During Hallmark Channel star Bethany Joy Lenz’s publicity tour to promote her highly-acclaimed memoir, “Dinner With Vampires,” the actress realized that despite writing a tell-all about how she got lured into a religious cult and spent a decade shut off from her friends and family, there’s one thing she forgot to do: apologize to her parents.
Lenz’s new book — released on October 22, 2024 — details her stunning experiences of being lured into a collective known as The Big House Family and marrying the son of its founder, all while starring on the hit coming-of-age show “One Tree Hill.”
While discussing her book on the October 29 episode of the “I’ve Never Said This Before” podcast, Lenz talked about the lingering effects of the trauma she experienced, including still feeling “scared of having vulnerable conversations” with her parents, whom the group convinced her to disown for many years.
Though they’re no longer estranged and her dad spent years collecting information on the group that lured away his daughter, hoping she’d come home one day, Lenz realized during the interview that she’d never formally apologized to them for the pain they’d experienced.
Bethany Joy Lenz Says She Has Often Avoided Emotional Conversations With Loved Ones Since Leaving Cult
Given the name and mission of the podcast, “I’ve Never Said This Before,” host Tommy DiDario asked Lenz toward the end of their interview if she could think of anything that had been left unsaid even with the publication of her tell-all book.
At first, the “A Biltmore Christmas” star figured she’d already put everything out there, saying, “Once I left this group and started realizing how much shame was isolating me. I started to just talk about it and say things, and I just … you can’t shut me up.”
But Lenz then paused and said, “I wonder — I bet there’s something, like, I haven’t ever said to my parents. Maybe, like, I’m still scared of having vulnerable conversations with my parents. Like, it’s just, I’m scared of emotion.”
“When I’m with somebody that I really care about and I start crying,” she continued, “I feel all kinds of uncomfortable things that I don’t know how to deal with. I don’t know if I’ve ever just flat out said to my parents that ‘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.”
In a video excerpt of the conversation published by People, Lenz teared up as she formally apologized to them on the show, saying, “So Mom, Dad, I’m really sorry for what I put you through for the last — well, those those 10 years. It’s been a while out of it now, but yeah. And thank you for sticking by me and for your patience and grace.”
Cult Leaders Convinced Bethany Joy Lenz to Distance Herself From Family & Friends, She Says
HallmarkBethany Joy Lenz in Hallmark’s 2023 movie “A Biltmore Christmas”
Lenz first shared her experience in a cult in July 2023, during an episode of her “Drama Queens” podcast, revealing that she’d lived a double life that her fans knew nothing about.
During an October 2023 episode of “The Tamron Hall Show,” Lenz further explained how she got involved with The Big Family House, sharing how its leaders isolated her from friends and family as she was skyrocketing to fame.
The actress told Hall that, when she moved at age 22 from New York to Los Angeles, she was looking for connection and was a prime candidate for cult leaders to prey upon. She joined a weekly Bible study circle that felt “natural and normal” to her, she said.
“It really just felt like, ‘Oh! Community! God just dropped this community in my lap and it seems really lovely,” she said, but then explained, “These kinds of malignant narcissists that are in these positions of power, often they know what to look for. So they know how to target people based on, you know, within a few conversations, they’re able to dissect who’s going to be susceptible to their gaslighting and love bombing and all those things — and who’s gonna catch on. So they target people intentionally.”
The group convinced Lenz to isolate herself from her friends, family and anyone else “who is not a part of or supportive of the group,” she told Hall. When her parents or “One Tree Hill” co-stars questioned why she was spending all of her time with the group, she said she felt very defensive and unwilling to listen. Lenz told Hall that the leader of the cult, would often remind her that she just needed to “pray for them because they just don’t understand.”
In August 2023, Lenz told Variety that missing out on life events in her loved ones’ lives has been “the most painful, shameful, difficult parts.”
“Knowing that I missed nieces and nephews growing up, weddings, birthdays, funerals, major events,” she said. “As a survival mechanism, when you fully are dependent on this social structure, you have to shut off the part of your heart that cares deeply.”
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