On June 17, 2026, ruling from the bench, United States District Judge Gregory H. Woods of the Southern District of New York granted in full the defendants' motion to stay Jane Doe v. OneTaste, Inc., et al., No. 1:23-cv-10184. The civil action, brought under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act against OneTaste, Inc., OneTaste NYC LLC, and two of OneTaste's former leaders, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, will not proceed until the Second Circuit decides their criminal appeal in United States v. Cherwitz, No. 26-943.
DharmaPalaw represents all of the defendants in the civil action.
Why the court stayed the case
The civil complaint borrows its theory from the criminal case. Both rest on the same statute and the same account of what happened inside OneTaste. As we put it in our motion to stay, the civil complaint "does not merely overlap with the criminal case—it adopts the indictment's theory wholesale." (Defs.' Mem. of Law, ECF Dkt. No. 58-1, at 5.)
Judge Woods granted the stay "for substantially the reasons articulated by defendants in their motion." He agreed that the overlap was substantial and that the appeal would decide questions that would shape the conduct of the civil proceedings. Applying the six-factor test of Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A. v. LY USA, Inc., 676 F.3d 83 (2d Cir. 2012), the court ruled:
"First, the issues raised in the criminal appeal substantially overlap with certain of the claims at issue in the civil action. Both cases involve the application of the TVPA. The Court of Appeals is expected to clarify whether the conduct at issue can violate the TVPA. Although the burden of proof is different for this civil action than for the criminal case, a decision on appeal will clarify the application of the statute in this case. Second, the criminal case is not yet fully resolved. The defendant[s] have raised substantial issues on appeal regarding the scope of the statute."
The court also found that the prejudicial impact of proceeding with discovery while the criminal case remains unresolved "will be very substantial," and that requiring Ms. Daedone and Ms. Cherwitz to invoke their Fifth Amendment rights would also "have a substantial adverse impact on the litigation posture of the corporate defendants." It stayed the case as to every defendant, and it declined to follow the phased approach taken in the parallel Eastern District action, where the parties exchange initial disclosures and discovery requests while responses wait. The whole case waits for the Second Circuit.
When will a court stay a civil case pending a criminal appeal?
Courts stay civil cases alongside criminal prosecutions all the time, almost always before trial, and almost always to protect a defendant's privilege against self-incrimination. After a conviction, the usual answer is no. Plaintiff made exactly that argument here: that courts seldom stay civil proceedings after conviction and sentencing.
The TVPA has its own mandatory stay provision. Section 1595(b) requires a civil action to be stayed while a related criminal action is pending, "until final adjudication in the trial court." 18 U.S.C. § 1595(b). Both parties agreed that, upon sentencing, adjudication in the trial court became final for purposes of § 1595(b). The question was whether the court should exercise its inherent discretion under Landis to stay the case anyway.
This order is different in kind. As far as we have been able to find, it is the first federal case in which a court granted a defendant's request to stay a related civil action pending a direct criminal appeal because of the significance of the issues on appeal: because the appellate decision will shape the future proceedings and the scope of discovery. Without a stay, Judge Woods found, "the parties and the Court would be required to litigate a case the scope of which may be substantially altered as a result of the appeal. We would then need to reopen discovery and motion practice with the benefit of the appellate court's ruling."
A court does not stay a case pending appeal when the appeal looks routine. It stays the case when the appeal could change the ground the case stands on. The Supreme Court recognized that principle nearly ninety years ago in Landis v. North American Co., 299 U.S. 248 (1936), where it explained that a stay is appropriate where the related proceeding presents "novel problems of far-reaching importance to the parties and the public," and that its outcome "would certainly narrow the issues in the pending cases and assist in the determination of the questions of law involved." Id. at 256. Judge Woods applied that logic to a pending criminal appeal. However the Second Circuit rules, its reading of "serious harm" under 18 U.S.C. § 1589 will define the elements of the civil claims and, with them, the scope of everything the parties would otherwise be fighting about in discovery.
What the Second Circuit will decide
The questions on appeal are not technicalities. The criminal case produced a single count of conviction, for conspiracy, with no substantive forced labor offense charged. As we noted in our motion, it is the first federal criminal conviction premised on psychological coercion alone as the mechanism of a forced labor conspiracy. No physical force was alleged.
The government's theory at trial was that "brainwashing," "gaslighting," "lovebombing," and similar terms amounted to forced labor. The government's own witnesses were college-educated adults who testified that they joined voluntarily, kept their phones, their jobs, and their families, and were free to leave. The Second Circuit will decide whether conduct on those terms can be "serious harm" under the statute, and whether a statute read that broadly can be squared with the First Amendment. The Supreme Court warned against exactly that expansion in United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 949 (1988), cautioning that a psychological-coercion reading of the forced labor statutes would reach "a religious leader who obtains personal services by means of religious indoctrination."
The appeal has drawn outside support. On September 25, 2026, Professor Eugene Volokh, one of the country's leading First Amendment scholars, filed an amicus curiae brief in the Second Circuit, written with attorney Matt Kezhaya of Kezhaya Law PLC. From the brief's summary of argument:
"Under the Government's theory of spiritual coercion, people who at one point believed that volunteering for a religious organization is the path to enlightenment or salvation, but who later become disillusioned with their former beliefs, can be found to have been retroactively 'coerced' into providing that labor. The same logic could apply to nuns who had felt religious pressure to do the educational or nursing work that their order was known for, or to monks who had felt religious pressure to do agricultural work that supports the monastery." (Volokh Amicus Br. at 6.)
Volokh argues that the government's case relied on the idea that people were influenced by spiritual teachings and by their attachment to a spiritual community, with no violence or threat of violence, and that treating those forces as criminal coercion targets religious practice in violation of the Free Exercise Clause. The government, he writes, "simply cannot put the legitimacy of religious or spiritual ideas on trial." (Id. at 18.) He recommends that the Second Circuit vacate the convictions and dismiss. (Id. at 21.)
For litigants in other civil cases that track a criminal prosecution, the order is a useful marker. Where a criminal appeal presents genuine questions of first impression about the statute both cases depend on, the pendency of that appeal is a reason to wait, independent of any Fifth Amendment concern. The alternative is to litigate, and take discovery on, a version of the law that may not survive the appeal.
Case information
- Civil action: Jane Doe v. OneTaste, Inc., et al., No. 1:23-cv-10184-GHW (S.D.N.Y.) (Woods, J.)
- Criminal appeal: United States v. Cherwitz et al., No. 26-943 (2d Cir.)
- Stay granted from the bench: June 17, 2026
- Defendants' motion to stay: ECF Dkt. Nos. 58, 58-1
- Amicus curiae brief of Professor Eugene Volokh: Nos. 26-943, 26-944 (2d Cir. Sept. 25, 2026) (PDF)
- OneTaste's report: Jane Doe v OneTaste Civil Case Stayed Pending Appeal on the Constitutional Limits of the Forced Labor Statute