Bethany Joy Lenz in religious cult during initial years of stardom

Bethany Joy Lenz was part of a religious cult during her initial years of stardom.

The 43-year-old actress, who played Haley James Scott in the drama series One Tree Hill in the early 2000s, reveals in her upcoming memoir Dinner for Vampires Life on a Cult TV Show (While also in an Actual Cult!) that she had just been “looking for a place to belong” when she ended up devoted to a Christian group in Idaho that controlled her career, finances and other aspects of her life.

She told People: “I don’t think of [doing this book] as brave. I think of it as important. Living silently in the suffering I experienced, I don’t know if that helps anyone.

“I think of this more as the right thing to do. I had always been looking for a place to belong. We crave that kind of intimacy. The idea that someone out there says, ‘No matter what you do or how badly you might behave or what dumb choices you make, I still love you, and I’m here for you.”

The pastor running the group had persuaded members to move into a small commune and Bethany admitted that everything just looked “normal” but she was “too far” into it to notice anything untoward.

“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. Plus, I was so young.”

At the time, she was appearing on the hit TV show alongside Chad Michael Murray, James Lafferty and Sophia Bush among others, and noted her co-stars could see that she was part of a cult even if she didn’t realise it herself.

She said: “I could see it on their faces. But I’d justify it, like, ‘I couldn’t possibly be in a cult. It’s just that I’ve got access to a relationship with God and people in a way that everybody else wants, but they don’t know how to get it.”

“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!”

In 2005, she married fellow cult member Michael Galeotti and they divorced in 2012, and was their daughter Maria, 13, who served as the catalyst for her leaving it all behind.

She said: “The stakes were so high. 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.