Bethany Joy Lenz’s Cult Gave Her a ‘Sex Schedule’ With Ex-Husband…Who Was the Cult Leader’s Son
"Because I was so disinterested in sex, I was then asked to go on a schedule, basically, of like...you just have to do it," she said on Call Her Daddy.
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A little over a year ago, Bethany Joy Lenz casually mentioned on her podcast, Drama Queens, that she had been in a cult for 10 years, and said that she started writing about the experience during the pandemic. Fourteen months later and the writing is done; the memoir, Dinner for Vampires, drops October 22; and the One Tree Hill star made her official Call Her Daddy press stop to talk about her decade inside the Big House cult and her marriage to the cult leader’s son. It’s wild! Cults are wild!
“I was in L.A., I went with a girlfriend to her Saturday night Bible study. It was very benign, it was the same kind of Bible study that I had been going to, having been raised in the western evangelical church, super common,” Joy Lenz told Alex Cooper of how she got involved in the first place. “There’s music and food and everybody talks and gets vulnerable and it felt very, very normal to me.” She said that a “pastor without a home,” Les, showed up one day, and they all welcomed him, thinking they were giving him a place to share his thoughts and sermons. Spoiler alert: Les would eventually become the cult leader.
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“I was looking for a place to belong still, I think that was the constant search; where do I fit, where do I belong?” she said of getting roped in. Fair.
And there Bethany stayed for a decade, at one point marrying Les’ son, who she refers to as “QB” in the book. She told Cooper their marriage was “playful and easy,” but that there “wasn’t a lot of intellectual stimulation,” and that she’d really had no other choice. “I mean, I kind of ran out of options, I couldn’t date a non-Christian, I couldn’t really date anyone outside of the group, so it just became this sort of arranged situation.”
But she wasn’t sexually attracted to him, so the cult put them on a sex schedule. “Because I was so disinterested in sex, I was then asked to go on a schedule, basically, of like…you just have to do it,” she told Cooper. “Just do it, this is your duty, this is your job as a wife, your emotions will fall in line…then eventually you will find a way to enjoy it, you will find a way to feel connected.”
Joy Lenz, who shares a daughter with QB, said the situation gave her PTSD and “really affected” her relationships since, specifically when she’s had to pick boyfriends up at the airport—because when she used to have to pick her husband up from the airport, she knew they’d be on the sex schedule for the next two or three weeks.
While this was all happening, Joy Lenz was starring on One Tree Hill. She said no one ever really said anything…except for one castmate. “Tyler [Hilton] once just flat out came out [and said], ‘Uh, are you in a cult?” Joy Lenz said her response at the time was some version of, “No, I hate that people can’t understand the depth of relationship that happens when you find your chosen family and you just commit to them. Why does it have to be a cult? Why does it have to be weird? Like, I feel so bad for you that you don’t understand what it’s like to have this kind of depth of relationship. How sad and shallow must your life be?” Huge yikes.
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