‘One Tree Hill’ Star Bethany Joy Lenz Reveals Details About The Decade She Spent In A Christian Cult

One Tree Hill actress Bethany Joy Lenz has revealed more shocking details of the years in a cult while she filmed the hit TV show for nine seasons.

Lenz remembered her cast’s reaction to her experience of the highly controlled cult.

In an August episode of Lenz’s podcast Drama Queens, Lenz disclosed details about her time in the controlling ultra-religious group for the first time: “I was in a cult for ten years… ten years of recovery after that. So there’s a lot to tell.”

She recalled, “In a lot of ways, One Tree Hill saved my life because I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina. 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 remembered her co-stars on the nine-season-long One Tree Hill had expressed extreme worry about her affiliation with the Christian group in an interview with People.

“I could read it on people’s faces,” she said. “But the justification of it can’t possibly be that I’m actually in a cult. It’s just that I’ve got access to a relationship with God and people in a way that everybody else wants, but they don’t know how to get it, and they’re too afraid to be that vulnerable with each other. And so we’ve got it, and they just don’t understand. That’s how you rationalize it.”

Lenz recalled that her co-star Craig Sheffer once explicitly told her she was in a cult, but in response, “I was like, ‘No, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid… that’s not what we do!'”

In the interview, Lenz explained what initially drew her into the cult. “I was looking for a place to belong that was also attached to a higher spiritual experience, and it looked so normal,” she said. “It looked so much like a lot of other Wednesday night Bible studies that I had been to in my life. And it was at first, and then it just morphed. But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to really notice, and I was very young.”

Lenz said that the group shifted to center around a visiting pastor who would convince many members to move into a commune-like community in Idaho. As the cult steadily became more exclusive to others, Lenz was discouraged from trusting or interacting with anyone outside of the group.

In her new memoir Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), set to be released October 22, Lenz delves deeper into her experience and how the cult wiped her bank account of almost $2 million.