“I Was in a Cult for 10 Years”: Bethany Joy Lenz on Reclaiming Her Past and One Tree Hill’s Complicated Legacy

“I was in a cult for 10 years….So there’s a lot to tell.” Bethany Joy Lenz was casual, flippant even, during a July 2023 episode of her One Tree Hill rewatch podcast, when she finally went public about the darkest chapter of her past. For years, Lenz had been finding catharsis through writing poems, songs, a short film, even a comedy pilot about the time she spent enmeshed in what she calls a “Bible study gone sideways.”

For months prior to that episode of Drama Queens, which Lenz hosted with fellow OTH costars Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush, she had been dropping hints about her time in a high-pressure group. But as fate would have it, a question from a viewer wondering if any of the hosts would write a book is what eventually drove her to explore that period of her life in a memoir. “It wasn’t a decision like, ‘Now is the time.’ It was more off-handed,” Lenz tells Vanity Fair from a sunny room in her Nashville home. “I just didn’t expect anything to come from it.”

More than a year later, the 43-year-old actor has channeled her experiences into Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult). Her debut memoir recounts how she was welcomed into what appeared to be a fairly innocuous Bible study. Before long, Lenz had laid bare some of her deepest vulnerabilities to leaders of the radical Christian group. Eventually, when Lenz wasn’t filming the ultra-popular One Tree Hill in Wilmington, North Carolina, she’d devote her time at the group’s cluttered epicenter in another state.

Onscreen, Lenz played happy-go-lucky high schooler Haley Scott, who finds true love with basketball star Nathan (James Lafferty). Off-screen, she found herself in a lifeless marriage to the group leader’s son, with whom Lenz would later welcome a daughter. By the time One Tree Hill ended its nine-season run in 2012, Lenz had lost more than $2 million during her time with the group, she writes.

Lenz credits monthslong filming blocks on the beloved teen series with saving her from further entanglement with the group. But One Tree Hill wasn’t always a safe space: She also writes about enduring hurtful whispers about her tight-knit religious group on set, and alleged misconduct by the show’s creator. (Lenz, Burton, Bush, and nine other former OTH cast members—as well as members of the crew—signed a joint statement supporting their colleague Audrey Wauchope after she accused showrunner Mark Schwahn of sexual harassment in 2017. Schwahn has never publicly addressed the allegations. VF has reached out to his lawyer for comment.)

“I think we’re all little cathedrals of contradiction,” Lenz writes in the acknowledgments of Dinner for Vampires. “Terrifying darkness and shocking beauty coexist in everyone, and God doesn’t wait for us to clean out all the bad before celebrating the good.” Says Lenz, “That’s how I view One Tree Hill—its own little cathedral of complication. There are some incredibly beautiful, wonderful things that came out of that environment, and there were some really painful, abusive, detrimental, awful things that happened there as well. That’s humanity. It’s not all tainted for me. I want to accept that bad things happen, but I want to focus on the good things.”

Vanity Fair: Is it bittersweet to be doing press—a People Magazine cover, an episode of Call Her Daddy—about a very painful period in your life?

Bethany Joy Lenz: It is definitely a strange and vulnerable experience. I’m grateful that I’m in a position to be able to help. There’s a lot of people that can relate to having experienced narcissistic abuse, and I want to be able to lend a voice to that. I would love to be able to be really excited about this, but it’s strange. I’m proud of my work, I’m excited to help, but it’s hard to talk about things that are embarrassing. I’m still working past a lot of the shame, so it is a mixed bag. It really is.