Bethany Joy Lenz
Bethany Joy Lenz spent a lot of time healing after 10 years in a cult, but the One Tree Hill alum realized she never said sorry to her mother and father.
“I’m still scared of having vulnerable conversations with my parents … I don’t know if I’ve ever just flat-out said to my parents, ‘I’m sorry for what I put you through in those 10 years.’ I think we’ve danced around versions of that, but I don’t think I’ve ever just flat-out said that,” Lenz, 43, said on the Monday, October 28, episode of Tommy DiDario‘s “I’ve Never Said This Before” podcast.
She opened up about her experience with The Big House Family in her new book, Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), released earlier this month. While on DiDario’s podcast, Lenz apologized to her parents for the first time.
“Mom, Dad, I’m really sorry for what I put you through for those 10 years,” she said. “It’s been a while out of it now but … Thank you for sticking by me and for your patience and grace.”
Bethany Joy Lenz Discusses Decision to Leave Cult on ‘Call Her Daddy’
Lenz added that she was “going to call” her parents directly to repeat that statement.
In her book, Lenz detailed how the group, which she belonged to during the entire nine-season run of One Tree Hill from 2003 to 2012, isolated her from her “bio family.” The actress recalled how a leader called Les (names were changed for the book) told her to ignore her parents’ concerns about The Big House Family. “It’s common for bio-families to feel threatened when they realize they can’t provide something that someone else can,” he told Lenz.
She even recalled telling a friend that the leaders of the group were more influential than her own mother and father.
Bethany Joy Lenz
“We’ve been adopted into God’s kingdom, so the families that we were born into aren’t always the families that are meant to have authority in our lives,” Lenz recalled telling a friend. “In a lot of ways, Pam and Les function more like parents to me than my own do.”
Dinner for Vampires recounts how Lenz eventually saw reason and left the cult behind. Telling her mom that she was finally out for good and getting a divorce (her husband was the son of one of the cult leaders) was an emotional experience.
“I told her the marriage was over,” Lenz wrote. “She let out her own tears of relief and shared with me how long she and my stepdad had been praying for this day. She had never stopped calling and texting and emailing and trying to engage with me, putting aside all her outrage and fears and concerns and depression. She didn’t question. She didn’t bait. She just waited patiently, trusting that the girl she’d raised, however imperfectly, would one day come to her senses.”
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While her experience was not a pleasant one, Lenz exclusively told Us Weekly that she knows no one could’ve changed her mind or gotten her out of the cult before she was ready. However, there is a little advice she’d give to her younger self.
“I would say be honest and open about your internal mess,” Lenz told Us of what she’d tell her 20-year-old self. “You can’t fix it all. You can’t clean it all up. If you live authentically, and … at the end of the book where I eventually got to was this: if I could just be honest and stop trying to earn my way into the good graces of God or people and I could just be willing to accept myself for where I’m at … maybe it’s OK to make mistakes. Actually, you should be making mistakes.”
Reporting by Sarah Hearon
