Bethany Joy Lenz, star of the drama One Tree Hill, talks about the decade she spent with a manipulative cult. One Tree Hill ran from 2003 to 2012, and all the cast was part of a cult. Lenz was slowly but surely drawn into the manipulative cult with them.
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Her book, Dinner with Vampires releases October 22, and it goes into detail about the ten years of her life spent inside the cult. The road of manipulation and the abuse of power the cult sucked her into was one she noticed far too deep into the spiral.
The Christian cult regularly shared in Bible study. Lenz grew up in the Evangelical Church, so it's no wonder she was attracted by the religious dress adorned by the sinister pastor. "I decided what I wanted to believe and rather than being willing to look at the belief system and measure it, I adjusted everything around me to fit," she told People magazine.
Bethany Joy Lenz Opens Up About Cult
A pastor invited Bethany Joy Lenz to live in 'The Big House.' This was a commune where all the cult community, including all the cast, lived. Les, the pastor, would go on to control her finances and her life, as cult leaders are prone to do.
The pastor would convince her to marry one of his sons. He also drained millions of her TV income without her knowledge. By the time she knew how damaging the cult was, it felt too late.
Cults typically provide an environment that's difficult to get out of. "They were my only friends, I was married into this group, I had built my entire life around it, I had given up so much of my career because of it," Lenz confirms. "The stakes were really high if I admitted I was wrong."
She Exited Hollywood
However, in 2012, she amassed a great deal of courage and left. Divorcing her husband of six years, leaving her only friends behind, and fleeing to Hollywood with her daughter all at the same time is a mighty ordeal.
She said, "For 10 years, I lived in this bubble of 'Unless you believe in the same God that I believe in, unless you believe in having relationships the same way that I believe [in], unless you do all the things on the same checklist that I'm doing, I can't learn from you. You can't teach me anything'... What a terrible mistake."
With no financial stability with next to no money, she had to survive Hollywood not knowing what would come next.
Not all cults are groups of cloaked individuals performing sacrifices in the woods. In most cults, those in power maliciously prey on people by providing community, security, and purpose. Most won't realize they're in one.
She said, "I'm still healing. It's just day by day. Person by person. Interaction by interaction. Making the choice to trust someone that you're not sure if you can trust, finding out you were right, shouldn't have trusted them. Finding out you were wrong, and that little thing that you were like, 'I don't know if I can trust,' maybe was just fear because of everything that's happened."
Thankfully for Bethany Joy Lenz, she managed to see through and escape.
