Bethany Joy Lenz Says ‘One Tree Hill’ Cast Tried to ‘Rescue’ Her from Cult: The Show ‘Saved My Life’
usmagazine.comBethany Joy Lenz is grateful that the cast and crew of One Tree Hill tried to get her out of a cult she belonged to while filming the show.“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,” Lenz, now 42, said in an interview with Variety published on Thursday, August 10. “I was really committed to what I believed were the best choices I could make. … The nature of a group like that is 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.”Lenz explained that her involvement in the cult — an involvement she says was common knowledge on the OTH set — began when she was in her early 20s, which was “a year or two” after booking the role of Haley James Scott on OTH in 2003.
She didn’t escape the organization until “shortly after” the teen drama ended in 2012.While Lenz has not shared the name of the group, she revealed it was a “bible-based cult.” The actress confessed she grew up in a Christian household and it was common for her to participate in “Wednesday night bible studies.” As she moved around to new cities and states, she would find a bible study to attend.“In a lot of ways, One Tree Hill saved my life, because I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina,” Lenz 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.
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