The ‘One Tree Hill’ star explains how she got lured into a religious cult and what happened when she left, in an exclusive excerpt from ‘Dinner for Vampires’
One Tree Hill actress Bethany Joy Lenz is getting candid about the decade she spent in a cult in her new memoir, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), out Oct. 22.
One thing she wants readers to take away from the book? To understand that it’s actually not that hard to fall for a high-control group like the one she was lured into, under the right circumstances.
“I had always been looking for a place to belong,” she explains to PEOPLE in this week’s cover story. “I wish someone had just told me when I was young that this is the universal human condition, but I didn’t know that.”
Raised an only child to young evangelical parents, she moved around a lot and says she had a lonely childhood. When she moved to L.A. at 20, she soon grew deeply attached to new friends she’d met at a Bible study. Soon, the group members began to feel even closer than family, and it was like nothing she’d ever experienced before.
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“We crave that kind of intimacy,” says Lenz. “The idea that someone out there says, ‘No matter what you do or how badly you might behave or what dumb choices you make, I still love you, and I’m here for you.’ I never had that. To walk into an environment that felt like that’s what I was surrounded by, it was like water in a desert.”
Lenz was soon enjoying life with her close-knit group when a new pastor she calls “Les” infiltrated the group and began to take over the weekly conversation. Soon he’d convinced a select group of them to stay at the “Big House,” where he lived in Idaho. Although she was starring on One Tree Hill, which filmed in Wilmington, N.C., Lenz visited as much as she could.
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And as the “family” morphed into something darker and more controlling,Lenz says she was too deeply entrenched to notice. It didn’t help that “Les” soon used one of the oldest cult tricks in the books: Isolation of members from friends and family.
“What was really insidious about the way they handled parental isolation was by zeroing in on real problems,” Lenz says. “They’d be like, ‘You didn’t get the parenting that you deserved. You didn’t get the upbringing that you should have had. Let us parent you. Let us give this gift back to you of what you missed out on, family and parents that really show up all the time and see you.'”
She continues, “Then I get out of the group, and it’s like all those things are still true about the way I grew up. So it was like how do I put a new lens on it to see it as something that is normal? We all just grow up with weird things in our family, you know what I mean? Don’t join a cult because your family’s weird.”
Lenz says her relationship with her parents is great now.
“It took some emotional moments and some time to just figure out what kind of relationship I wanted to have with them for the first time in adulthood because I just went from being a bratty teenager to isolation and being like, ‘You’re not even my family!'”
But she says that when she left the group, her parents were there with open arms.
“I was like, ‘OK, now you are the only people I have in the world. Please don’t abandon me.’ They’re like, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We love you.’ And it’s turned out well. I love both my parents.”
Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, Lenz shares what happened when she and her father reunited.
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