Bethany Joy Lenz Says Her 'One Tree Hill' Costars Tried to 'Rescue' Her from a Cult: 'I Was Very Stubborn'

The ‘One Tree Hill’ alum said her former costars attempted to ‘rescue’ her from the cult she was involved with while making the show

Bethany Joy Lenz is getting candid about the decade she spent as a member of a cult while filming One Tree Hill.

In an interview with Variety published on Thursday, the actress and singer-songwriter opened up about the cult, which she declined to identify by name. Though she kept its identity under wraps, Lenz, 42, said her One Tree Hill castmates were aware she was involved at the time — and even attempted to intervene and “rescue” her.

“It was the whisper behind the scenes, like, ‘You know, she’s in a cult,'” she told the outlet. “For a while, they were all trying to save me and rescue me, which is lovely and so amazing to be cared about in that way.”

“But I was very stubborn,” she added. “I was really committed to what I believed were the best choices I could make.”

Bethany Joy Lenz on ‘One Tree Hill’ with costars Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush.

Fred Norris / Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett

‘One Tree Hill’ Star Bethany Joy Lenz Says She Has ‘a Lot to Tell’ After 10-Year Experience in a ‘Cult’

The actress, who played the kind-hearted Haley James Scott for nine seasons on the popular CW coming-of-age drama, said her involvement in the cult began as a home group Bible study in Los Angeles and later developed an emphasis on “isolation.”

“They have to make you distrust everyone around you so that the only people you trust are, first and foremost, the leadership and then, people within the group if the leadership approves of them and isn’t in the middle of pitting you against each other, which happens all the time also,” she explained.

“It built a deep wedge of distrust between me and my cast and crew,” she continued. “As much as I loved them and cared about them, there was a fundamental thought: If I’m in pain, if I’m suffering, I can’t go to any of these people. So you feel incredibly lonely.”

Ultimately though, Lenz credited One Tree Hill and the show’s filming location because it “saved my life.”

“I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina,” she said. “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,” she explained.

The actress is currently working on a memoir due out early next year that will explore those “painful” memories even further, she told PEOPLE in this week’s issue, due out Friday. The decade of being in a cult was followed by another decade of recovery, which involved “lots of therapy.”

Bethany Joy Lenz at the 2022 iHeartRadio Music Festival.

Mindy Small/Getty I

Bethany Joy Lenz Says Writing Her Memoir, Including Reliving Her Time in a Cult, Has Been ‘Painful’ (Exclusive)

“Recovery looks different for everyone, depending on your experience of trauma,” she explained to PEOPLE in a story published on Wednesday. “I had to start from a baseline of my personal understanding of God and the experiences I had had. And then there was a lot of going back to who I was before and remembering that, and then acknowledging that there was so much I just didn’t know.”

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While the writing often flows smoothly, revisiting “painful” times has been difficult, Lenz admitted.

“I’m a writer at heart, so turning a phrase is easy for me,” she added. “Exploring the memories, and really facing them, can be challenging — but I’m doing it.”

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Source: HIS Education