Actress Bethany Joy Lenz Explains How It’s Easy to Fall For a Cult: ‘It Felt Like Love’ (Exclusive)
The 'One Tree Hill' star explains how she got lured into a religious cult and what happened when she left, in an exclusive excerpt from 'Dinner for Vampires'
One Tree Hill actress Bethany Joy Lenz is getting candid about the decade she spent in a cult in her new memoir, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), out Oct. 22.
One thing she wants readers to take away from the book? To understand that it's actually not that hard to fall for a high-control group like the one she was lured into, under the right circumstances.
"I had always been looking for a place to belong," she explains to PEOPLE in this week's cover story. "I wish someone had just told me when I was young that this is the universal human condition, but I didn't know that."
Raised an only child to young evangelical parents, she moved around a lot and says she had a lonely childhood. When she moved to L.A. at 20, she soon grew deeply attached to new friends she'd met at a bible study. Soon, the group members began to feel even closer than family, and it was like nothing she'd ever experienced before.
"We crave that kind of intimacy," says Lenz. "The idea that someone out there says, 'No matter what you do or how badly you might behave or what dumb choices you make, I still love you, and I'm here for you.' I never had that. To walk into an environment that felt like that's what I was surrounded by, it was like water in a desert."
Lenz was soon enjoying life with her close-knit group when a new pastor she calls "Les" infiltrated the group and began to take over the weekly conversation. Soon he'd convinced a select group of them to stay at the "Big House," where he lived in Idaho. Although she was starring on One Tree Hill, which filmed in Wilmington, N.C., Lenz visited as much as she could.
And as the "family" morphed into something darker and more controlling, Lenz says she was too deeply entrenched to notice. It didn't help that "Les" soon used one of the oldest cult tricks in the books: Isolation of members from friends and family.
"What was really insidious about the way they handled parental isolation was by zeroing in on real problems,” Lenz says. "They’d be like, 'You didn’t get the parenting that you deserved. You didn’t get the upbringing that you should have had. Let us parent you. Let us give this gift back to you of what you missed out on, family and parents that really show up all the time and see you.'"
She continues, "Then I get out of the group, and it's like all those things are still true about the way I grew up. So it was like how do I put a new lens on it to see it as something that is normal? We all just grow up with weird things in our family, you know what I mean? Don't join a cult because your family's weird."
Lenz says her relationship with her parents is great now.
"It took some emotional moments and some time to just figure out what kind of relationship I wanted to have with them for the first time in adulthood because I just went from being a bratty teenager to isolation and being like, 'You're not even my family!'"
But she says that when she left the group, her parents were there with open arms.
"I was like, 'Okay, now you are the only people I have in the world. Please don't abandon me.' They're like, 'Don't be ridiculous. We love you.' And it's turned out well. I love both my parents."
Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, Lenz shares what happened when she and her father reunited.
Dad’s voice kept pinballing up high behind his nose, as though he might burst at any moment. It had been six years since we’d last talked — since he’d refused to come to my wedding, fully convinced that I was in a cult. He’d apologized later and desperately tried to stay connected, except he had been so insistent that I was in danger, and I couldn’t allow in a catalyst to that kind of doubt. I had to believe to survive, so I told him he had to talk and make peace with my husband first — which he tried to do. But my husband cut him out and Dad was left for years making fruitless communication attempts via email, voice messages — even snail mail.
I had missed family weddings, kids’ birthdays, and milestones, and I wasn’t willing to miss any more. I was now separated from my husband, in protracted legal proceedings for the resolution of our divorce and custody of our daughter, and finally able to see my dad’s fears about a cult had been warranted. So I called him. Making that call was so difficult and shameful, but hearing his voice full of warmth was all the reassurance I needed.
He was so overcome with emotion that the conversation was mostly just him saying how much he loved and missed me over and over again. That was all that mattered to him: reassuring me how much I meant to him. He didn’t even mention my husband or the cult. He didn’t want to bring any negativity or anger into our reunion. I promised to introduce him to his granddaughter as soon as I could.
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A few months later, Dad came to visit me in LA. I had rented a Sunset Blvd. house in West Hollywood that supposedly Errol Flynn kept his mistresses in. I couldn’t afford it, especially with my quickly mounting lawyer costs. But I thought for sure, given the success of One Tree Hill, I’d book another show and money wouldn’t be an issue. Surprise, surprise, an actress in her thirties coming off a CW teen drama wasn’t exactly in high demand. As Ava Gardner once said: “Actors get older, actresses get old.” The only kind of auditions I was getting was for “Mom of 10-Year-Old” on Law & Order.
I was so stressed I started smoking — well, attempting to smoke. It was the first time since briefly in high school, and I’m not sure I knew how to properly inhale any more than I did then. I never smoked in front of my daughter or in the house. I’d savor them late at night on the back balcony, watching the palm trees sway in the breeze and the cars whip past on Sunset Boulevard. Holding a stick of fire made me feel in control of something.
Before my dad arrived, I made sure to hide the cigarettes and clean up any butts on the balcony, reverting to my teenage self, afraid of getting busted, not grasping the hilarity of this. You just spent 10 years of your life in a cult, but yes, totally worry about your dad being disappointed in you for using tobacco.
I didn’t have to worry. My dad likely wouldn’t have noticed if the house was full of ashtrays. He barely even glanced around when he walked in. He went straight to the dining room, unzipped his suitcase, pulled out a red folder, and dropped it on the table. It made a massive thud, sending the dog scampering into the bedroom. The folder was stuffed so full of papers it barely stayed closed.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The last six years of my life,” my dad said.
To read more about Bethany Joy Lenz and how she finally managed to leave the cult, read this week's issue of PEOPLE on stands Friday.
After I cut him out, I thought he’d simply tried to move on with his life. Instead, he’d devoted his time to studying cults, learning how they worked and chasing down any information he could find about the Leadership group. I was so moved I burst out crying. Then, as I flipped through the folder’s contents, I felt like crying for a different reason, realizing how little I knew about Les and how gullible and naive I’d been.
It was page after page of emails, letters, newspaper clippings. The allegations got dark. Witness after witness referred to his purported sexual misconduct, supposed lawsuits, financial “wrongdoing” and a tendency to destroy marriages and split apart families.
My dad had mapped out a timeline. He had compiled lists of known associates and those with one terrible story after another. All these years he had been planning for this day.
I shared it all with my attorney, who seemed to agree that this evidence could be damning enough to prove how dangerous it’d be to grant custody to my husband who was still fully enmeshed with his father — Les — and the rest of the "Family." My attorney also jokingly offered my dad a research job at the law firm.
But for me, the folder was only the start. It made me want to reach out to these people who also had their lives (and faith) destroyed. I saw in them a different kind of family into which I’d unwittingly been inducted. Because, aside from severely warping my view of relationships, this cult had ravaged my ability to trust God, or believe anything spiritual at all. I wondered if these witnesses my Dad found might have the answer to a question I’d asked myself many times in the years that followed my exit from the cult. While most people tend to wonder why God allows so many bad things to happen, I wondered why God allowed so many good things to happen to me while I was involved in something so damaging. The answer would come in the most unexpected way.
From DINNER FOR VAMPIRES: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!) by Bethany Joy Lenz. Copyright ? 2024 by Bethany Joy Lenz. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC
Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!) comes out Oct. 22 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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