One Tree Hill's Bethany Joy Lenz gives first in-depth interview about cult experience

On a recent episode of the One Tree Hill podcast Drama Queens, Bethany Joy Lenz revealed that while starring in the hit teen drama she had been involved in a cult. As with any story wherein Hollywood and cult behavior intersect, the situation drew a lot of attention. But Lenz has been vague about the details, partly because she’s got a book coming that will delve deeper into it. “There’s so much more that could help people, so much about this weird, secret life,” she tells Variety in her first interview on the subject. “I’m going to put it all out there and yeah, I’ll share some of the all the [sic] dirty details—as much as I can without causing harm.”

She does share some of her experience in the new interview, namely that she thought she was getting involved in something familiar and comforting. “I moved to a new state, moved to a new city, and I went to another Wednesday night Bible study and that’s all it was to me. But the friendships seemed deeper, more vulnerable somehow, as time went on,” she explains. “The person that was brought into the leadership position was sociopathic and most of us who were involved were in our early 20s.”

Lenz compares the group’s leader to Keith Raniere, the NXIVM leader whose eventual arrest was chronicled in The Vow. “I don’t think I was ever consciously scared other than a few… there were a few physical interactions I had that made me scared,” she says, noting that some of those moments helped her realize the reality of her situation. Her other saving grace? “[In] a lot of ways, One Tree Hill saved my life, because I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina. 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. And I think that spatial separation made a big difference when it was time for me to wake up.”

Lenz’s involvement with the cult was apparently an open secret behind the scenes at One Tree Hill. “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. I was really committed to what I believed were the best choices I could make,” she recalls. As for her other loved ones, “Family members who expressed concern or who were like, ‘What are you saying? This is crazy,’—anyone who kind of went against what I was experiencing in my reality—became a bit of the enemy.”

Becoming a mother is one of the things that inspired her to finally break her ties from the group, but reclaiming her career was also a factor. “I was at the height of my career, getting offers for huge movies and Broadway shows. Everything I’d trained for, all my childhood dreams were coming true and I said no to all of it so I could go live with this remote, small group of people, convinced I was making a noble, spiritual sacrifice,” Lenz says. “I’ll tell you, any group that requires you to believe every detail of what they believe in order to be loved without condemnation… please run the other way. Just run.”