The Free Speech Coalition allegedly provided porn stars as subjects for a Nicole Prause study she claims will debunk porn addiction

Introduction

Nicole Prause is a former academic with a long history of harassing and defaming authors, researchers, therapists, reporters, men in recovery, academic journal editors, multiple organizations, and others who dare to report evidence of harms from internet porn use. She appears to be quite cozy with the pornography industry, as can be seen from this image of her (far right) on the red carpet of the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO) awards ceremony. (Wikipedia explains that, “the XRCO Awards are given by the American X-Rated Critics Organization annually to people working in adult entertainment and it is the only adult industry awards show reserved exclusively for industry members.^[1]“).

In her blatant support for the porn industry, Prause has created at least 2 websites with social media accounts:

2016 – PornHelps,” which had its own Twitter account (@pornhelps) and a website promoting the porn industry as well as outlier studies reporting the “positive” effects of porn. “PornHelps” chronically badgered the same people and organizations that Prause also often attacked using her own name and social media accounts. In fact, Prause would team up with her apparent alias PornHelps to attack individuals on Twitter and elsewhere in tandem with her other identities (see 1, 2, 3, 4). Both the @pornhelps Twitter account and PornHelps website were suddenly deleted when Prause was outed on Psychology Today as being PornHelps.
2019 – Prause, as manager of “Real”YBOP Twitter (@BrainOnPorn) and RealYBOP website, is also engaging in defamation and harassment of Gary Wilson, Alexander Rhodes, Gabe Deem, NCOSE, Laila Mickelwait, Gail Dines, and anyone else who speaks out about porn’s harms. In addition, David Ley and two other RealYBOP “experts” are now being compensated by porn industry giant xHamster to promote its websites (i.e. StripChat) and to convince users that porn addiction and sex addiction are myths! Prause (lord of the trademark-infringing RealYBOP Twitter) appears to be tight with the pornography industry, and uses RealYBOP Twitter to promote the porn industry, defend PornHub (which hosted child porn and sex trafficking videos), and attack those who are promoting the petition to hold PornHub accountable.

Quid Pro Quo

Does Prause’s relentless support for the porn industry arise from a quid pro quo, or more than one? Certainly, a public exchange of favors occurred in 2015 when the Free Speech Coalition (porn industry lobby) offered Prause assistance and she accepted. Immediately she attacked Prop 60 (condoms in porn, which the industry didn’t want).

A second possible quid pro quo occurred in 2016. Prause was given a bucket-load of money to produce a hired-gun study on the heavily tainted and very commercial “Orgasmic Meditation” scheme (now apparently under investigation by the FBI). Orgasmic Meditation, an pseudo-cult that charges big bucks to teach men how to stroke a partner’s clitoris (see 10-part series by the BBC). Prause pictured here monitoring a couple engaging in OM:

We are not sure, but the clitoris diddling study (OM) may have hit a predictable snag: the challenge of finding female subjects who want their genitals rubbed while being hooked up to machines and monitored by researchers. To reach her target of 250 OM couples, it appears that Prause may have obtained porn performers as subjects through porn industry interest group, the Free Speech Coalition. The favor to the FSC? Then, almost two years later, Prause publicly began exclaiming that her upcoming OM study (which previously had nothing to do with porn) would debunk porn addiction. As of this writing (June, 2020) the OM study has yet to appear.

Articles paint OneTaste not only as a sexual cult, but as employing less than savory business practices:

Details and documentation:

Adult performer Ruby the Big Rubousky, vice president of the Adult Performers Actors Guild, stated that Prause obtained porn performers as study subjects through the most prominent porn industry interest group/lobby, the Free Speech Coalition. (Prause has since deleted this Twitter thread).

The study (or studies) in question was originally said to be funded by OneTaste, a for-profit company that charged $4,300.00 for a 3-day workshop to learn clitoral manipulation. As described in this Bloomberg.com expose, OneTaste offered several different packages:

Currently, students pay $499 for a weekend course, $4,000 for a retreat, $12,000 for the coaching program, and $16,000 for an “intensive.” In 2014, OneTaste started selling a yearlong $60,000 membership, which lets buyers take all the courses they want and sit in the front row.

The official description the OM study and the funder, from page 3 of Nicole Prause’s 20-page CV (notice that Prause lists herself as “principal investigator”):

In court documents, tweets, and a lie-filled letter threatening me, Prause is now bizarrely stating that I defamed her by stating that her first Orgasmic Meditation study was funded by the OneTaste Foundation. Perhaps she is currently being funded by the newly created “Institute of OM Foundation”, OM FREE”, or another of the many OM entities, but her CV doesn’t lie – even though Prause does. And we have Co-investigator Greg Siegle’s CV listing OneTaste as funding Prause & Siegle’s Orgasmic Meditation research:

Then there’s this – a 2018 article revealed that “OneTaste” appears to have created numerous shell companies: A cult worse than NXIVM? — a mother’s plea to rescue her daughter from ‘OneTaste!’. Relevant excerpt:

There is a strong financial component. According to one source, there are numerous shell companies. These may be such as:

One Taste
OneTaste Incorporated
OneTaste Lineage, LLC
OneTaste Cooperative, Inc
OneTaste Media, LLC
Ehrlich Photography & Shutterbug Studio
Shutterbug Shop
Ehrlich Photography
Del Monte Realty, Inc.
Caravan, Inc
Caravan Incorporated
Caravan Retreats Incorporated
Mirror Clan, Inc
Insight Institute, LLC
DBDD, LLC

Why would OM create shell companies? Anyhow, a 2017 Yoga Journal article also names OneTaste as the funder for the OM study:

Additional articles describing Prause as the principal investigator for the OneTaste (Orgasmic Meditation) study:

More on the Prause & Siegle study(s), now publicized on the newly formed Institute of OM Foundation website (with not a word on the site about the discredited “OneTaste”):

In the 2018 Bloomberg article Chief Executive Officer Joanna Van Vleck pretty much says that OneTaste was now dependent on Prause’s upcoming EEG studies about OM:

The newish CEO is betting that the study OneTaste has funded on the health benefits of OM, which has taken brain-activity readings from 130 pairs of strokers and strokees, will draw fresh crowds. Led by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the study is expected to yield the first of multiple papers later this year. “The science that’s coming out to back what this is and what the benefits are is going to be huge in terms of scaling,” Van Vleck says.

Put simply, Prause was hired to bolster the commercial interests of the heavily tainted and very controversial company (another article: The ‘fingering’ cult: A reader’s experience of OneTaste – is not very tasteful at all).

A 2021 expose straight up said that the Institute of OM Foundation was once Onetaste – “Inside the multi-million dollar orgasm cult endorsed by Hollywood” (The Telegraph, UK). An excerpt:

In October 2018, a few months after the Bloomberg exposé was published, OneTaste announced it was closing all its US offices and had stopped offering in-person courses and retreats, saying instead it would be focusing on online education to reach a wider audience.
But the OneTaste website no longer exists. In its place there is now a new organisation, called The Institute of OM, set up by former OneTaste members, which describes itself as ‘an education company dedicated to helping people increase health, happiness and connection through Orgasmic Meditation (OM)’.
The website includes links to Daedone’s TEDx talk and her book Slow Sex; endorsements from satisfied customers – ‘OM cured me of suicidal depression’; and a primer on OM-ing theory, practice and etiquette (‘Once the strokee is in the nest, stroker mindfully enters nest by stepping over and across strokee with their left foot and sits down next to the strokee…’).
Anjuli Ayer, formerly one of the owners of OneTaste, was listed on The Institute of OM’s website as the organisation’s CEO. Joanna Van Vleck, who was formerly the CEO at OneTaste and who once described it as ‘the Whole Foods of sexuality’, is listed on her LinkedIn profile as its ‘director of reach’. The Telegraph attempted to reach Van Vleck and Ayer, but the Institute of OM did not respond to numerous email requests.
And Nicole Daedone? The woman who wanted to turn on the world through touch is also out of reach. Shortly after the Bloomberg revelations, Daedone disappeared. For a while, she was said to be living in Bali and then Thailand. She was last heard of living in Italy with a former OneTaste instructor.
But her cult of the orgasm continues to thrive. ‘Learn to OM for free,’ reads an offer on the IOM website. ‘Get started in your own home with our official guide to orgasmic meditation.’

So much for Prause’s game-playing.

Again, to conduct the OM study Prause needed willing participants comfortable with being hooked up to machines, and having their genitals exposed and masturbated by a man as researchers observe their responses. It’s not hard to imagine it’s challenging to locate females willing to act as sexual guinea pigs in Prause’s office. Whatever the reasons, Ruby insisted that Prause obtained subjects for her OM study via the FSC, and that Prause had an ongoing relationship with the FSC:

If the above is true, it reveals a very cozy working relationship between Prause and the FSC. A relationship that may have started in 2015, when Prause was publicly offered (and apparently accepted) assistance from the deep-pocketed FSC. This was immediately followed by Prause throwing her scientific weight behind some the FSC’s major agendas (Proposition 60, ‘porn stars are not damaged goods’, ‘porn addiction is a myth’, ‘porn is not public health crisis’, ‘watching porn is mostly beneficial’, etc.)

The plot thickens. Originally, the study was funded to explore only the benefits of “Orgasmic Meditation” – but it then mysteriously transformed into a study to debunk porn addiction (which would certainly serve the FSC’s interests)!

Although the study is still not out as of June, 2020, in 2017 Prause began crowing that her yet to be published Orgasmic Meditation study “falsified” porn and sex addiction. Yet the study appeared to have had nothing to do with porn use and likely did not involve any actual porn addicts.

In her tweets and comments Prause revealed that she showed her clitoris-stroking couples “sex films” and the results (in her opinion) debunked the porn addiction model. In short, Prause’s OM study has apparently magically morphed from a “partnered sex” investigation into an anti-porn addiction, pro-porn industry paper. Below are a few examples of Prause claiming her upcoming “partnered sex” (OM) study debunks porn addiction.

Background: In spring of 2019, the World Health Organization released a new edition of its diagnostic manual, the ICD-11, with a diagnosis called “Compulsive sexual behavior disorder.” Prior to the release of the “implementation version,” a beta draft of the ICD-11 was put online, and made available for interested parties to comment on. (A simple sign-up is needed to view and participate.)

Astonishingly, Prause posted more comments in the beta-draft comment section than every other commenter combined. In the comments section under this new proposal, Prause posted three times about her OM study (partnered sex, N=250). Here are her comments asserting that her OM study found no evidence of sexual compulsivity (she never does, even when neuroscientists say she has):

Another ICD-11 comment:

Another ICD-11 comment:

She tries again, in 2018:

Her attempt failed, and the new ICD-11 contains a new diagnosis suitable for those suffering from porn addiction: “Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder.”

But she tried her hardest to head off the ICD-11’s CSBD diagnosis. In July, 2018, Prause let WHO, the APA, and AASECT know that her lone Orgasmic Meditation study had “falsified” the porn/sex addiction model:

What legitimate researcher would ever claim to have debunked an entire field of research and to have “falsified” all previous studies with a single study that did not recruit porn addicts and wasn’t designed to assess the signs, symptoms and behaviors of an addiction? Prause had trumpeted similar claims of “falsification” in 2015 based on her own dubious work, and was ultimately greeted with 10 peer-reviewed analyses saying she misinterpreted her findings.

In this tweet Prause says her upcoming OM study will correct all the “lies” by sex addiction therapists:

In this 2018 SLATE article, “Why Are We Still So Worried About Watching Porn?” by Marty Klein, Taylor Kohut, and Nicole Prause, we were even told that the World Health Organization should wait for Prause’s OM study:

More importantly, we have no laboratory studies about actual sexual behaviors in those who report this difficulty. The first study of partnered sexual behaviors in the laboratory, which tests the compulsivity model, is currently under peer review at a scientific journal. (Disclosure: One of this article’s co-authors, Nicole Prause, is the lead author of that study.) The World Health Organization should wait to see if any science supports their novel diagnosis before risking pathologizing millions of healthy people.

There several more examples of Prause telling the world that her upcoming “partnered sex” study will debunk porn and sex addiction…for all time.

After all her crowing that her upcoming Orgasmic Meditation study would debunk porn addiction, Prause pre-registers the OM study on March 27, 2018 as now assessing “addiction models of sex film viewing.” Most irregular.

Contrary to what Prause did here, pre-registration means that prior to collecting actual data, you share the introduction and methods section of your paper with others. Prause is pre-registering her OM study 2 years after collecting data, and a year after boasting that her “findings’ debunked porn addiction. The journal that eventually publishes Prause’s OM study needs to look very closely into the unprofessional behavior surrounding this paper. So do ethics organizations.

What Prause is not telling anyone is that she may have used porn performers supplied by the lobbying arm of porn industry, the FSC. The same FSC that offered her help 3 years earlier when her Twitter account was permanently banned for harassment. (The victim of Prause’s Twitter-based harassment? The lead author of one of the most cited reviews of the literature on the porn addiction model: Neuroscience of Internet Pornography Addiction: A Review and Update (2015).)

Bottom line: Prause was offered, and appears to have accepted help from the FSC. Immediately, Prause used social media (and emails) to promote porn-industry interests, while simultaneously attacking research that reflected poorly on porn. Since then, she has waged an extensive war on individuals and organizations she labels as “anti-porn activists.”

Question: Does the University of Pittsburgh know how Prause has turned its study into a propaganda tool for the porn industry? The OM study apparently received its IRB approval through Pittsburgh and co-researcher Dr. Greg J. Siegle. Does the University know that Prause allegedly obtained subjects via the Free Speech Coalition? Does the University of Pittsburgh know about Prause’s close ties to the porn industry? Is the University of Pittsburgh aware of Prause’s long history of unethical, and sometimes illegal, behaviors (false police reports, defamation, false reports to governing boards) in support of the porn-industry agenda?

Epilogue: Nicole Prause’s cozy relationship with the porn industry

In 2013 former UCLA researcher Nicole Prause began openly harassing, libeling and cyberstalking Gary Wilson. (Prause has not been employed by an academic institution since January, 2015.) Within a short time she also began targeting others, including researchers, medical doctors, therapists, psychologists, a former UCLA colleague, a UK charity, men in recovery, a TIME magazine editor, several professors, IITAP, SASH, Fight The New Drug, Exodus Cry, NoFap.com, RebootNation, YourBrainRebalanced, the academic journal Behavioral Sciences, its parent company MDPI, US Navy medical doctors, the head of the academic journal CUREUS, and the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity (See – Numerous Victims of Nicole Prause’s Malicious Reporting and Malicious Use of Process)

While spending her waking hours harassing others, Prause cleverly cultivated – with zero verifiable evidence – a myth that she was “the victim” of most anyone who dared to disagree with her assertions surrounding porn’s effects or the current state of porn research. To counter the ongoing harassment and false claims, YBOP was compelled to document some of Prause’s activities. Consider the following pages. (Additional incidents have occurred that we are not at liberty to divulge – as Prause’s victims fear further retribution.)

In the beginning Prause employed dozens of fake usernames to post on porn recovery forums, Quora, Wikipedia, and in the comment sections under articles. Prause rarely used her real name or her own social media accounts. That all changed after UCLA chose not to renew Prause’s contract (around January, 2015).

Freed from any oversight and now self-employed, Prause soon added two media managers/promoters from Media 2×3 to her company’s tiny stable of “Collaborators.” (Media 2×3 president Jess Ponce describes himself as a Hollywood media coach and personal branding expert.) Their job is to place articles in the press featuring Prause, and find her speaking engagements in pro-porn and mainstream venues. Odd tactics for a supposedly impartial scientist.

Prause began to put her name to falsehoods, openly cyber-harassing multiple individuals and organizations on social media and elsewhere. Since Prause’s primary target was Gary Wilson (hundreds of social media comments along with behind the scenes email campaigns), it became necessary to monitor and document Prause’s tweets and posts. This was done for her victims’ protection, and crucial for any future legal actions. Note: within months of this page going live, Prause became embroiled in two defamation lawsuits (Donald Hilton, MD & Nofap founder Alexander Rhodes), a trademark infringement case, and a trademark squatting case.

It soon became apparent that Prause’s tweets and comments were rarely about sex research, neuroscience, or any other subject related to her claimed expertise. In fact, the vast majority of Prause’s posts could be divided into two overlapping categories:

Indirect support of the porn industry: Defamatory & ad hominem comments targeting individuals and organizations that she labeled as “anti-porn activists” (often claiming to be a victim of these individuals and organizations). Documented here: page 1, page 2, page 3.
Direct support of the porn industry:
- direct support of the FSC (Free Speech Coalition), AVN (Adult Video News), porn producers, performers, and their agendas
- countless misrepresentations of the state of pornography research and attacks on porn studies or porn researchers.

This extensive page contains a sampling of tweets and comments related to #2 – her vigorous support of the porn industry and its chosen positions. After years of sitting on the evidence, YBOP is of the view that Prause’s unilateral aggression has escalated to such frequent and reckless defamation (falsely accusing her many victims of “physically stalking her,” “misogyny,” “encouraging others to rape her,” and “being neo-Nazis“), that we are compelled to examine her possible motives.

The page is divided into 4 main sections:

Please note: There is unequivocal evidence that the porn industry funded the sexology profession for decades. Sexology’s agenda still appears to serve the porn industry. Thus, the evidence on this page should be viewed in a larger context. See Hugh Hefner, the International Academy of Sex Research, and Its Founding President to understand how porn-industry friendly sexologists influenced the Kinsey Institute. Prause is a Kinsey grad.

Finally, in 2019 & 2020, some accurate media coverage appeared investigating serial false accuser, defamer, harasser, trademark infringer Prause: “Alex Rhodes of Porn Addiction Support Group ‘NoFap’ Sues Obsessed Pro-Porn Sexologist for Defamation” by Megan Fox of PJ Media and “Porn wars get personal in No Nut November”, by Diana Davison of The Post Millennial. Davison also produced this 6-minute video about Prause’s egregious behaviors: “Is Porn Addictive?” In May of 2020, media outlet ScramNews was forced to apologize & pay substantial damages for publishing Nicole Prause’s lies about Alex Rhodes & NoFap. In fact, journalists beware: printing Prause’s lies caused ScramNews to go out of business!