Bethany Joy Lenz to Detail “Spiritual Abuse” in Cult in New Memoir

Bethany Joy Lenz is ready to pull back the curtain on a challenging time of her life. 

The One Tree Hill alum revealed that she will be releasing a memoir early next year during which she’ll recount her 10 years in a cult. 

“There’s a lot to tell,” she shared with People in a August 9 interview, adding that her years in the unnamed cult overlapped with her time on the CW drama and involved “spiritual abuse.”

“Recovery looks different for everyone, depending on your experience of trauma,” Bethany explained, adding that part of her decade-long recovery process has included therapy. “I had to start from a baseline of my personal understanding of God and the experiences I had had. And then there was a lot of going back to who I was before and remembering that, and then acknowledging that there was so much I just didn’t know.”

But when it came to putting pen to paper, the 42-year-old said it wasn’t the writing that was the hard part. 

“I’m a writer at heart, so turning a phrase is easy for me,” she explained. “Exploring the memories, and really facing them, can be challenging, but I’m doing it.”