'One Tree Hill' Star Bethany Joy Lenz Details Being Lured Into a Cult
"It still looked normal," Lenz says of the group she joined. "And then it just morphed. But by the time it started morphing, I was too far into the relationships to notice.”
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00:00I could read it on people's faces, you know, enough times you hear the word cult,
00:04but the justification of it can't possibly be that I'm actually in a cult, it's just that
00:10I've got access to a relationship with God, relationship with people in a way that
00:16everybody else really wants but they don't know how to get and they're too afraid to be that
00:20vulnerable with each other and so we've got it and they just don't understand.
00:24That's how you have to rationalize it, it's the only way that makes it make sense.
00:28I didn't question the group, I questioned my marriage, but
00:34being involved in, for me, being involved in something like that where there's,
00:44I don't know that I like the term brainwashing, I think it's more just such high control that you,
00:53you know, we convince ourselves of things all the time and I think you just
00:57have decided, like I decided what I wanted to believe and rather than being willing to
01:04look at the belief system and measure it, I adjusted everything around me to fit what I
01:12wanted to believe and because the stakes were so high, they were my only friends, I was married
01:18into this group, I had built my entire life around it, I had given up so much of my career because
01:23of it, the stakes were really high. If I admitted that I was wrong, if I admitted like there's holes
01:28in this, something's off, the whole construct of everything else comes crumbling down.
01:33So I was not in a position to be able to question anything.