Bethany Joy Lenz Reveals How ‘One Tree Hill’ Cast Saved Her From Cult
Bethany Joy Lenz is penning a memoir that will delve into the ten years she spent in a cult and how cast and crew of her show One Tree Hill helped rescue her.
The actress, who sprang to fame on Guiding Light, opened up about some of the details in a new interview with Variety, saying that it was a “Bible-based cult” that operated on isolating its members from their friends and family. She didn’t escape the cult until “shortly after” One Tree Hill ended in 2012, but she explained that her co-stars tried to help her.
“For a while, they were all trying to save me and rescue me, which is lovely and so amazing to be cared about in that way. But I was very stubborn,” Lenz said. “I was really committed to what I believed were the best choices I could make.”
She continued, “The nature of a group like that is isolation; they have to make you distrust everyone around you so that the only people you trust are, first and foremost, the leadership and then, people within the group if the leadership approves of them, and isn’t in the middle of pitting you against each other, which happens all the time also.”
Lenz revealed she joined the cult “a year or two” after landing the role of Haley James Scott in the beloved teen drama. She now credits the show for saving her life.
“In a lot of ways, One Tree Hill saved my life because I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina,” she shared. “I had a lot of flying back and forth, a lot of people visiting and things like that, but my life was really built in North Carolina. And I think that spatial separation made a big difference when it was time for me to wake up.”
Lenz kept her involvement in a cult secret from the public for years, but she finally opened up about it on a July episode of her One Tree Hill rewatch podcast Drama Queens, which she co-hosts with her former co-stars Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton Morgan.
“What I came to realize was that there’s actually a lot of power in exposing that shame to the light and allowing new information to come in,” she told Variety. “And there’s not just power in that for me, but my hope is that — and really why I wanted to talk about it — is because I think it can be really healing for a lot of other people. I know I’m not the only one.”
