‘One Tree Hill’ Star Bethany Joy Lenz Reveals That Her Co-Stars Tried to “Rescue” Her From a Religious Cult: “I Was Very Stubborn”

Since One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz opened up about being a part of a religious cult for the entirety of her time playing Haley James Scott on the CW drama, she has reflected on the role the series played in helping her escape.

Lenz, who is working on a book about her experience, revealed to Variety that her One Tree Hill castmates knew about her involvement in the cult and tried their best to free her from it.

“It was the whisper behind the scenes, like ‘You know, she’s in a cult,'” she recalled. “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 shared that her involvement was a result of her attending Wednesday night Bible studies in Los Angeles. Despite having gone to such meetings before moving to L.A., she noted that the relationships she developed there “seemed deeper, more vulnerable somehow, as time went on,” as she ultimately compared the cult’s “sociopathic” leader to NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere, who was exposed in the true crime docuseries The Vow.

Lenz told Variety she was isolated in the cult, explaining, “They have to make you distrust everyone around you so that the only people you trust are, first and foremost, the leadership and then, people within the group if the leadership approves of them, and isn’t in the middle of pitting you against each other, which happens all the time also.”

“It built a deep wedge of distrust between me and my cast and crew,” she continued. “As much as I loved them and cared about them, there was a fundamental thought: If I’m in pain, if I’m suffering, I can’t go to any of these people.”

While this made her “feel incredibly lonely,” she admitted that she was lucky to live away from the cult while filming the teen drama, while many of her fellow members “were in it day after day.”

“So in a lot of ways, One Tree Hill saved my life, because I was there nine months out of the year in North Carolina,” she told Variety. “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 said that delving into her own trauma for her memoir “can be really healing for a lot of other people.”

“What good are our painful experiences if we just lock them away and pretend like everything’s perfect?” she asked. “That’s not doing anybody any good.”

All seasons of One Tree Hill are now streaming on Hulu.