One Tree Hill actress Bethany Joy Lenz gets candid about her decade in a cult in her new memoir, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), out October 22.
One thing he wants readers to take away from the book? To realize that it’s not really that heavy fall to a highly controlled group like the one she was lured into, under the right circumstances.
“I’ve always been looking for a place to belong,” she explains to PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “I wish someone had told me when I was young that this was a universal human condition, but I didn’t know that.”
She raised the only child of young evangelical parents, moved around a lot and says she had a lonely childhood. When she moved to LA at the age of 20, she soon became deeply attached to the new friends she met at Bible study. Soon the members of the group began to feel even closer than family, and it was like nothing she had experienced before.
“Vampire Dinner” by Bethany Joy Lenz is on sale October 22 How One Tree Hill Star Bethany Joy Lenz Was Lured Into A Cult For A Decade – And How She Got Out (Exclusive)
“We crave that kind of intimacy,” says Lenz. “The idea of someone out there saying, ‘No matter what you do or how bad you behave or what stupid decisions you make, I still love you and I’m here for you.’ I’ve never had that. To go into an environment where I felt like I was surrounded by that, it was like water in the desert.”
Lenz soon began to enjoy life with her close-knit group when a new pastor she calls “Les” infiltrated the group and began taking over the weekly conversation. He soon convinced a select group of them to stay in the “Big House” where he lived in Idaho. Although she acted on Hill of one tree, which was filmed in Wilmington, NC, Lenz visited as often as she could.
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Bethany Joy Lenz on the 2024 PEOPLE cover shoot in New York.
John Russo
And as “family” morphed into something darker and more controlling, Lenz says she was too ingrained to notice. It didn’t help that “Les” soon resorted to one of the oldest cult tricks in the books: isolating the members from friends and family.
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“What was really insidious about the way they dealt with parental isolation was focusing on the real problems,” says Lenz. “They would say, ‘You didn’t get the parenting you deserved.’ You didn’t get the upbringing you should have. Let us give you back this gift of what you’ve been missing, the family and the parents that really show up all the time and see your.'”
class=”ql-align-justify”> Bethany Joy Lenz says ‘One Tree Hill’ co-stars tried to ‘save’ her from cult: ‘I was very stubborn’
She continues, “Then I get out of the group, and it’s like all these things are still true about the way I grew up. It was like how do I put a new lens on seeing it as something that’s normal? We all grow up with weird things in our family, you know what I mean? Don’t join a cult because your family is weird.”
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Lenz says her relationship with her parents is now great.
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“It took me a few emotional moments and time to figure out what kind of relationship I wanted to have with them for the first time in adulthood because I went from being a teenage brat to being isolated and thinking, ‘You’re not even my family!'”
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But she says that when she left the group, her parents were with open arms.
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“I thought, ‘Okay, now you’re the only people I have in the world. Please don’t leave me.’ They say, ‘Don’t be funny.’ And it turned out well, I love both parents.”
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Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, Lenz shares what happened when she and her father were reunited.
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Bethany Joy Lenz shares her story on this week’s PEOPLE cover.
Victoria Stevens
Listen to Bethany Joy Lenz read from ‘Vampire Dinner’
Dad’s pinball voice kept ringing high behind his nose, as if it might crack at any moment. It’s been six years since we last spoke – since he refused to come to my wedding, completely convinced I was in a cult. He later apologized and tried desperately to stay connected, except he was so adamant that I was in danger, and I couldn’t allow a catalyst for such suspicion. I had to believe in order to survive, so I told him that he needed to talk and reconcile with my husband first – which he tried to do. But my husband kicked him out and Dad spent years trying to communicate by email, voicemail — even regular mail — without success.
I missed family weddings, children’s birthdays and milestones, and I didn’t want to miss any more. Now I was separated from my husband, in the protracted legal process to resolve our divorce and custody of our daughter, and I could finally see that my father’s fears about the cult had been justified. So I called him. Making that call was so hard and embarrassing, but hearing his warm voice was all the reassurance I needed.
He was so overcome with emotion that the conversation was mostly just him saying how much he loved me and how much he missed me over and over. That was the only thing that was important to him: to convince 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 him that I would introduce him to his granddaughter as soon as I could.
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A few months later, my dad came to visit me in LA. I rented Sunset Blvd. the house in West Hollywood where Errol Flynn allegedly kept his mistresses. I couldn’t afford it, especially with my rapidly increasing attorney fees. But I thought sure, given the success One Tree HillI would book another show and money wouldn’t be an issue. Surprise, surprise, the actress in her thirties coming off the CW’s teen drama wasn’t exactly in demand. As Ava Gardner once said, “Actors get old, actresses get old.” The only type of audition I went to was for “Mom of a 10-Year-Old”. Law and order.
I was so stressed that I started smoking – well, I was trying to smoke. It was the first time since a short time in high school and I’m not sure I knew how to breathe properly any more than I did back then. I never smoked in front of my daughter or in the house. I would enjoy them late at night on the back balcony, watching the palm trees sway in the breeze and the cars drive by on Sunset Boulevard. Holding the fire stick made me feel like I was in control.
Before my dad arrived, I made sure to hide the cigarettes and clean up all the butts on the balcony, reverting to my teenage self, fearing I’d be arrested, not realizing the laugh of this. You’ve just spent 10 years of your life in a cult, but yeah, totally worry about your dad being disappointed in you for smoking.
I didn’t have to worry. My dad probably wouldn’t notice if the house was full of ashtrays. He barely even looked around when he entered. He went straight into the dining room, unzipped the trunk, pulled out a red folder and dropped it on the table. There was a loud bang and the dog ran into the bedroom. The folder was so full of papers that it barely stayed closed.
“What is this?” I asked.
“The last six years of my life,” my dad said.
To read more about Bethany Joy Lenz and how she was finally able to leave the cult, read this week’s PEOPLE on stands Friday issue.
After I kicked him out, I thought he just tried to move on with his life. Instead, he devoted his time to studying the cults, learning how they worked, and seeking out all the information he could find about the Leadership Group. I was so touched that I burst into tears. Then, as I flipped through the contents of the folders, I felt like crying for another reason, realizing how little I knew about Les and how gullible and naive I had been.
It was page after page of e-mails, letters, newspaper clippings. The accusations went dark. Witness after witness mentioned his alleged sexual abuse, alleged lawsuits, financial “injustices” and tendency to destroy marriages and separate families.
My dad mapped out the timeline. He compiled lists of famous associates and those with one horror story after another. He had been planning this day all these years.
I shared all of this with my lawyer, who seemed to agree that this evidence might be damning enough to prove how dangerous it would be to award custody to my husband who was still in full contact with his father – Les – and the rest.” Family.” My lawyer also jokingly offered my dad a research job at the law firm.
But for me the map was just the beginning. This is why I wanted to reach out to these people whose lives (and faith) have also been destroyed. In them I saw a different kind of family into which I was unknowingly introduced. Because, in addition to seriously warping my view of relationships, this cult has devastated my ability to believe in God, or to believe in anything spiritual at all. I wondered if these witnesses my dad had found might have an answer to a question I had asked myself many times in the years since I had left the cult. While most people 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 harmful. The answer would come in the most unexpected way.
From DINNER FOR THE VAMPIRES: Life in a Cult TV Show (Although It’s Also in an Actual Cult!) by Bethany Joy Lenz. Copyright © 2024 Bethany Joy Lenz. Reprinted with permission from Simon & Schuster, LLC
Vampire Dinner: Life in a Cult TV Show (Although It’s Also in a Real Cult!) is out on October 22nd and is available for pre-order now, wherever books are sold.
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