Bethany Joy Lenz on Escaping Cult, Losing ‘One Tree Hill’ Money: Interview

Fifteen months ago, during a recap episode of the “Drama Queens” podcast, guest Michaela McManus asked co-hosts Bethany Joy Lenz and Sophia Bush whether they’d ever write a book. Lenz responded that she often writes, and that she would love to tell her story. And then she revealed to listeners something shocking about herself. “I was in a cult for 10 years,” she said. “That would be a really valuable experience to write about — and the 10 years of recovery after that. There’s there’s a lot to tell.”

Four weeks later, she talked about the experience at length for the first time, speaking with Variety over Zoom. As she sat outside her Nashville home, we spoke for 45 minutes about the shame she felt, how her “One Tree Hill” cast tried to help and how she ultimately overcame the fear she had about leaving the group.

Now, 11 months after that interview, her book “Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult)” is about to go on sale. Lenz and I are sitting outside a boutique hotel in Wilmington, N.C., the small city where “One Tree Hill” filmed from 2003 to 2012 — an area that she looked at as a refuge during her many years in the Big House Family, the name of the cult that began as a Bible study in Los Angeles. When a new leader, whom she identifies in the book as “Les” (many names have been changed), took over, the group moved to a commune-style environment in Idaho.

For years, Lenz would fly between Los Angeles, Wilmington and Idaho, turning down acting jobs at the group’s guidance. At the end of 2005, midway through Season 3 of “One Tree Hill,” she married the son of the group’s leader, and they share 13-year-old daughter Rosie. While he’s not named in the book, Lenz’s husband was musician Michael Galeotti; the duo divorced in 2012, announcing their split one month before the series finale of “One Tree Hill” aired.

For our interview, Lenz wears paint-covered jeans and snacks on snickerdoodles made by Rosie, offering me some. We order cocktails at the bar — she’s very specific about her gin and tonic — and it doesn’t take long for her to recognize Wilmington locals from her many years there.

“I think we come back enough convention-wise, that it doesn’t feel like triggering or like I’m stepping into something. In fact, it actually makes me feel the nostalgia of all the things that I missed out on,” she says. “I wish I’d really been able to enjoy this in the early 2000s before cell phones when everybody just ran into each other on the street.”

Lenz writes about some of her “One Tree Hill” friends who helped her after she left the cult, and began fighting for sole custody of her daughter following the divorce. She received written statements from Paul Johansson, Daphne Zuniga, Allison Munn and producer Joe Davola to be used in court.

Later, Johansson told her that the cast was very concerned about her safety — and she’d misread the whispering behind her back. “They weren’t making fun of me, and they weren’t scared of me,” she writes. “They sensed I was being taken advantage of and might even be in danger. They were trying to figure out how they could help me.”

In the book, she also recalls a conversation with costar Tyler Hilton. The pair became very close while on the “One Tree Hill’ Concert Tour” in 2005 and on the third stop, some members of the Big House Family joined. Afterward, her close relationship with Hilton changed, and he later asked, “Are you in, like, a religious cult or something?” She denied it — but could feel that, from then on, it loomed over them.

Shortly after the tour ended, she was offered her dream role: Belle in “Beauty & the Beast” on Broadway.

But “Les” convinced her it wasn’t the best choice for her, and she turned it down. She recalls him telling her, “One direction leads to career, which will be greatly blessed. One direction leads to Family, which will also be greatly blessed. But I’ll tell you what’s on my heart is that you never had the opportunity to be a part of a Family. You’ve been on the road for the last few months. This is the longest you’ve been away from us up here, and we’re just waiting with open arms. It’s worth considering this might be a tactic of the enemy to keep you from your inheritance as a child of God — your spiritual inheritance of pressing into Family and finding out what it feels like to really be a part of heaven on earth.”

Below, Lenz and I dive into her writing process, her relationship with God, and with her ex’s family — and finding trust again.

We last spoke when you were in the process of writing. Now, you’re done. How do you feel?

I’m proud of it. I know how hard I worked on it. I didn’t use a ghostwriter. I wrote that book. It was exhausting, and it was like an information dump. Thank God I had an amazing editor who could help me talk my way through things, and knew how to move things around to help me around. I learned so much in the process.

The process must have been so intense. What was the most difficult part?

The hardest part was when I started to get into after 2005 — after I got married, really. That chunk was really hard to write, not only just because of that, but because my daughter is 13 and it’s her father. And I want to be really respectful of that. I don’t necessarily believe in shielding children from a lot of things, but I think you give them the amount of information that they can handle. She’s old enough now that, if she wants to read it, she can, and I feel like we’d be able to talk about it. But I didn’t want to dishonor her dad. I don’t believe he’s a bad person. He’s on his own journey, and I don’t want to judge it, but I have to maintain that balance of me being authentic and telling the truth of what I experienced and also leaving space for their relationship. That was the hardest part in the whole book: making sure I created that balance.

How much have you spoken to your daughter about this?

Because of different legal things that are in place, I can’t discuss too much of that.

How’d you land on “Dinner for Vampires” as the title and this cover image?

I was writing the book proposal, and the phrase just flowed out in the middle of a sentence of, like, “I didn’t know that I was going to become dinner for a bunch of vampires.” I was a little nervous about it because it’s very provocative, and then my agent liked it. For the cover, we went through so many iterations of it, but they all felt too serious or vague. It was important to me that, especially with a dark, provocative title, the cover immediately conveyed the tone of the book as “hopeful.”

I think most cult memoirs are very niche, heavy and sad. While my story has those elements, I wanted people to see the cover and immediately know this was a story told with humor and self-depreciation, which I think subconsciously translates to hope. You can’t laugh at your mistakes unless you’ve accepted them, and accepted the flawed version of yourself in them. That’s a relatable theme, whether you were in a cult or not. And, the real life drama of it all was so over the top that, creatively, it seemed only fitting to lean into a vibe of soapy paperback books from the ’70s and ’80s — nostalgic, outrageous, glamorous, dramatic and heartwarming.

You changed the names of people in the book, and I know you combined some people into one character to tell the story more smoothly. How much communication did you have with the people who you do write about?

A lot. The Emily, Jasmine, Dante and Abe characters, I have a lot of contact with, and they were really helpful in just those initial conversations of, “Hey, I’m sorry that we have to go relive this. But would you please help me remember?” That’s one of the hard parts too. When you go through trauma, your brain creates these gaps. You just kind of block [things] out. After I wrote a lot of stuff about the marriage, I started to get so foggy. I didn’t feel like I could authentically write a ton about the next four years of my marriage, because I didn’t remember a lot of it. I just kind of went numb, and checked out. I didn’t want to just make shit up. Talking with a lot of those people, all those journeys were authentic, everything that people went through and shared with me. It was kind of like private investigating your own life, discovering all these things that you didn’t know you didn’t know.

This group began as a Bible study, and eventually, they really tried to take advantage of your religious loyalty to God. What’s your relationship with religion and God now?

It’s better than it ever has been, that’s for sure. What I realized was that I had been approaching my faith and my idea of God, with a sense of duty, activity, learning. Like, if I do all the things on the checklist, then I get a great life, right? Isn’t that the deal? I do all the right things, and you give me a nice life? Is that not the arrangement? And what I found was something so much more complex, so much more freeing, actually, that I got to a point where I started to live in the openness of humanity and I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know what the right decision is to make on any given day. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, and that’s OK. As my relationship with God develops on a daily basis, that is my safe place. It’s not the things that I’m doing and it just feels a lot more freeing. It’s so much easier to make mistakes. I don’t beat myself up as much anymore. It feels so much easier to let go. I don’t feel so much shame. I still feel a little, but I don’t live with the shame of my past so much, because I know that there’s a plan B, C, D, E. It’s all just gonna work out. It’s OK.

You talk a bit about the controlling nature your ex-husband had on your wardrobe, scripts, having lunch with co-stars, etc. on “One Tree Hill.” Was the cast aware of that?

I don’t think so. I knew they would think it was weird. There was a lot that I knew people would think was weird, and I justified it by saying, they just don’t have “spiritual eyes” to see things. It builds kind of a sense of superiority. That’s the only way you can manage living that way.

Paul Johannsson and Daphne Zuniga were really there for you after you got out, but you share that the way you separated yourself from the group, and did create a bit of a divide between you and the rest of the cast. Do you feel you were able to repair those relationships later on?

Yeah, what I wish is that I had realized it a little sooner. It would have been nice to have the last year of the show or the last couple of years of the show, really connecting with everybody, because by the time I woke up and got out on my own and was trying to figure out life, everybody had scattered. Even though we worked together for 10 years, those people will always be my family, but everybody was on new jobs. That’s the nature of the business. You jump into a new job and you become friends with those people really quickly. Paul and Daphne were old enough to know the value of the relationships and the friendship. So they invested, I think, in a way that maybe the younger people just didn’t have enough life experience to know how to reach out and how to connect and invest. I certainly wasn’t aware of it, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was flailing. So they were really great, both of them — so lovely and anchoring in so many ways. As far as the rest, I reached out in smaller ways. I think I started with James [Lafferty], because he lived in L.A., and he and I always got along. We just weren’t close. So I reconnected with him and I tried to reach out to people, but these conventions have been a huge help in that.

You have the “Drama Queens” podcast with Hilarie Burton and Sophia Bush, both of whom you never allowed yourself to get close to on set. Did you ever feel the need to apologize to anyone?

Many people. People on the show, I don’t know if I did. Perhaps I should. I think most of the people that I have apologized to were people like my parents and my family. Maybe it’s because I never did get super close with anyone on the show, so it didn’t occur to me. It wasn’t like they had me, and then they lost me.

Maybe it’s something to consider. The idea of saying, “I’m sorry that I was here, but I was not here for you. I wasn’t a present part of this community, and maybe you needed me and I wasn’t there and I’m sorry.” Yeah, that might be worth it. It’s interesting to think about.

You were so open about your relationship with your parents — cutting out your dad for six years and him so openly taking you back in and helping you win custody of your daughter. How do they feel about the book?

They’ve been really supportive. I was concerned that my mom might have come off harsher than I meant for her too, but it was more that I was living in the memory of a 13-year-old or 15-year-old girl, and that’s how it felt at the time. I hope by the end, people know that relationships with mothers and daughters are complex, and she was dealing with a lot of her own stuff, because there were complications in the marriage that it wasn’t my business to explain. I read back and thought, “Oh man, Dad looks like a saint, and Mom looks a little wild.” So I hope that people are able to pick up on the nuance. It happened so fast that I wish I’d had a normal timeline to be able to write this.

It seems really quick. Once you mentioned it on “Drama Queens,” how fast was your turnaround?

Oh, yeah. Simon & Schuster wanted it out in a year. I turned in 90,000 words within two and a half months. I was a machine.

As a single mother, how were you able to hold space for when you were writing, emotionally, then hopping to school pickups and dinner duty?

I’ve been seeing a wonderful man, and he was incredibly helpful, very supportive, and helped with things like after-school pickup, so I could keep writing until 5. I tried to put myself on a schedule so that I knew what days I was picking her up from school and helping her with her homework or taking her to different activities, so I could make sure it still felt like I was a part of the daily routine. Then there were other days where I was like, peace out, I’m writing from 7:30 until 6. So I did have help. And she, thank God, is at an age where Mom is not cool, and the last thing she wants to do is hang out with me.

Emotionally, I think I was just living authentically and as openly as I could. She doesn’t need to know every single detail of everything, but I would be open. “Hey, I’m having a hard day. I had to write about something hard today, so sorry if I snapped at you,” or “Sorry if I seem sad. I’m here. I love you.” And she understood.

Did it take you a long time to trust someone new in a romantic relationship?

Absolutely, I only dated people that I knew.

And do they need to still be spiritually aligned with your beliefs?

Yeah, because the more that I’ve released the need for the checklist, the deeper my day-to-day relationship has gotten with the God of my understanding. It’s at the core of me. So I don’t know how you could really know me in the way that an intimate partner would need to know me if you don’t also have your own relationship with God — not that it has to be done in exactly the same way, but if there’s not a general agreement on who God is, the character in God, I just don’t know how [I’d do that]. I certainly tried in relationships with somebody, but for me, I always felt like I was a little bit unseen.

Are you comfortable going to church now?

No. I go sometimes. I went into one the other day that was in somebody’s house, and I had, like, a panic attack before I walked in. It was a huge trigger, but I also am trying to be aware enough to know that not everything looks exactly the same. I could do things differently, it’s not all going to be the same.

Would you write another book?

Absolutely. I started writing fiction when I was 12 years old. I wrote a few chapters on our brand-new computer. It’s about a girl named Luke. Isn’t that funny? It’s about a girl named Luke in high school, dealing with bullies, the real-life struggle. I got distracted! But absolutely, I really want to write fiction. I feel like there’s a follow-up to this book in some way I don’t know if it’s necessarily directly related to all of this. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I feel like there’s a little more to say, maybe in a different context. So I’m working on that. We’ll see. I’ve always been a writer, it’s just always been private.

This may be a difficult question, but I’m asking for correct phrasing and accuracy. Do you view your relationship with your ex as physically abusive?

I still struggle with that. I don’t know if I have a good answer or a helpful answer. Someone throwing things in the room while they’re standing next to you, or breaking things in front of you, or stopping you from leaving a room physically with their body, even though they may not touch you … They’re not touching you — but physical intimidation, I don’t know? I don’t know if I’m right or if I need more therapy. But I don’t feel like I was in a physically abusive relationship. Maybe I was, and I still haven’t come to terms with it. Maybe I wasn’t because I was never hit or touched in that way. But there was a sex schedule. It’s so complicated.

Something that’s not always detailed when cults are discussed is the financial aspect. You share that all of the money you made on “One Tree Hill” was taken from you — at least $2 million — and then “roughly $360,000” in court to fight for your daughter’s custody. Were you hesitant at all about sharing those details?

I was, because I think it’s gauche to talk about money. But I also knew there’s so many women and men who are in toxic, abusive or narcissistic relationships, and they’re stuck because they don’t have any money, or he controls the finances, or she doesn’t have a skill set, because she’s been raising the kids, and what else is she going to do? It felt like, why would I hold that back? It’s cringy for different reasons — because of what happened but also to talk about an obscene amount of money. For so many people who never experienced a paycheck like that in the first place, it’s getting over the hurdle of, “Oh, I feel so bad for you.” I really had to come at it from a clinical, objective place and trust that the audience is generous and smart enough to be able to understand that this lifestyle is bizarre and the paychecks are huge and weird. But even if you as a person are in an abusive situation and you may not be getting the same size paycheck, the same situation can still be happening to you. I’m hoping that’s what people take away from it.

I think it was clear. It wasn’t like you were living this lavish lifestyle.

Oh, God, he got so mad at me one time — I think I spent $385 at J.Crew, and it was the fight of the century.

For spending your money.

It was my money! And in comparison — I’m saying this to reiterate — I didn’t live a lavish lifestyle. I didn’t even enjoy it when I had it! I’ve got nothing to hide, nothing to lose at this point. Honestly, it’s all just a big mess. And I feel like we’re in a stage now where people are kind of over the cancel culture idea of jumping on top of everybody for every little thing. I’m gonna say dumb things, I’m gonna make mistakes, I’m gonna not do everything perfectly, and I really hope that you will all join me on this journey.

Do you have any relationship with your ex’s family at all?

I am not connected to them in any way, thank the Lord Jesus.

“Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult)” is available for purchase now. This interview was edited and condensed.