Who would have thought that beneath the guise of an intellectual teenager in a relationship with her high school basketball star, there was a young woman under the influence of a cult? While Bethany Joy Lenz played the wise high school student Haley James Scott on screen in the 2000s series “One Tree Hill” (“Les Frères Scott”, in French) she frequented an abusive religious circle in real life.
Outside of the film sets, the American actress was in fact a member of an ultra-Christian group led by a pastor from Idaho. The latter controlled his career, his life choices and also his bank account for a decade. In “Dinner for Vampires,” her book to be released October 22, 2024, Bethany Joy Lenz shares her experience with the hope of helping other people leave their cult.
Years of denial
After numerous moves and her parents’ divorce when she was 16, belonging to a religious group represented a milestone for Bethany Joy Lenz. When a pastor, whom she nicknames “The” begins to take more and more place in the community, the actress is not suspicious, even when he manages to convince people to settle in a “big house » in Idaho.
“It still seemed normal,” said the young woman during an interview with People, published this Wednesday, October 16. “And then it transformed. But by the time it started to transform, I was too involved in relationships to realize it. (…) I was so young.”
If the actress managed to hide her secret from viewers, her colleagues from “One Tree Hill” quickly understood – before her – that she belonged to a sect. But despite their thoughts, notably those of Craig Sheffer, the interpreter of Keith Scott, who directly told her what he was thinking from the start of filming, the actress remained in denial for a long time. “No, no, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in dresses who sing crazy things and drink Kool-Aid (an American brand of drink mix. It was allegedly drunk with cyanide by members of a religious movement in 1978 as part of a collective suicide in Guyana, South America). (…) That’s not what we do! “, she defended herself at the time, according to her statements.
Therapy to “heal”
Bethany Joy Lenz, however, married another member of the sect in 2012, with whom she had a daughter, Rosie. But a year after the child was born, she realized she wanted to divorce and leave her community. “The stakes were so high,” she recalled. “They were my only friends. I was married to this group. I had built my whole life around this group. If I admitted I was wrong…everything else would fall apart.”
After spending a decade in the cult, the actress told E! News, in 2023, that she had been in therapy for ten years: “I sought to heal from all of this. And during that time, part of my catharsis was writing. (…) It is certain that I am much closer to my true self. I feel much more comfortable in my skin than I ever have.”