One Tree Hill's Bethany Joy Lenz got lured into a cult who controlled her life choices for a decade
Warning: this article discusses cults, coercive control and sexual assault which some readers may find distressing.
A former One Tree Hill star has opened up about her time in a cult, which saw her lose years of her life and a huge amount of money while filming the popular TV show.
Celebrities seem to be attracted to cults like moths to a flame at the moment, with more and more sharing details about their former lives in cult organisations, with the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer all spending time in religious or spiritual groups in their younger days.
The latest cult case is focused on Allison Mack, after the former Smallville actress shared how she performed a 'slave master' role in the infamous NXIVM group. This saw her select young women, who would later be branded with either her initials or that of Keith Raniere, before being forced to have sex with the cult founder.
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Raniere landed a 120-year sentence for his crimes but Mack was released after just two and has since shared some horrifying details of the cult she became involved with.
Now, One Tree Hill's Bethany Joy Lenz is the latest to add her name to the strangely long list of TV stars to land themselves in cults.
Speaking to PEOPLE, she admitted that during the eight years she played Haley Scott in One Tree Hill, she was under the thumb of a religious cult who controlled her career, life choices and, eventually, her bank account.
The 44-year-old said: "I don't think of it as brave. I think of it as important. Living silently in the suffering I experienced, I don't know if that helps anyone. I think of this more as the right thing to do."
Lenz has written a new book, titled Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), and hopes that could help other people who find themselves in similar situations, which left her with almost nothing to show after nearly a decade on one of the most popular teenage shows of the 2000s.
She explained that she met a pastor through her bible group after moving to LA when she was 20 to pursue an acting career, and he soon invited her and others to move into a small commune in Idaho, but she was already too far in at this point to realise that anything was wrong.
"It still looked normal. And then it just morphed. But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to notice. Plus I was so young," she says.
Even when co-stars pointed out to her that she could be in a cult, the Florida-born actress still didn't fully believe it.
She added: "I could see it on their faces. 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."
Craig Sheffer, who played Keith Scott on the show, even told her point-blank that she was there, but the young actress refused to believe it until she realised that she wanted to leave the husband who she'd met in the 'family', and realised that she'd have no support if she stepped away.
She concluded: "The stakes were so high. 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."
Topics: TV, Mental Health, Religion, Crime, Celebrity, Books
James Moorhouse