallejo, or in the case of others, sequestered in Vermont or in a pair of condos in North Carolina, remains murky. And that may be because there were a fair amount of drugs involved, and blogging on esoteric subjects, and bizarre, spurious experiments aimed at controlling individual hemispheres of one's brain.

A few clues have emerged, which mostly just translate into theories of their thinking and motivations. The strict veganism, for instance: Leader Ziz (born Jack LaSota) and other members of the group were likely compelled by the idea that, if we are facing a future in which AI entities gain control over us, we have to set an example for how we treat lesser creatures, and not kill them for food. It is an extension, albeit extreme, of Rationalist and effective altruist principals, believing that sentient life of all kinds must be preserved to avoid an AI apocalypse.

One mysterious figure who is now dead because of her involvement with Ziz and the others, Ophelia (born Felix, and still known as Felix to her family) Bauckholt, a German national math prodigy who was in the US on an HI-B visa, and was making something like a $500,000 income working as a quant trader and analyst for a Manhattan firm.

While motivations and links between the six deaths that the Zizians are linked to have not been confirmed by investigators or court documents, it seems clear that money, and the resources to continue living off the grid to do what Ziz considered their important, experimental work, was a key factor.

Were it not for a pending eviction, for non-payment of rent, from property that four of them were living on in Vallejo in November 2022, the first violent attack attributed to the group may not have occurred. Alexander "Somni" Leatham, Suri Dao, and Emma Borhanian allegedly attacked landlord Curtis Lind as he was taking steps to evict them after over two years on his property not paying rent. 25 months later, in January 2025, as Leatham and Dao were headed to trial for both Lind's and Borhanian's deaths, Lind was allegedly fatally stabbed by another assailant, Maximilian Snyder.

Days later, a 21-year-old woman who had attended the University of Washington and who had been in long romantic relationship with Snyder, Teresa Youngblut, was in a shootout with US Border Patrol agents in Vermont in which she was injured, and both an agent and Bauckholt, who was the passenger in the car she was driving, ended up dead. Youngblut has now been charged with murder in federal court, and faces state charges as well.

The New York Times picks up the story again this week, noting a few details we had not heard before‚ including the fact that Youngblut's family had reported her missing eight months prior to the Vermont shootout.

Bauckholt, the Times reports, had ghosted her closest friends and her roommate, a fellow trans woman and Rationalist, Astra Kolomatskaia, over a year earlier, leaving New York City without explanation and apparently becoming one of Ziz's devotees — though members of the group continue to reject the term "Zizian," and obviously don't think they are/were in a cult.

It seems clear from the Times's reporting that Bauckholt was impressionable, generous, and more than a touch naive, and was lured into Zizian inner circle for a pragmatic reason, from Ziz'z perspective: she had money.

Following the arrests of Suri Dao and Somni Leatham in California, and despite the seriousness of the charges against them, Bauckholt offered up money to fund Dao's defense, believing that the criminal justice system was fundamentally corrupt and unjust. It's unclear if Dao's defense attorney may still be profiting from those funds, nine months after Bauckholt's death.

Dao and Bauckholt had reportedly been friends online, corresponding in various forums where Dao was known as Silver and Ivory — a blogger known to write about ethics and trans rights. Bauckholt reportedly offered a bounty to a friend in California to find Dao, saying, "$500 + an extra $1000 for Silver if Silver is alive?" Adding, "Or double those numbers I guess."

Bauckholt reportedly attempted to live on only 10% of her pretax income, and had been known to give generously to charities, under the auspices of effective altruism. The Times piece suggests that Bauckholt was attracted both to the Zizians' philosophy, but also maybe moreso to the idea that they were people in need of financial help, and she had the funds to give them.

Bauckholt's friends report her becoming increasingly distant around June 2023 — a time that coincides with Ziz's release from jail in Pennsylvania, in connection with an obstruction charge relating to the deaths of the parents of Michelle Zajko in the suburbs of Philadelphia, on December 31, 2022.

Bauckholt reportedly began taking frequent, unexplained weekend trips during the summer and fall of 2023 — possibly to Vermont, where the group had holed up for a time on property Zajko purchased, or elsewhere. We know that Bauckholt likely funded the rental of a pair of Airbnbs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Ziz was likely staying with Youngblut and Bauckholt and possibly others, during the fall of 2024.

The Times also notes the timeline of a February 2024 trip Bauckholt took to Vermont to visit Zajko which coincides with Zajko purchasing four handguns from a store in Mount Tabor, Vermont. Those guns may have been purchased with Bauckholt's money, and two of those guns would end up in the car with Youngblut and Bauckholt almost a year later, when they were pulled over by Border Patrol.

Another new detail: Bauckholt and Youngblut were reportedly in Vermont to look at a piece of "off the grid" property that was for sale, which Bauckholt's money would also have been used to purchase.

What they thought they were accomplishing by that last act of violence — or why they felt threatened by the traffic stop — remains unclear. According to the agent who survived the shootout, Youngblut shot first, getting out of the car and opening fire without warning. Bauckholt, too, was seen reaching for a gun, was told to stop, and refused to comply. She was then shot twice in the chest.

Her friend, Dr. Kolomatskaia, who had been her roommate in New York before she disappeared, told NBC News earlier this year that Bauckholt was "the glue of our friend group," and she was "living a very good life" before this Zizian stuff came into  her life. Though she didn't talk much about where she was going or who she was helping, Kolomatskaia suggests to the Times that it was part and parcel of her generous spirit.

Kolomastkaia adds, hauntingly, to the Times, "You can give people the benefit of the doubt and you can have it not bite you for the longest time. Until it does."

In related news this week, the Vacaville Reporter has word from the courtroom in Solano County where Leatham and Dao are set to be tried for Lind's attempted murder, and Borhanian's murder. It was already looking unrealistic that a trial date set for later this month would be stuck too, and, indeed, the judge granted a continuance that was requested by both defendants' attorneys.

The reason for the extra time, they say, is that they need time to collect and review more information from experts. The trial date is now set for March 3, 2026.

All previous Zizian coverage on SFist.

There has been some movement in the cases of the multiple people tied to a small but violent, cult-like group that originated in the Bay Area several years ago. And two suspects who are charged with the murder of their associate and the attempted murder of the former landlord were back in court this week in Solano County.

Alexander "Somni" Leatham, 30, and co-defendant Suri Dao, 24, are both tied to a group seemingly led by Jack "Ziz" LaSota, who espoused some bizarre beliefs about human morality, trans identity, and who continued to have some allegiance with the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement. Most of those associated with the group, including Leatham and LaSota, have computer programming backgrounds and identify as trans women.

LaSota was reportedly present on the property of Curtis Lind in Vallejo when, early on the morning of November 13, 2022, three of her associates allegedly attacked Lind, with Leatham allegedly wielding a sword that impaled Lind through the torso. A witness described Lind as "bleeding like a stuck pig," with a gaping wound near his right eye and the sword sticking through his chest.

The group was imminently being threatened with eviction, after living out of solar-powered box trucks on Lind's property since 2019, and having not paid rent since a few months into their stay. (A pandemic moratorium on evictions had tied Lind's hands until the late fall of 2022.)

While LaSota was not charged in the attack, there has been the implication that she had directed it. Leatham and Dao were arrested, and their friend Emma Borhanian was killed by Lind in the scuffle.

They both stand charged with Lind's attempted murder and Borhanian's murder, and their trial date — though it seems likely to be postponed — is currently set for October 21.

As the Vacaville Reporter reports, Leatham appeared in court Thursday, "shackled while seated in a chair, strands of her brown hair reaching her shoulders," reading a handwritten note to the judge requesting a change of counsel. The so-called "Marsden motion" allows a California criminal defendent to seek alternate representation due to irreconciliable difference or inadequate representation — Leatham has, in the past, insisted that her attorney be vegan, and that may or may not figure into this motion.

Dao, who appeared in court Thursday as well with her lawyer, SF-based Brian Ford, was recenty transferred back to Solano County Jail from the California Insitution for Women in Chino, where it had been suggested she was receiving mental health care. Ford has filed motions to supress evidence, known as in limine motions, which Judge John B. Ellis said he would hear fully on September 24.

The Chronicle earlier identified Dao as, possibly, a person who had once gone by the name Tessa Berns and became estranged from family and friends in Denver in the years prior to surfacing in LaSota's orbit in Vallejo. Berns had been a National Merit Scholar and told friends as a teen that they identified as bi-gender.

The judge said he would rule on Leatham's Marsden motion next week, on September 18.

Things were more dramatic in a courtroom with a different judge on Wednesday, as Courthouse News reports, with Leatham delivering one of her now familiar outbursts. In front of Judge Daniel Healy, she reportedly read from a statement saying, "I am an innocent woman! I have done nothing wrong! This is a show trial to coordinate the genocide of transgender people! What will you do when they come for you?" She also reportedly said she had been "kidnapped [by a] gang of dead-eyed brutes" who were denying her estrogen while in prison, and said, "Where have the good men gone? Where are the gods?"

The earlier hearing on Wednesday included an accusation from the prosecution that the defense is seeking to delay the trial, and a motion by Leatham's attorney, Carole Long, for a continuance due to a previously planned personal trip of her own.

Also facing trial in Solano County is 23-year-old Maximilian Snyder, who allegedly completed the job of killed Lind, stabbing him on his property this past January — though Snyder's ties to LaSota remain unclear.

Across the country in Maryland, LaSota remains behind bars along with associates Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank, after the trio was found trespassing on some rural property and arrested in February. LaSota was indicted by a federal grand jury in June for being a fugitive in possession of multiple weapons — and we first learned that Ziz had other aliases including Andrea Phelps, Ann Grimes, Anne Grimes, Canaris, and Julia LaSota.

Zajko, Blank, and LaSota remain persons of interest in the deaths of Zajko's parents outside Philadelphia on December 31, 2022.

And in Vermont, another associate, Teresa Youngblut, remains in federal custody and was indicted by a grand jury last month for the murder of Border Patrol Agent David "Chris" Maland in a January altercation near the Canadian border. Another associate of the Zizians, Ophelia Bauckholt, was also killed in the ensuing shootout.

All previous coverage of the Zizians on SFist.

The New York Times published a piece this week profiling the Berkeley-based Rationalist movement and its arguably cult-y, religious-y ways, and they never once mention the probably actual cult that spun out of their group.

Maybe someone within the Rationalist movement saw that they needed a PR boost and knew someone higher up at the New York Times who could do them a favor. Or, maybe, the Times itself felt it needed to take a deeper, kinder look at the Rationalists after they consistently garnered mentions in some fairly unsavory stories through the early part of 2025.

In either case, we get this piece this week in the Times that delves into the origins and present state of the Rationalists — a fairly geeky but highly influential group of techno-philosphizers bent on saving the world from the evil potential of artificial intelligence, with a fair bit of overlap with the Effective Altruism movement. And, remarkably, the article never once mentions the Zizians, the small group that originated among the Rationalists and socialized with them, but broke off on their own in the last couple of years and, allegedly, started killing people, seemingly without remorse.

To be fair, the Times thoroughly covered the Zizian saga in early July, but it seems strange not to mention it, even as a brief paragraph about the perils of creating a quasi-religious, intellectual space obsessed with gaming out or avoiding a possibly disastrous, AI-tyrannized future.

And the latest piece isn't entirely a glowing portrayal of the Rationalists themselves, who have counted among their flock DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei, and former OpenAI researcher Paul Christiano, as well as, to some extent, Elon Musk.

"When you think about the billions at stake and the radical transformation of lives across the world because of the eccentric vision of this group, how much more cult-y does it have to be for this to be a cult? Not much," says Harvard chaplain Greg M. Epstein, who wrote a book that touches on the Rationalists called Tech Agnostic, speaking to the Times.

Epstein adds, "What do cultish and fundamentalist religions often do? They get people to ignore their common sense about problems in the here and now in order to focus their attention on some fantastical future."

The Rationalists' online forums and in-person events appeared to give shape and purpose to the lives of Ziz, born Jack LaSota, and her half dozen or so closest followers. Even one of the Rationalist movement's leaders, Anna Salamon, executive director of CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality), has admitted that the Rationalist meet-ups were, unwittingly, the perfect breeding ground for such a cult to form. And Salamon has said that Ziz gathered around her "a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated" and "manipulated" them through various cult-ish means — including food and sleep deprivation — into doing her bidding and crowning her their spiritual leader, of a sort.

Salamon told the Times last month that she believed Ziz and her friends "came [to the Rationalist sphere] hoping to become one of the main characters in the story, and then found out that they didn’t get to be one of the main characters. And then I think they were like, 'To heck with that — we’re going to be the main characters anyway.'"

Founding thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky gave a good quote to the Times in July about the Zizians, after mostly declining to comment on them, saying, "A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home, and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible."

The new Times piece also notes the religious overtones of Rationlist practice, which includes recitations of Yudkowsky's The Sequences, and an annual winter solstice gathering that includes group singing.

If nothing else, it seems clear that the Rationalists, whether they like it or not, are likely to keep making news as AI itself keeps making news.

Related: Possible Suicide Cluster Linked to Zizian Group, on Top of Killings

Two women who ran the San Francisco-based wellness company OneTaste, which promoted the physical and spiritual health benefits of the female orgasm, were convicted Monday in federal court in Brooklyn.

The former leaders of OneTaste, former CEO Nicole Daedone and former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz, were convicted Monday of forced labor conspiracy following a one-month trial. Prosecutors argued that both women had subjected their victims, all former employees of OneTaste, "to economic, sexual, emotional, financial, and psychological abuse, as well as surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation." The trial also discussed ways in which OneTaste members were coerced into spending large sums on courses and forcefully discouraged from leaving the group.

As the New York Times notes, while previous trials involving sex cults and forced labor schemes have included more direct evidence of blackmail or threats of violence, this case involved other forms of coercion which the jury apparently found convincing.

Testimony at trial included testimony from former employees who described a highly sexually charged environment in which the lines between personal and professional were constantly blurred. OneTaste kept a communal house in Harlem where Daedone reportedly had her own private room, and employees were tasked with cleaning up after her and her sexual exploits. Employees also described having to perform sexual favors for, and sadomasochistic acts on, Daedone's romantic partner.

Joseph Nocella Jr., the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, issued a statement saying, "The jury’s verdict has unmasked Daedone and Cherwitz for who they truly are: grifters who preyed on vulnerable victims by making empty promises of sexual empowerment and wellness only to manipulate them into performing labor and services for the defendants’ benefit."

"Today's verdict sends a clear message — controlling your labor force by relying on lies, manipulation, and abuse is a crime," said FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher G. Raia, in a statement.

Daedone, a former sex worker and an acolyte of the Bay Area's Purple People and "responsible hedonism" guru Dr. Victor Baranco, maintains her innocence and vowed outside the Brooklyn courthouse Monday to appeal her conviction.

"There is nothing but the spiritual aim that I set out for, and that’s the liberation of all people, and the liberation of women. I’ll do that wherever I am," Daedone said, per the Times.

Daedone and Cherwitz will face sentencing in September, and both face up to 20 years in prison.

OneTaste was founded in San Francisco in 2004, and Daedone said that she based her coursework on Buddhist teachings, as well as her own knowledge of female pleasure from her time as a sex worker.  She was vaunted on the TED Talk circuit, and at one point OneTaste had outposts in nine countries, with offices in LA, New York, Austin, Denver, London, and elsewhere.

Then came a 2013 Gawker piece titled "My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult," and a damning 2018 expose by Bloomberg that appears to have led directly to the federal investigation. Then Netflix gave it the documentary treatment in 2022's Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste. Daedone and Cherwitz were then indicted by the feds in June 2023.

Previously: Founders of OneTaste, the Cult-y SF Orgasm Group, Begin Federal Trial In NY

Top image: Nicole Daedone attends the 2024 Dream.Org "We, The Dream" Inaugural Gala, celebrating justice and environmental champions, on October 16, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for Dream.Org)

With more stories emerging of individuals whose lives were impacted by the so-called Zizian cult in the Bay Area and beyond, it's become clear that there were more victims besides the six people who were allegedly killed at the hands of group members.

The Chronicle reports on two instances of mental breakdowns by individuals who became heavily involved in the Berkeley-based rationalist movement, and two cases of suicide which had direct links to the Zizians. More on this in a moment.

There have been only a few reports in the last month from court appearances by members of the group we're calling the Zizians, who all seem to have been in the thrall of the writings and beliefs of a trans woman named Ziz, birth name Jack Amadeus LaSota.

As we know, six people are dead due to violence attributed to or very likely linked to LaSota and her acolytes, who all believe in an offshoot philosophy of rationalism that fears a coming end to humanity at the hands of AI, adheres to a strict vegan lifestyle, and believes that the hemispheres of the human brain are gendered and can be in conflict with each other.

Here in the Bay Area, the first death that brought the group onto our radar was the brutal stabbing of 82-year-old Curtis Lind in Vallejo, on January 17. 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder, who has distanced himself from the group but is nonetheless linked to it, is in jail in Solano County charged with Lind's murder.

Lind had been the landlord for members of the group, including LaSota, who lived out of two box trucks on his property from 2019 until November 2022, when three group members — Emma Borhanian, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, and Suri Dao — allegedly attacked him with knives and a samurai sword, impaling him through the chest and stabbing out one of his eyes. Lind fatally shot Borhanian while defending himself, and Leatham and Dao remain in jail for his attempted murder, and the murder of Borhanian.

Three days later, across the country in northern Vermont, two other people linked to LaSota and the Zizians, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-year-old Ophelia Bauckholt, engaged two US Border Patrol agents in a shootout during a traffic stop. Bauckholt died in that shootout, while Youngblut sustained injuries, and she stands accused of the murder of Border Patrol Agend David Maland.

Additionally, on or around December 31, 2022, the parents of another group member, 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, were mysteriously murdered in their home outside of Philadelphia, and no one has yet been charged with their killing.

Zajko, who remains jailed along with LaSota and another group memer, Daniel Blank, in Allegany County, Maryland, wrote an "open letter to the world" from jail, some of the contents of which were published last month by the Associated Press. Zajko insists that press reports about her and her friends have been inaccurate, that she did not kill her parents, and she says that Snyder is not part of their group.

"My friends and I are being described as like Satan’s lapdogs, the devil & the Manson family all rolled into one," Zajko writes. "My friends and I certainly don’t call ourselves 'Zizians.'" Still, she says, Ziz "saved my life," and "I’ve never seen her do an evil thing."

"Ziz is not my leader, & I am not her’s. What we have is called friendship, and I love her infinitely more than I could ever express," Zajko writes.

Also, like LaSota and Leatham similarly have done in court appearances, Zajko complained in her letter about not being fed a sufficient vegan diet while in jail.

The Chronicle's reporting team that has continued digging into the Zizians, and reports on how rationalist ideas have pushed at least two people — who may or may not have been psychologically vulnerable to begin with — to have psychotic breaks or mental collapses. (Says one individual who chose to remain anonymous after being imprisoned for an assault that took place during one such mental break, "There’s inherent stress in concluding that humanity is heading toward an apocalypse that will kill everyone you care about.")

They've also now uncovered more about the story of a young trans woman from Poland, Maia Pasek, whose name had been mentioned in multiple rationalist forums as being a victim of Ziz and her teachings. Pasek took her own life in March 2018, jumping off a building in her native Krakow, about two months after coming out as transgender, and a year after traveling to the Bay Area to attend a rationalist conference put on by CFAR (the Center for Applied Rationality).

Pasek's girlfriend, who had moved with her to the Canary Islands in 2017 ostensibly to start their own rationalist movement, tells the Chronicle that her suicide was likely spurred by a confluence of factors, including her overall mental state. But LaSota had been in significant contact with Pasek, and had allegedly convinced her that her two brain hemispheres were split, one male and one female, and that her female half was suicidal due to her being trans.

Pasek, in one of her final writings in February 2018, wrote in a comment on LaSota's blog that suicide was the "obvious choice" for "bearers of selfish utility functions who expect negative utility."

Anna Salamon, the executive director of CFAR, has spoken about the terrifying chill she experienced in several interactions with LaSota, who she believed seemed dangerous. And, Salamon tells the Chronicle, "LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek. Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself."

Salamon has admitted that rationalist meetups and the community she helped create had unwittingly created the perfect breeding ground for a cult. And she has referred to the followers of Ziz as "a number of smart, mostly autistic-ish transwomen who were extremely vulnerable and isolated," and who were easily "manipulated" by her.

A second suicide linked to the group is that of Texas native Jay Winterford, a trans woman who reportedly met Ziz at a rationalist meetup in Berkeley in 2016. By 2020, having left the Bay Area, Winterford was living an isolated existence in a cabin her mother owned in Colorado, and as the Chronicle reports, she "maintained regular, sometimes antagonistic contact with LaSota and other rationalists through online forums." That contact was often bullying, and in early March 2021, she took her own life, shortly after leaving a comment on Ziz's blog saying, "I have been trying to destroy my system for months out of a belief that it’s done more harm than good."

If you or someone you know is struggling with feelings of depression or suicidal thoughts, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers free, round-the-clock support, information and resources for help. Call or text the lifeline at 988, or see the 988lifeline.org website, where chat is available.

Previously: Sole Surviving Witness In First Zizian Murder Case Is Infirm, Has Memory Lapses In Day of Testimony

The co-founders of SF-based female-orgasm evangelism group/"wellness startup" OneTaste, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, are on trial in New York for labor-law violations, and that trial began on Monday.

We've been talking about OneTaste on this site since the middle of the last decade, when they were a trending Bay Area self-help purveyor with workshops that only wealthy techies could afford, and a co-founder, Nicole Daedone, who was big on the TED Talk circuit for preaching the importance of the female orgasm.

The group's woo-woo workshops brought in both men and women who were struggling to discover themselves sexually and had money to burn in trying. They billed their practice as "orgasmic meditation," and at one point it had expanded to nine countries, with offices in LA, New York, London and elsewhere.

OneTaste's lineage actually has Bay Area roots that go back much further than the 2010s, with Daedone being a disciple, of sorts, of Purple People f0under Victor Baranco — whose 57-year-old group, based on a 23-acre commune in Lafayette, in the East Bay, has often been referred to as a "sex cult."

Daedone and her second-in-command, former OneTaste head of sales Rachel Cherwitz, were indicted by the feds in 2023 on charges of forced labor conspiracy, with federal investigators saying that they engaged in "a years-long scheme to obtain the labor and services of a group of OneTaste members — including volunteers, contractors, and employees of OneTaste — by subjecting them to economic, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, surveillance, indoctrination, and intimidation."

The indictment further said that the pair "groomed OneTaste members to engage in sexual acts with OneTaste’s current and prospective investors, clients, employees and beneficiaries, for the financial benefit of OneTaste and, in turn, themselves." And, prosecutors said, they "instructed the OneTaste members to engage in sexual acts — including acts the members found uncomfortable or repulsive — as a requirement to supposedly obtain freedom and enlightenment and demonstrate their commitment to OneTaste and Daedone."

The whole thing has the familiar whiffs of the NXIVM case, with the difference being that there was not one charismatic man at the helm getting his own sexual gratification as well as money, but two women.

The OneTaste story landed on the site Gawker in 2013, in a piece titled "My Life With the Thrill-Clit Cult," and subsequently they were the subject of a 2018 expose by Bloomberg that may have led directly to the federal investigation. Subsequently, there was a 2022 Netflix documentary titled Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste, which included allegations of sex trafficking.

And while OneTaste still exists as a free app, and its CEO, Anjuli Ayer, says told the Wall Street Journal in January that the company is still pursuing a franchise model, neither Daedone nor Cherwitz is still involved. (It's also unclear if they still have an office in San Francisco, and their original Market Street offices are closed.)

As the New York Times reports, jury selection began Monday in federal court in Brooklyn for Daedone and Cherwitz, who face up to 20 years in prison if they are convicted.

Part of the defense appears to hinge on discrediting some of the incendiary details that appeared in the Netflix doc. As this legal blog notes, the DOJ has acknowledged that the content of some incriminating journal entries that appeared in the doc could not be authenticated. The journals belonged to former member Ayries Blanck, and the defense has argued that Blanck's sister was paid $25,000 to participate in the Netflix film.

Per the Times, the prosecution plans to call other former members and employees as witnesses at the trial.

Previously: SF-Founded Sex Cult-y Group OneTaste Has Founder, Top Executive Indicted For Forced Labor, Sex Traffic

The elderly man who is the sole surviving witness to the November 2022 stabbing of Vallejo resident Curtis Lind — though he only witnessed the aftermath of the stabbing — gave a day of testimony Tuesday in Solano County.

Patrick McMillan, 81, was the best friend and tenant of Curtis Lind, 82, on Lind's Vallejo property where a group of alleged cult members were also living out of two box trucks between 2019 and 2022. On the morning of November 13, 2022, McMillan says that Lind knocked on the door of his trailer and he found his friend outside "bleeding like a stuck pig" from his right eye, with the tip of a samurai sword poking out from the middle of his chest.

As the Chronicle reports, McMillan provided seven hours of testimony Tuesday in what's called a conditional hearing, due to his frail health and the possibility that he will not be able or alive to testify at trial. But, McMillan also failed to identify the suspects in court, and admitted to memory problems.

McMillan can be seen in the KTVU report below from November 2022 discussing the attack on his friend.

On trial are Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao, who may also have the name Tessa Berns, who have been in jail in Solano County since their arrest just after this stabbing. They are accused of stabbing Lind, with the help of 31-year-old Emma Borhanian, on a day that they were going to be evicted from Lind's property by the Solano County Sheriff's Office.

Lind previously testified at a conditional hearing that he had allowed the group, led by Jack "Ziz" LaSota, to live on the property beginning in 2019, but they had quickly stopped paying rent — and when the pandemic lockdowns began, so did an eviction moratorium in Solano County that did not end until 2022. Neighbors had already been calling the odd squatters "the cult" before any of the violence began, and they were known walk around outside naked, sometimes with gas masks.

As both McMillan and Lind have testified, the group had been throwing rocks at Lind's trailer around 1 am on November 13, 2022, and trying to open his door while he remained quietly inside, because they were angry about the eviction. Around 7 am that morning, Dao allegedly lured Lind out of his trailer, and he was attacked by Leatham, Dao, and Borhanian. He managed to defend himself, fatally shooting Borhanian and also shooting Leatham. And he survived the attack, though he was blinded in his right eye.

Lind was set to testify in the upcoming trial of Leatham and Dao, for his attempted murder and the consequent killing of Borhanian, when he was fatally stabbed on January 17, 2025. 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder remains in custody for that crime.

His stabbing brought what's been called the Zizian cult to the media's attention, with another crime across the country just days later being apparently connected. On the afternoon of January 20, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-year-old Ophelia Bauckholt were driving on Interstate 91 in northern Vermont when they were pulled over by US Border Patrol agents. According to investigators, Youngblut and Bauckholt both pulled out guns, and both Bauckholt and Border Patrol Agent David C. Maland were killed in the ensuing shootout.

Youngblut had reportedly been in frequent contact with Snyder and LaSota. LaSota and two others were subsequently arrested the following month in Maryland, where they had been living out of a box truck on private land. They are being held on suspicion of trespassing, but also in connection with the unsolved Pennsylvania murders of the parents of another alleged cult member, Michelle Zajko.

The group appears to be devoted to radical form of Rationalism, as espoused by LaSota, which includes devout veganism, and spurious ideas about the hemispheres of the brain and morality itself. Most of the group members identify as trans women, and all are highly educated and computer savvy.

Circumstances, evidence of the cult's path of destruction, and an absence of other suspects may still make the case against Leatham and Dao easy to win for Solano County prosecutors. However, as the suspects and the group as a whole likely knew, Lind was the only eyewitness to his own attack besides the suspects themselves.

And McMillan is not the most solid witness. As the Chronicle reports, he failed to identify either Dao, who appeared via Zoom from a Chino hospital — this hospitalization has not been explained — or Leatham, who, as she has in the past, entered the courtroom with an outburst about her treatment in jail. McMillan also admitted to having memory lapses after eight strokes and nine heart attacks, though says his memory since 2022 is fairly good.

A trial date had initially been set for this month for Leatham and Dao, but it is now unclear when the trial will take place. Another pre-trial hearing is set for May 2, as KCRA reports.

None of the Zizians, or Ziz herself, has faced a jury, and so far only Leatham, Dao, and Snyder have been charged with murder. Charges in the East Coast cases are still pending.

Related: Accused Murder Suspect and Zizian Cult Member Accuses Jailers of 'Detransitioning' Her In Court Outburst

One of the suspected cult members who is set to stand trial for the attempted murder of Curtis Lind and the murder of fellow Zizian Emma Borhanian in 2022, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, had another outburst in a court appearance Tuesday.

The January murder of Vallejo resident Curtis Lind brought to light the small but seemingly very violent Bay Area cult, the Zizians, and a path of destruction that allegedly led to the deaths of six people to date in four separate incidents across the country. And Lind's murder appears to be linked to his testimony in an earlier attempt on his life by three of the alleged cult members on his Vallejo property in November 2022.

Two of those suspects from the 2022 incident, Somni Leatham and Suri Dao, are still set to stand trial, and made a court appearance Tuesday morning in Solano County Superior Court in Fairfield. As SFGate reports from the courtroom, Leatham once again proved disruptive, having previously been handcuffed to a wheelchair for court appearances due to her earlier outbursts and at least one escape attempt.

The wheelchair and handcuffs were used again, and Leatham reportedly immediately began screaming upon being wheeled into the courtroom. In front of Judge John B. Ellis, per SFGate, Leatham repeated that a Solano County jail officer had told her she "deserved to be shot for being transgender while he had a gun and I was in chains."

Leatham also said, "The court has been hormonally detransitioning me for quarter of a decade as part of a state-sponsored conversion therapy program. I am not suicidal. I have never been suicidal."

The quarter decade appears to refer to the two-and-almost-half years that Leatham has been in custody for the attempt on Lind's life — which allegedly involved a samurai sword and knives — and the consequent killing of Emma Borhanian, who had allegedly taken part in the attack but who Lind said he shot in self-defense.

The third suspect in the attack, Suri Dao, also appeared via video in court Tuesday, per SFGate, and "politely" answered the judge's questions. Leatham and Dao are now scheduled to appear again on April 22. (The Chronicle reported last month that Suri Dao appears to be also known as Tessa Berns, a onetime National Merit Scholar from Denver who disappeared around 2022.)

The three suspects appeared to be taking revenge on Lind for trying to have them evicted, after he said they — along with purported cult leader Jack "Ziz" LaSota — had been living out of box trucks on his property without paying rent for over two years. A pandemic-era eviction moratorium in the county had just ended in late 2022 when Lind began taking legal action to have them removed.

The group, apparently inspired by LaSota's writings and theories, is an offshoot of the Bay Area-born Rationalist movement, and is deeply concerned with the rise of AI. But LaSota had also formed spurious theories about the functioning of the two hemispheres of the brain, and how this related to morality and gender identity, among other things. They are also all militantly vegan, and all but three of them identify as trans women.

Not long after the attack on Lind, which he survived, LaSota and two others, Daniel Blank and Michelle Zajko, were arrested in Pennsylvania in connection with the double-murder of Zajko's parents on December 31, 2022. After being jailed on obstruction and other charges, all three were released and subsequently missed court dates in Pennsylvania.

Then, in January 2025, a gun licensed to Zajko was allegedly used in a shootout with US Border Patrol agents in Vermont. The two suspects in that case were also suspected acolytes of LaSota, and 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut remains in custody on gun charges. Her alleged accomplice, 28-year-old German national Ophelia Bauckholt, was killed in the shootout.

In February, LaSota, Blank, and Zajko, who had been on the run for about 20 months, were arrested on some private property in rural Maryland, where they were living out of a box truck, and where the property owner had decided to evict them. Late last month, firearms charges were added to their list of felonies and misdemeanors, and they remain in custody in Maryland, likely awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania.

Also last month, the suspect in the January fatal stabbing of Lind, 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder, made a court appearance in Solano County and pleaded not guilty to the murder. Snyder has claimed to a reporter that he is not a follower of Ziz, though he appears to have a connection to Youngblut.

Previously: Leader of Zizians Group Speaks Out In Court Pleading for Vegan Food, Says 'I've Done Nothing Wrong'

Photo of Leatham via Sonoma County Sheriff's Office

Maximilian Snyder, one of seven members of a strange, cult-like group with Bay Area origins who are currently in police custody for a series of seemingly linked crimes, made another court appearance on Wednesday.

The Chronicle was on hand for a plea hearing for Snyder in Vallejo, and the 22-year-old data scientist and Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast was reportedly "singing" in a holding cell and humming as he came into the courtroom. Snyder entered a plea of not guilty today in the January 17 murder of 82-year-old Curtis Lind.

The hearing sounds otherwise unremarkable, and as in previous court appearances, Synder "calmly answered questions from the judge," as the Chronicle reports. Snyder made his first appearance in a Vallejo courtroom on January 28, after being arrested eight days earlier. It has apparently taken two months for Snyder to find an attorney — others in the so-called Zizians group have insisted their attorneys be vegan, like them, and that may have been the case here — and now enter a plea.

Across the country, three days after the murder of Lind, a young woman who had school ties to Snyder was allegedly involved in a shootout with US Border Patrol agents in Vermont — a shootout that ended with her friend, Ophelia Bauckholt, and one of the agents, David Maland, both death. The woman, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut, remains in custody in Vermont, and was indicted last month on two felony weapon charges, but she will also likely face murder charges as well.

The purported ringleader of this group, which is an offshoot of the Bay Area-based Rationalist movement, is a trans woman who goes by Ziz, and whose legal name is Jack LaSota. Lind had been a landlord to LaSota and a group of others, including two who remain jailed in Vallejo, who were living in solar-powered box trucks on property Lind owned between 2019 and late 2022. It was when Lind, in November 2022, moved to evict the group — who had stopped paying rent and used pandemic eviction protections up until that point — that he was first stabbed by a group of three of them, identified as Suri Dao, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, and Emma Borhanian. Leatham allegedly impaled Lind with a samurai sword, and Borhanian was killed in the struggle by a gunshot from Lind.

Lind miraculously survived, having lost an eye to a stab wound, and he was set to testify this year against Leatham and Dao. Snyder appears to have been sent to finish the job in January, with Lind being the sole witness to his own stabbing.

Snyder has since tried to distance himself from Ziz and the others in the group, but has similarly impassioned feelings about veganism — and we know he and Youngblut applied for a marriage license in their home state of Washington last fall. The Chronicle got him to a agree to a jailhouse interview in early February, and he used this as an opporunity not to speak to the crime he's accused of, but to dictate a letter to a primary figure in the Rationalist scene, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Snyder pleaded with Yudkowsky to adopt a vegan lifestyle and to promote this, because it is "critical to saving the world."

In court last month, Ziz, aka LaSota, similarly used time before a judge in Maryland to make a plea for vegan food while in custody.

Ziz and two others, Michelle Zajko and Daniel Blank, were arrested in February in a rural area of Maryland, where they were living out of a box truck on private property. They had been on the run from authorities for about 20 months, and investigators have suggested that Youngblut and Bauckholt had been in cellphone communication with one or all of them. They likely face extradition to Pennsylvania, where all three have been persons of interest in the double murder of Zajko's parents on December 31, 2022.

The trio was originally arrested in a Philadelphia airport hotel in January 2023, but were all subsequently released from custody.

A gun registered to Zajko was also reportedly used by Youngblut in the Vermont shooting.

We may learn more about all of these cases in the coming months, as each returns to court for evidentiary hearings.

Previously: Leader of 'Zizian' Death Cult and Two Associates Arrested In Maryland After 20 Months on the Run

We are not likely to learn much more for a while about the motivations and internal communications of the small, cult-like group known as the Zizians, who have left six deaths in their wake over the past two years. But we do now know what Ziz herself said in court last week.

Jack "Ziz" LaSota and two others who are apparently loyal to her were arrested a week ago Sunday in rural Maryland and are being held without bail there, likely pending extradition back to Pennsylvania. And the Chronicle just got their hands on an audio recording from a bail hearing last week in which Ziz spoke out via remote video feed in a Allegany County, Maryland courtroom. And she suggested that her being able to eat a vegan diet was "more important than whatever this hearing is."

"I haven’t done anything wrong," LaSota said to the judge, adding, "I shouldn’t be here."

LaSota paused frequently and said "um" quite a bit, and proceeded to interrupt the judge a number of time, leading the judge to suggest she would be muted if she did not pipe down.

LaSota also said she was in a "mild state of delusion" after not being properly able to eat since entering jail. And, she added, when she was previously incarcerated in nearby Pennsylvania in 2023, she fasted — essentially went on a hunger strike — for over a month because she was not being provided vegan meals. And she said something about a jail chaplain with a "discriminatory agenda."

Per the Chronicle and the recording, the judge allowed LaSota to speak for about five minutes toward the end of the hearing, and she argued that a bail release may be a "matter of survival," because she needed access to vegan food. Her lawyer suggsted that her mother may have figured out a way to get her vegan mails at the jail.

“I think the idea that I be mentally impaired for a month at proceedings because I’m in a state of starvation or that somebody with a particular majority religion would be deciding whether my religious beliefs are real … it’s not right."

LaSota's statement suggests that she ties her plant-based diet to a religious belief, which tracks with some of her earlier writing, and with the similar, cultlike devotion with which several of her associates have spoken about veganism.

Daniel Blank, 26, who was arrested last week alongside LaSota and 32-year-old Michell Zajko, reportedly broke off contact with his parents as he insisted that they adopt a vegan lifestyle.

Maximillian Snyder, 22, who was arrested last month in Solano County, California for the murder of 82-year-old Curtis Lind, used an opportunity to speak to the Chronicle to dictate a letter to a well known figure in the rationalist movement, convincing him that he must adopt and promote veganism.

LaSota has never been charged with any violent crime, however she, Blank, and Zajko were all questioned and considered persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 murder of Zajko's parents in Chester Heights, PA. LaSota was also previously living with others in two box trucks on Curtis Lind's property in Vallejo where three of her associates allegedly attacked Lind with knives and a sword in November 2022. LaSota, who was not apparently present for the crime, appears to have been questioned by authorities at the time before fleeing the Bay Area, but was never charged.

It was several months before this that she allegedly faked her own death by drowning in the Bay, with the help of two associates, one of whom died in the melee with Lind.

Lind was killed one day after the Solano County District Attorney gave a statement saying that he was the only eye witness to his own attempted murder, and would be testifying in the upcoming trial of two other LaSota associates, Suri Dao and Somni Leathem, who remain jailed in Solano County — and who have both attempted escape, the DA said.

Two other LaSota associates, Teresa Youngblut and Ophelia Bauckholt, who appear to have had some contact with Zajko and LaSota in recent months, were implicated in the killing of a US Border Patrol agent in Vermont on January 20. Bauckholt was fatally shot in the incident, and Youngblut was shot and injured and will also be facing trial there. Authorities say the gun she used in the killing was registered to Zajko, and may be linked to a gun used to kill Zajko's parents.

Acquaintances in the rationalist movement had been sounding alarm bells about Ziz/LaSota's writings and behavior for several years, with one leader in the movement, Anna Salamon, saying she felt viscerally afraid of LaSota as far back as 2018.

Her belief system, centered on decision theory and rationalism, includes some strange ideas about the hemispheres of the brain being able to operate independently — something that is not backed up by brain science. She has tied this notion to both gender — with people having, sometimes, male and female hemispheres simultaneously, or two of the same — and morality, with people having good and evil halves. Rarely, she has written, people can be "double good," brain-wise, like her.

Related: 'Zizian' Group Member Arrested In Sonoma Protest Confirmed Alive, Estranged From Group

Photo via Sonoma County Sheriff's Office

One figure who has been unaccounted for the last several years as the so-called Zizian cult took a violent turn, Gwen Danielson, was rumored online to have taken her own life. Her father confirms that is not the case.

As this week brought news of the East Coast arrests of three key players in the group we continue to call the Zizians — though they may not use this term to describe themselves — the Chronicle has been tracking down the parents of several members who have been especially disturbed by recent events. One of those parents is Brett Danielson, the father of Gwen Danielson, who has been absent from the group for several years and was thought to be possibly deceased.

In fact, Danielson appears to have done a disappearing act not unlike the one attempted by the group's apparent leader Ziz, aka Jack LaSota. LaSota faked her own death in San Francisco Bay with the help of friends in August 2022, which led to an obituary being posted in her native Alaska. But when Solano County authorities were investigating the attempted murder of 80-year-old Curtis Lind in November 2022, they found LaSota alive and well in Vallejo.

Within two months, LaSota would be under arrest in Pennsylvania in connection with the deaths of two people, the parents of another group member, Michelle Zajko.

Danielson and LaSota had been close, and as vegan trans women with a passion for the rationalist movement they were together trying to create a like-minded community that LaSota had imagined, living cheaply on boats in the Bay Area. Danielson joined LaSota in sailing a rusted tugboat down to Half Moon Bay from Alaska in the summer of 2017, as reported on by the Chronicle earlier this month — the idea for which originated with Danielson living on a sailboat in the Berkeley Marina in 2016, around the time the two met at a rationalist meet-up.

In 2018, one of the movement's leaders, Anna Salamon, the president and cofounder of the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) says that she first began feeling afraid of LaSota, whom she referred to as Ziz, during a retreat. She described Ziz repeatedly asking to have one-on-one conversations with her — Ziz was there as a student, and Salamon a part-time instructor — and said that some of these conversations were uncomfortably intense. It was around this time that a rift formed, and Ziz began gathering others around her and her own version of rationalist thought — which included spurious beliefs about the hemispheres of the brain, decision theory, and notions of good and bad.

Both LaSota and Danielson would end up starting blogs in 2019 and 2020, respectively, laying out their thoughts and grievances toward Salamon and others. Danielson's was called Everything to Save It — which may refer to the rationalist movement itself.

It was in November 2019 that Danielson, LaSota, Emma Borhanian, and Somni Leatham showed up in Guy Fawkes masks at a CFAR reunion event in Sonoma County, and were allegedly menacing adults and children there. They were arrested — the Chronicle wrote about the arrests and the bizarre protest, noting that "The suspects were allegedly uncooperative and spoke incoherently," and "investigators had to rely on fingerprints to identify them."

Shortly after this protest, the group set up camp in box trucks on Lind's property in Vallejo — Lind had met them in Half Moon Bay where he had a large boat, and offered them space in his RV lot for $2,000 per month. Not long after the pandemic began, they stopped paying rent, Lind said, and cited COVID moratoriums on evictions as reason why they would not be leaving.

Danielson was the group's "mouthpiece" at the time, according to the Chronicle's reporting, but would become estranged from them sometime after 2020, and before the attempt on Lind's life.

"This is a situation where some people apparently turned what was meant to be an intellectual group into a violent group with some extreme views, and it’s made it dangerous for people who got into it for a good reason," says Danielson's father, speaking to the Chronicle. "I would love to see this come to resolution where at least she and anyone else that really wants to do good in that group can kind of be free of the trouble behind them and move forward.”

This week, Brett Danielson tells the Chronicle that he is relieved to hear about the arrest of LaSota in Maryland, saying that he hopes it means his daughter will return from a self-imposed exile. According to the father, she has been living off the grid, "working construction jobs under a fake name," apparently fearful of violence.

LaSota, Zajko, and Bay Area native Daniel Blank are in custody in Allegany County, Maryland and being held without bail. They are considered persons of interest in the murder of Zajko's parents in December 2022, and in the murder of a border patrol agent in Vermont last month. Separately last month, another figure who has disavowed any connection to LaSota, 22-year-old Maximillian Snyder, was arrested for fatally stabbing Lind in Vallejo.

"This is something that’s been scary," Brett Danielson tells the paper. "Hopefully they will spend a fair amount of time behind bars."

Previously: Arrests of Alleged 'Zizian' Cult Members Came After Another Dispute With a Landlord

Top image: A 2019 photo of Danielson via the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office

The three individuals tied to a cult-like group that has been linked to two Bay Area deaths and four on the East Coast were apparently up to their old tricks in rural Maryland when they were arrested on Sunday.

We now know more about the circumstances in which 34-year-old Jack "Ziz" LaSota (she/her), 32-year-old Michelle Zajko, and 26-year-old Daniel Blank were arrested in Allegany County Maryland, after being on the run for nearly two years. And much like they and others in the group did on other people's property in Vallejo, California and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, they were apparently residing in two box trucks, likely tricked out with solar power.

As the Guardian reports, following a Tuesday bail hearing in Maryland, prosecutors say that LaSota, Zajko, and Blank had arrived on a man's property in Frostburg, in Georges Creek Valley, Maryland in recent weeks, and asked permission to camp there for a month. The man reportedly called authorities and said that the trio, who dressed in black and carried holstered guns, seemed suspicious and he wanted them off his property.

The three were arrested and charged with trespassing and gun possession, and authorities did not initially appear to know the links between them and several other violent crimes, including the January 17 murder of Curtis Lind in Vallejo, and the January 20 murder of Border Patrol agent David Maland in Northern Vermont.

All three were also persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 double murder of Zajko's parents in suburban Pennsylvania.

Police said they found a rifle and handgun in one of the box trucks, and Zajko was arrested while carrying a handgun. Zajko also, allegedly, refused to comply with police commands to put her hands behind her back, and was "taken to the ground," per the Guardian.

Maryland prosecutors said that LaSota "appears to be the leader of an extremist group known as Zizians," and a judge ruled she should be held without bail. It's not clear from the report if Zajko and Blank are also set to be held without bail. Given they were only charged with misdemeanors in Maryland, it appears likely that extradition is in their future.

Law enforcement had lost track of Blank and Zajko since the spring of 2023, and similarly, LaSota, after making bail in June of that year, had been on the run and had a bench warrant for her arrest.

As SFist noted yesterday from the mugshot photos seen below, Zajko appeared to be in (possibly willful or feigned) catatonic state, much like LaSota did in a January 2023 mugshot in Pennsylvania. LaSota and others in the group wrote frequently in blog posts about "dissociating," and about inducing sleep in a single hemisphere of the brain.

LaSota/Ziz's blog writing (now offline), which is sprawling and highly intelligent, but also unstructured and rambling, takes on topics of the rationalist movement and prominent Bay Area figures in it, as well as issues of artificial intelligence, veganism, trans identity, and the "warring" hemispheres of our brain. The writing often cited and linked to the writings of others, in the style of an academic treatise.

Ziz self-identified as a "vegan Sith," referring to the "dark side" warriors from Star Wars as a religion and wearing black robes, writing at one point, "Sometimes cops harass me for wearing my religious attire as a Sith." She also wrote of the brain hemispheres being good and sinister, with most people having one of each, and rarer people — like her — having a "double good" brain.

Acquaintances in this sphere had for several years noted the violent rhetoric that began to appear in LaSota/Ziz's writing, and one last known physical interaction with the rationalist community in 2019, at a gathering of the Berkeley-based Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in Sonoma County, ended with LaSota and three others being arrested.

CFAR president and co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC News last week that she first became fearful of LaSota during a 2018 CFAR retreat, when LaSota began intensely discussing her belief system, which strayed from standard rationalist thinking.

"I was viscerally afraid of LaSota in a way I’ve never been viscerally afraid of anybody," Salamon said.

Salamon added, "There are a lot of young people... who would have had OK lives except they bumped into the network around LaSota."

By November 2022, LaSota's living arrangement in box trucks on the property of Curtis Lind in Vallejo appeared to be threatened, with Lind planning to call in the sheriff to evict thr group after they had stayed there rent-free for three years. (An agreement to let them park on his lot began amicably in 2019, he said, but they soon stopped paying rent.) One night, Alexander "Somni" Leatham, Suri Dao, and Emma Borhanian allegedly attacked Lind with knives and a sword, stabbing out his eye and impaling him through the chest. Lind survived the ordeal (Borhanian did not), and planned to testify against Leatham and Dao this spring — however he was killed by an assailant on January 17, three days before the shooting in Vermont.

The two "friends of Ziz," as they've been sometimes referred to, 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut and 28-yeear-old Ophelia Bauckholt, who were pulled over by Border Patrol agents in Vermont last month, had been living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in recent months, in two Airbnb units. The owner of the units told the media, after the shooting incident, that he found them suspicious, and that one of them — presumably Bauckholt, but possibly LaSota — had been seen sitting in a box truck parked outside the unit.

Youngblut is in custody in Vermont after being shot herself in the January 20 shootout. Bauckholt was fatally shot by one of the agents. A gun found in their car was registered to Zajko and linked to the killing of her parents, and a cellphone wrapped in foil had apparently been in contact with LaSota or Zajko.

LaSota had written, more than six years ago, about a dream of gathering like-minded rationalists, and particularly trans women, on boats where they could live as "anchor-outs" in the Bay Area — still connected to the community and able to "study" but not having to pay high rents. When a plan to live on a decaying tugboat off the shore of Half Moon Bay collapsed six years ago, LaSota apparently responded to an offer from Lind to park vehicles on his land.

This plan turned into the box trucks — two of which, allegedly registered to Zajko in Vermont, were left behind on Lind's property in California, and witnesses described finding much computer and medical equipment inside, including an ultrasound machine and industrial lye possibly for the use of dissolving a body.

It is not clear what LaSota, Zajko, and Blank were up to on the Maryland man's property, or what their next moves would be, but their modus operandi seemed to be parking in rural areas where few people asked questions.

As a prosecutor in Essex County, Vermont, Vincent Illuzzi, described the area to NBC where Zajko owned property, and near where Youngblut and Bauckholt were pulled over, "It’s not off the grid, but it’s the next best thing to it. Rural people leave you alone. There’s no one down the street watching you come and go."

Previously: Leader of 'Zizian' Death Cult and at Least One Other Arrested In Maryland After 20 Months on the Run

Ziz, aka Jack LaSota, the purported ringleader of a bizarre cult that appears to have grown out of the Bay Area and the rationalist movement, has been found and arrested in Maryland, along with two other figures who were also on the run from the law.

Police in Allegany County, Maryland arrested LaSota, along with 26-year-old Daniel Blank and 32-year-old Michelle Zajko. VTDigger reported on the arrests of LaSota and Zajko, as did the Associated Press.  The Chronicle confirms that Blank was also arrested with them.

Allegany County is in a rural, wooded part of Maryland next to the border of Pennsylvania, and includes Rocky Gap State Park and Green Ridge State Forest.

All three were considered persons of interest in the December 31, 2022 double-murder of Zajko's parents, Richard and Rita Zajko, in nearby Pennsylvania. The trio were detained by police in January 2023 at a hotel near the Philadelphia airport — with LaSota feigning, or being in, some sort of trance state — and both LaSota and Blank were held in custody on obstruction charges, with LaSota charged with resisting arrest. LaSota was eventually released on bail five months later and has failed to appear for subsequent court dates.

None of the three has been charged with the homicides, and the Chronicle adds the detail today that Blank provided an alibi for the crime for Zajko.

Zajko was the alleged purchaser of a gun linked to her parents' murder, and the gun subsequently turned up along with other weapons in the possession of two individuals who last month were involved in the alleged killing of a border patrol agent in Vermont, 44-year-old David Maland. 21-year-old Teresa Youngblut remains in custody for that crime, and was shot and injured herself, while 28-year-old German national Ophelia Bauckholt was shot and killed.

Both LaSota and Zajko were considered persons of interest in the border patrol agent's killing. And Zajko was the owner of some property in a rural part of Vermont near the Canadian border, and also near where the shootout occurred on January 20.

LaSota was reportedly living out of two box trucks on a property in Vallejo in or around November 2022 when the landlord on the property, Curtis Lind, was allegedly attacked by three members of this Zizian group who had been residing there for three years at that point. One of those individuals, Emma Borhanian, was shot and killed by Lind, and the other two, Alexander "Somni" Leatham and Suri Dao are in custody in Solano County awaiting trial on attempted murder and murder charges.

Lind, who planned to testify against them, was killed at his property on January 17, just three days before the shooting with the border patrol agent. And Youngblut was linked, via a recent marriage license application, to Maximillian Snyder, the 22-year-old who was arrested in connection with Lind's killing last month.

Authorities have suggested that Youngblut and Bauckholt, who had been living in Airbnb units in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as of late last year, were in possession of cellphones, at least one of which had been in frequent contact with LaSota/Ziz.

According to VTDigger, Zajko and LaSota were being held in Maryland on charges of "obstructing and hindering" officers, as well as trespassing and misdemeanor firearm possession. Lt. Jeremy Stonebraker​ of the Maryland State Police tells the site, "The investigators that are working on the case aren’t going to do any press releases at this time because the investigation is kind of fluid and ongoing and the FBI is involved now."

It appears that the two (or three) individuals were reported as trespassing, and it was only later that local authorities learned of their connection to the recent Vermont killings, and the Pennsylvania killings.

During the January 2023 arrest, LaSota — who uses she/her pronouns — was found unresponsive lying on a bathroom floor in the Philadelphia airport motel room where the group was located. The state she was in seems connected to a theory she has promoted to her group of followers that has to do with putting one hemisphere of the brain to sleep at a time. LaSota continued to remain in this state during the booking process, and a mugshot photo shows this.

A mugshot photo of Zajko, taken Sunday, posted to VT Digger and provided by the Allegany County Sheriff's Office, shows Zajko apparently in a similar state, with her eyes rolled into the back of her head.

These arrests bring to a close the uncertain period that began several weeks ago, with some of those acquainted with Ziz wondering whether other killings could still be to come. Some have expressed fears online that the group would continue to act out violently, under a belief system that didn't seem concerned with laws, morality, or civil society — but was deeply concerned with consuming animal products, and the bases of gender identities.

The only at-large figure who is known to have had connections with this group is Gwen Danielson, who was rumored to have taken her own life in 2022, but that has not been confirmed. [Update: She has been off the grid, and in contact with her father.] Danielson, Leatham, LaSota, and Borhanian were all arrested in connection with a November 2019 protest outside a rationalist group event in Sonoma County, but those charges were subsequently dropped.

LaSota allegedly faked her own death, via drowning in San Francisco Bay, in August 2022, only to turn up alive several months later in Solano County.

Last week, we heard from Snyder that he was not a "friend" of Ziz, and he instead issued a statement via a letter to a rationalist movement figure about the importance of becoming vegan.

As the Chronicle reported, the last known public contact they could find from Ziz was a comment reply on her blog, in which she asked the reader if they were vegan, saying, "Do you consume the flesh of the innocent?" And the paper now also reports that they spoke to Daniel Blank's father, who said he had not heard from his son since the spring of 2023, when he and his wife received a one-line text message from their son with a video about farm animals, saying, "Look what you have done."

Previously: Suspect and Possible Cult Member Makes Court Appearance In Vallejo Killing as Further Links Revealed to Other Murders

This post has been updated with confirmation about Blank's arrest.