Bethany Joy Lenz was a household name in the early 2000s due to her starring role on the CW’s “One Tree Hill.” At the same time, she was unknowingly a member of a cult.
In 2023, the actress shared on her podcast with former “One Tree Hill” castmates Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton that she’d harbored that secret from the public for around a decade.
“There’s a lot to tell,” she said at the time. Given the public’s interest, she decided to write a book about her experience, “Dinner for Vampires,” out later this month.
In a new interview ahead of its release, the actress, now 43, shared how the entire group, including her former husband, the cult leader’s son. pressured her to quit acting.
“I was so far along in my submission and abdication to this group. … And the thing was, that it was disguised as submission to God,” she said on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast Wednesday. “From that place, everything about my career started to then funnel though the group because I didn’t trust my own instinct to know if I was on the right path or taking the right job.”
On studios’ radar due to the success of her television series, Lenz explained she had more acting opportunities.
“I was cast as Belle in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and gave that up at the advice — the heavy-handed advice — of ‘Les,'” whom she identifies as the cult leader in her book.
“There were some really big movies that I was on a short list for, auditioned for, was pinned for and then I had to call my agent and be like, ‘You know what, I actually don’t want to do this. I don’t want to continue auditioning for this.”
Lenz said it was all about control.
“The more that I worked, the less they would see me. The more that I worked, the more confidence I would be gaining in my abilities and my creativity,” Lenz recalled.
She said the reason “One Tree Hill” wasn’t a problem is because cult members knew her location when the show was shot predominately in Wilmington, North Carolina. They also knew the cast and crew and were able to influence her opinions of them. She also wasn’t meeting anyone new.
On the show, Lenz was one half of the beloved couple, Haley and Nathan, otherwise known as “Naley.” Their storyline on the show involved her kissing her TV husband, James Lafferty.
“Nobody cared except my husband,” she said of kissing Lafferty. “He hated it, but he also wanted me to quit acting so I would stop making out with other guys.”
But as much as her husband wanted her to quit acting, he also relied on her income for sustainability. Lenz said she lost $2 million to the cult after merging her finances with her husband.
“I just did the dutiful Christian wife thing and merged my accounts,” she explained. “It didn’t occur to me that I was going to be taken advantage of. It was more that gut check of like, ‘This is mine. Like, I’ve been working really hard for all of this, and I’m not sure that I should just be randomly adding someone else’s name to the account. But I’m going to marry him, so I guess it’s OK.'”
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Lenz said when she married her husband, whom she calls “QB” in the book, their relationship was “playful and easy,” although the two didn’t connect much.
“We didn’t have a lot in common,” Lenz admitted. “There wasn’t a lot of intellectual stimulation. … I’d kind of run out of options. I couldn’t date a non-Christian. I couldn’t really date anybody outside of the group, or certainly not anybody who lived anywhere outside of that area. … It just became this sort of arranged situation.”
During the relationship, her husband had what she called “spiritual authority,” Lenz said.
“As far as I understood it in the group, it was the man basically gets the last word on anything, and he gets the final say. And you really are not allowed to question him. You can’t question his decisions. You can’t know about deep intimate things in his life. He has to go to other men for that. But he’s responsible for you, and he’s supposed to know all the deep, intimate things about your life. That’s how it was presented to me.
“But not in those words, otherwise I would’ve been like, ‘Y’all crazy,'” she joked on the podcast.
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However, Lenz has said her marriage wasn’t all bad because she has her daughter from that relationship. In an interview with People magazine, she said, “The further away I get from it, the more a blessing I see in it.”
“The more good things that I see have come out of walking through that,” she added, referencing her daughter, Maria.
On the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, Lenz spoke about the intimacy issues with her husband, which made the relationship even more difficult.
“I didn’t have this attraction. I didn’t have the drive, really ever. We just weren’t connected. We weren’t the right people for each other and, so, because I was so disinterested in sex, I was then asked to go on a schedule basically,” she revealed.
Lenz said the overall message was, “You just have to do it. Just do it. This is your duty, this is your job as a wife. Your emotions will fall in line if you do it. If you do it enough, then eventually you will find a way to enjoy it. You’ll find a way to feel connected.”
The schedule ultimately catered to her husband.
“It was a routine that I had to participate in in order to keep the peace in my marriage,” Lenz said.
She admitted her “stomach dropped every single time” her husband arrived in town, sharing how that trauma has affected her other relationships. “I had so much PTSD from showing up at the airport to see him, knowing that I was gonna have to start this sex schedule, for, like, the next two weeks or three weeks.”
When speaking with People, Lenz said she doesn’t have any nefarious motives in telling her story.
“I didn’t write this book to get revenge on anyone. I just wanted to tell an honest truth about what happened,” Lenz said.
She said that, through this book, she’s going to help people “who have experienced this and don’t know what to do with their shame, who may be currently experiencing it and don’t quite know how to identify what they’re feeling. But maybe they can recognize and see something in what I’m saying,” she added. “And help people who might otherwise get into something like this, and now they know what red flags to look for.”
