ESCAPING A CULT AND STARTING OVER

THE TV STAR THOUGHT HER BIBLE STUDY GROUP WAS THE CHOSEN FAMILY SHE'D ALWAYS WANTED. BUT AFTER 10 YEARS, SHE REALIZED IT WAS SOMETHING MUCH DARKER

- GILLIAN TELLING

In 2004, a year into starring as Haley James Scott on the popular teen drama One Tree Hill, actress Bethany Joy Lenz was chatting with her costar Craig Sheffer in between takes. "We were sitting at the bleachers filming a basketball scene at Laney High School, and he started asking me questions about my family," Lenz, now 43, says. She began to tell him all about her "chosen family," a tight-knit group of deeply religious friends she'd met at a Bible study in Los Angeles who lived in a commune-like house in Idaho where they were led by a pastor she calls "Les." "Eventually Craig goes, 'You know you're in a cult, right?"" Lenz says. She laughed off the idea. "I was like, 'No, no, no. Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid. That's not what we do!""

It would take another eight years before Lenz finally saw the "Family" for what it was. She uses the word "cult" as shorthand for the situation in which she found herself: a high-control group led by a man some described as a "false prophet" who separated members from their real families, took advantage of anyone with money and may have had dark, predatory undertones. In her memoir Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), out Oct. 22, Lenz tells the whole story for the first time. "I don't think of it as brave," she says of why she's finally opening up. “I think of it as important. Living silently in shame and in the suffering I experienced, I don't know if that helps anyone." She hopes her book will empower others in similar situations: "I think of this more as the right thing to do."