One Tree Hill star was warned she was in a cult earlier than dropping years of earnings

Warning: this text discusses cults, coercive management and sexual assault which some readers could discover distressing.

A former One Tree Hill star has opened up about her time in a cult, which noticed her lose years of her life and an enormous sum of money whereas filming the favored TV present.

Celebrities appear to be interested in cults like moths to a flame in the intervening time, with an increasing number of sharing particulars about their former lives in cult organisations, with the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer all spending time in spiritual or religious teams of their youthful days.

The newest cult case is concentrated on Allison Mack, after the previous Smallville actress shared how she carried out a ‘slave grasp’ function within the notorious NXIVM group. This noticed her choose younger girls, who would later be branded with both her initials or that of Keith Raniere, earlier than being pressured to have intercourse with the cult founder.

Raniere landed a 120-year sentence for his crimes however Mack was launched after simply two and has since shared some horrifying particulars of the cult she turned concerned with.

Now, One Tree Hill’s Bethany Pleasure Lenz is the most recent so as to add her identify to the unusually lengthy listing of TV stars to land themselves in cults.

Talking to PEOPLE, she admitted that throughout the eight years she performed Haley Scott in One Tree Hill, she was beneath the thumb of a non secular cult who managed her profession, life selections and, ultimately, her checking account.

The 44-year-old stated: “I do not consider it as courageous. I consider it as necessary. Residing silently within the struggling I skilled, I do not know if that helps anybody. I consider this extra as the appropriate factor to do.”

Lenz has written a brand new e-book, titled Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Present (Whereas Additionally in an Precise Cult!), and hopes that would assist different individuals who discover themselves in related conditions, which left her with virtually nothing to point out after practically a decade on one of the vital fashionable teenage reveals of the 2000s.

She defined that she met a pastor by her bible group after shifting to LA when she was 20 to pursue an performing profession, and he quickly invited her and others to maneuver right into a small commune in Idaho, however she was already too far in at this level to understand that something was incorrect.

“It nonetheless regarded regular. After which it simply morphed. However by the point it began morphing, I used to be too far into the relationships to note. Plus I used to be so younger,” she says.

Even when co-stars identified to her that she might be in a cult, the Florida-born actress nonetheless did not totally imagine it.

She added: “I may see it on their faces. However I would justify it, like, ‘I could not presumably be in a cult. It is simply that I’ve obtained entry to a relationship with God and other people in a approach that everyone else needs, however they do not know find out how to get it.”

Craig Sheffer, who performed Keith Scott on the present, even advised her point-blank that she was there, however the younger actress refused to imagine it till she realised that she needed to depart the husband who she’d met within the ‘household’, and realised that she’d haven’t any assist if she stepped away.

She concluded: “The stakes had been so excessive. They had been my solely buddies. I used to be married into this group. I had constructed my total life round it. If I admitted that I used to be incorrect … the whole lot else would come crumbling down.”