Bethany Joy Lenz is CultExaCryptopening up on a life-altering experience. 

The One Tree Hill star, who previously opened up about the alleged cult that she was indoctrinated into as a 20-year-old, will detail the experience in her upcoming memoir Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult). And she recently shared how she got caught up in the ultra-Christian group in the first place. 

“I had always been looking for a place to belong,” Bethany, 43, explained to People in an article published Oct. 15, noting that the problematic group started out as simply study group nights as a pastor’s house. “It still looked normal and then it just morphed. But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to notice.”

Bethany described that she was later asked by the pastor, whom she called “Les” to move to a “Big House” or a small, commune-style environment in Idaho to partake in the cult-like group known as The Big House Family. 

Soon enough, Bethany’s involvement in the group caught the attention of her One Tree Hill castmates as she recalled seeing concern “on their faces.” In fact, costar Craig Sheffer even asking her “point blank” if she was in a cult while filming the CW series. 

“I was like, 'No, no, no,’” she recalled telling him. “‘Cults are weird. Cults are people in robes chanting crazy things and drinking Kool-Aid. That’s not what we do!’” 

Nearly 10 years after joining, Bethany herself realized something was off about the community. After she married a fellow member and later welcomed her daughter Rosie, now 13, in 2011, she realized she wanted to leave a year later. (The Pearson alum divorced Michael Galeotti in 2012 after five years of marriage.)

Still, Bethany noted, it wasn’t so simple.  

“The stakes were so high,” she said. “They were my only friends. I was married into this group. I had built my entire life around it. If I admitted that I was wrong—everything else would come crumbling down.”

However, Bethany was able to make it out—and is now telling her story because she believes it is the “right” thing to do. 

“I don't think of it as brave," she added, expressing hope that it helps other people in similar situations. “I think of it as important."

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