One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz has revealed how she got roped into a religious cult – which she remained part of for 10 years.
The 43-year-old is about to release a memoir called Dinner For Vampires, in which she alleges that she experienced ‘manipulation, abuse and fear’ at the hands of what she thought was a church covenant.
In the official description of her book, she said she was under the control of the ‘domineering minister’ of The Big House Family for a decade before she finally left.
She has claimed the minister convinced her to marry his son and stole millions of dollars from her television income from One Tree Hill, which ran from 2003 to 2012.
Now, with her book arriving on the shelves next week, she has told the story of how she was first enticed to join the organization to People.
One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz has revealed how she got roped into a religious cult – which she remained part of for 10 years; pictured 2022
Bethany always had an Evangelical Christian background, but during her childhood, she moved several times and had ‘always been looking for a place to belong.’
Her parents divorced when she was 16 years old – one year before she got her big break on the soap opera Guiding Light after years as a child actress.
Amid the instability of her upbringing, she was able to root herself in her acting, as well as in the Bible-study group where she met people who shared her worldview.
The Bible-study sessions were ‘water in a desert’ to Lenz, who would discuss God, pray and sing with the other members of her group.
‘We crave that kind of intimacy. 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,”‘ she explained.
Soon, a pastor she refers to as ‘Les’ began appearing at Bible-study, taking charge of sessions – and persuading attendees to move to his communal ‘Big House’ in Idaho.
‘It still looked normal. And then it just morphed,’ she shared. ‘But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to notice. Plus, I was so young.’
Lenz has previously spoken about how her membership of the organization became a ‘whisper behind the scenes’ on the set of One Tree Hill.
Her co-stars ‘were all trying to save me and rescue me,’ but she was too ‘stubborn’ to be prevailed upon, she confessed Variety last year.
Now she has divulged that she could ‘see’ on the ‘faces’ of her One Tree Hill co-stars that they knew was entangled with a cult.
‘But I’d justify it, like: “I couldn’t possibly be 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,”‘ Lenz recalled.
When her co-star Craig Sheffer told her to her face that she was in a cult, she shot back at him: ‘No, no, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid. That’s not what we do!’
In 2005, Lenz married musician the late musician Michael Galeotti, formerly of the band Enation, and also a member of the Big House Family.
The couple gave birth to daughter Maria Rose, now 13, her only child, in 2011 – and one year later, she decided she wanted to leave him and the organization.
However she had difficulty extricating herself as the ‘stakes were so high,’ given the degree to which her life was intertwined with the organization.
‘They were my only friends. I was married into this group. I had built my entire life around it. If I admitted that I was wrong…everything else would come crumbling down,’ the actress and singer said.
