You're listening to a Mama Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast is recorded on from Mamma may I'm Maya Friedman. You're listening to No Filter and this is an episode about cults and Bethany Joy Lentz, who has been in two different kinds of cults, a good cult and a really really bad one. The good kind is the television show One Tree Hill, where she played the iconic character Hayley for nearly a decade.
We made our decision, we got married and were happy, and if you're not here to celebrate with us, then.
You should just go home, because I don't want you here.
And which even today has what we would colloquially call a cult following, because when we use that word to talk about a TV show or a band, what we're so is that it's captivated a particular type of very committed audience, and that it has a devoted following, and that it's something that's become almost a part of the fabric of who those people are. And those are the features of the more sinister and truer meaning of the
word cult as well. And Bethany Joy Lentz, who prefers to go by the name Joy, was in that kind of cult. At the same time, she was in a bad, toxic, abusive kind of cult. The kind of cult that isolates you from your friends and family, that controls every facet of your life, that demands your utter loyalty and Enjoy's case, your hard earned money millions of dollars. The kind of cult that puts you in emotional and physical danger and makes you too scared to ask for help, let alone
get away. But eventually, when something unthinkable and intolerable began to happen, Joy did ask for help, and eventually she did get out. She's written a memoir about her experience called Dinner for Vampires. She spent a really long time coming to terms with what happened to her, and she's finally ready to talk about it, especially how she escaped
and recovered. It's an incredible story that was even more incredible because it was happening under the noses of everybody who watched and loved One Tree Hill for all those years. Because the years that Joy was in that cult are the same years that she was incredibly famous on one of the most successful TV shows in the world. Here's Joy with her story. The title of the book Dinner for Vampires. Where did that come from?
You know, that is as much my guess as it is yours. It flew out of my pen. I was, well, you know, my metaphor pen meaning my keyboard. I was typing this paragraph that was just something about how I never could have known in that moment that I would eventually end up becoming dinner for these vampires. And as it came out, I went, oh, yeah, that's actually exactly
what it was. That really encompasses the book. And I like the tone of it being a little, a little tongue in cheek because I wanted that tone for the book overall.
Yeah, so you're the dinner and the vampires are essentially the big House family.
Well, yeah, it's it's a term that's I think commonly used for a narcissists.
That's that's what they are.
They you know, they can't they don't have an identity of their own, so they have to suck yours out.
They have to suck the life out of you.
You quote something from the series The Vow, and you said, nobody joins a cult, you join a good thing. Nobody walks into a seat and says, sign me up, I want to fuck up the rest of my life.
That's Mark Vincent Davy. Yeah, that's such a great quote.
That's the name I was looking for. Very smart man, And I want to start with a bit about your life before you walked into that situation. Yeah, you grew up in Texas. When did you decide that you wanted to be an actor?
Oh gosh, I mean I didn't. I wasn't aware that that could really be something you do as a career until I was probably ten or eleven. I think I started to become really more aware that, oh, this is something people actually do with their lives. But I did begin doing local theater when I was about seven, and it was probably just a way of my parents being like this, she can't sit still, she's always singing, she's always writing songs and making up stories and just be
you know, she's got this huge imagination. And my father was no stranger to this, having grown up with two parents in musical theater.
I'm sure he was like, I know exactly what this is.
Is that your grandmother Doris, because she was, Yes, my grandma Doush.
I write about in the book and the impact that she had in my artistic life. And his father, George Lenz, who is I mean, playbill dot com. Go check it out, you'll see his resume. So he definitely recognized the signs. And my mom was also really creative, and so I think they both just went, let's just put her in some theater and see if that helps her get her energy out.
And it worked because you started getting jobs as a kid, and you traveled to LA and you built up your resume. You got some pretty big gigs alongside people like Paul Savino and James Franco, and eventually you got a regular role on a really big soap opera, Guiding Light. What was it like being a teenage girl navigating Hollywood and then back home navigating a pretty religious family and community, which is how you grew up?
Great question, You know, I never considered New York to be Hollywood. There was so much more serious in New York than it was whenever I would go to LA and go audition for pilots, you know, with the wide roads and the sun and the palm trees and the very sort of glamorous feeling in the air driving onto these big studios, and so I would go and do
some of those pilots for a few weeks. But I lived in New Jersey, and I was in New York City for you know, three or four days out of the week for my voice lessons and dance lessons and auditions for films and things. So in New York, living in that environment, I didn't feel really like I was a part of that Hollywood experience as much as just the very serious actory artist community in New York.
I was going to ask about how the church reacted because as soap opera, you know, apart from the idea of show business, the content on the soap opera itself, I mean, it's not raunchy, but you know, soaps on are they godly? I don't know how.
Well. The community I was a part of at the time certainly didn't think. So. I was a part of the worship team, which is just the people who sing music on stage when you go to a church where
they have music. Some churches do choirs and some have a band on stage, and ours was kind of the band, and it was called the worship team, and I was on it, and they asked me to step down after I got this job on a soap opera, which was so confusing to me because to your original question, navigating this spiritual life and also navigating being in the entertainment industry was never terribly conflicting for me because to me, like I was raised on the Bible, Like, how do
you get better bigger stories than the Bible? And I'm a storyteller, so it went hand in hand to me. I was just like, yeah, we're just making art, we're telling stories, and I mean, you want to talk about some really racy stuff, Like I could direct you to several books in the Bible and have a lot.
Of really controversial things in them. So it just was not on my radar.
And I was really surprised when I started to get older and realized that a lot of people didn't view art.
In the same way that I did.
They felt like it was a very anti god, anti religious thing, and I'm still baffled by that.
That contradiction must have been sort of hard to navigate. And what's interesting to me is how you describe sort of living at different times. You live alone in New York and then eventually you moved to La. Your faith remains really important to you and you always seek out those subcultures of you know, artists who are also Christian. So it wasn't just you that was feeling that contradiction.
And the thing is it didn't feel like a contradiction to us. It seemed to be that way to so many other people in the religious communities that we were in, which was confusing. But yeah, so we would really seek each other out, like, where are the other storytellers in the world who believe in God, who have a sense
of morality? And that looks a specific way, I guess is what I felt when I was young, and I wanted to be surrounded by like minded people, as anyone with any set of beliefs I think looks for you want to have people around you that support what you believe and who can encourage you when you're feeling down and things like that. So it seemed like a very natural thing to look for.
You talk about floating around a little bit, but finding your community. And then the night everything changed. What happened on that night.
I yeah, so I had found this really lovely group of people through my roommate in LA I was feeling sorry.
If you guys hear my dog's park sometimes I loved them.
I had moved to LA I was feeling really lonely. I missed my New York community, and my roommate invited me to come to a Bible study that she was a part of with other young artists and entertainment industry professionals, and we all just became really good friends and got to know each other very well. It was an easy community to slip into, and there wasn't anything that gave
me red flags. In fact, I didn't write about this in the book, but I remember once when I was probably around the age of twelve, my parents took us that we were visiting churches, and my parents took me to this one church. We started going for like three months, and I just loved it. I was so close, it was artists, it was all this great thing. And then one day my dad said, we're not going there anymore.
After a church service.
He came and picked me up after the Sunday school youth group thing, and I said, why he goes it's a cult. It's like, what are you talking about, Dad, And he was like, no, no, it's a cult.
We got to go.
This is not right, and I was devastated. I missed this group of friends that I had built. So it's funny, how you know, it can take a while to notice things sometimes. And it felt really benign, and I think
it was. But then two of the young men who were running the group, and they had invited a pastor from another state to come down and speak to the group, and he himself had been going through a hard time leaving the church that he had previously been associated with, And we were so young, and we felt really empathetic toward him and his family and wanted to greet him with open arms, and we were happy to have a real, older, actual pastor in our midst and wanted to listen for
his wisdom. I mean, it was just a perfect storm. I think he looked around and saw a bunch of young entertainment professionals and got dollar signs in his eyes and went, oh, I know what I can do here. But we were none the wiser.
Of course, there's a sort of cost of characters who went to your life at this point. Can you set the stage a little bit and explain who Les and Martin and Ed and pam Ah.
Yes, So in the book I start to explain when I meet this pastor whose name is Les and his wife is Martin. He's got three sons, He's got good friends who he's met through these younger gentlemen in the group. Their parents are from the same state where the pastor is from. Less and that's Ed and Pam.
They all have this.
History in Seventh day Adventism, which I really knew nothing about. It was not I was always raised in the non denominational charismatic Christian Church and didn't know anything really about the other denominations, and so it was interesting. I was curious. I wanted to know more about their history and why
they had grown disaffected with their branch of Christianity. You know, I just felt like a nice community to be a part of when I didn't have my parents around or any of my friends from the East coast.
You refer to Less and Pam even though they weren't a couple, that they sort of become your spiritual parents. Is that how you felt being away from your own family.
Yeah.
I think anytime we're longing for pieces of community that are not there's like gaps in our in our heart for different people in community.
We seek that out.
And I grew up as an only child. There was a lot of tempestuousness in the air in my home with my parents and what they were going through among themselves, and I just really wanted to feel like I was a part of a family, like a real family, and so less was this you know, sort of jovial, sweet, funny, irreverend character who was very warm in a way that my father I think is really deep down he's a
big puppy dog, but he's got a harder exterior. And I was craving that open, masculine, warm energy that I didn't receive a lot of as a child. And Pam came in with the same type of motherly, gentle kind, sweet, soft spoken, good listener, really encouraging and all these things that I also believe my mother feels underneath her exterior.
But I you know, as a child, we only see what we see, and so without understanding the complexity of who people are and how we develop and what's really going on behind the surface, it's hard to see those things. And you know, again I was young, so I just was like, oh, warm, open dad figure, gentle kind, encouraging mother figure, this is what I need in my life. And I adopted them as much as they adopted me metaphorically.
I want to understand how you know it seems so inocuous. It's you go to a Bible study group, there's this guest speaker. One night, you're auditioning, you're getting roles, You're twenty two years old, living in la How does it escalate like in the actual the next week? Do you go again? And then how do things get to get to the point, yeah, where you start coming. I imagine it's like frog and boiling water. Right, it doesn't start out boiling.
That's absolutely what it is. It's the frog and boiling water. It happens so slowly and so many of the things are innocuous and look totally fine. And that's how That's how narcissists get you, whether it's in a group dynamic
or whether it's in an individual personal relationship dynamic. There's this love bombing phase where everything seems great and there's only a couple of red flags like here and there, but the good far outweighs the bad, or the things that make sense far outweigh the couple of things that you're like, I don't know about that, but I guess everything else makes sense.
So I'm sure, it's fine. It must be me.
I'm so young, I'm so naive, they're so wise. I really should just like listen and learn and trust, which is a beautiful place to be and for anyone to be curious and to be trusting people around you and to be interested in people who are who have been through different things in life, Like I think that's an admirable quality. But of course when you're so young, it's easy to be taking advantage of when you're in that
place as well. So I mean, really, to answer your question, the whole book is that story, and why I wanted to tell it that way was so that people could see how slow and insidious it is a long time. It's a slow burn, and you've got to be able to start to trust your instinct pretty early on if you're not going to get sucked into something. Yeah, you know that's that's got a narcissistic abuse agenda behind it.
More of my conversation with Joy after this short break, you talk about some words that Less said to you that sort of hooked you. He said, Joy, it's time for you to come out of agreement with the idea that you'll runner up and release the spirit of performance for love. Why did those words hit so hard for you?
I was a needy kid, emotionally really needy kid. I just wanted to be I wanted to feel safe and loved, and I think that could That's something so many people can relate to, being a child in a home where there are loving parents who have a lot of their own complications going on. Parents had me when they were twenty two years old. I mean, and they came from
broken homes. They came from homes with addiction and patterns of behavioral abuse and patterns of fear, and I mean there's just so much that they were carrying in and then trying to raise a little girl with no money and you know, bouncing around from job to job and doing their best. I mean, how difficult must that have been for them? And I adopted very early on the I've got me Like you guys clearly have a lot going on. Don't worry about me. I'll stay out of
the way. I don't want to take up space and the one but of course I did want to take up space, because everyone inherently deserves to take up space on the planet. So you know, you're never going to get away from that. And so the way that I found to take up space was on stage, which is, you know, just put me on a stage. I can take up all the space on an entire stage. Just put me there on a spotlight and we'll be golden and.
Yes.
And that's so I felt so free and I felt so like, oh, that's my identity is here. But you have to work hard and you have to prove it. And if you make a joke and the audience doesn't laugh, you're failing at taking.
Up the space properly.
You feel like you don't deserve to take up that space because you're not doing a good enough job. And so that mindset then carried for me into so many realms beyond entertainment, but just in my relationships at school, my friendships, in my relationship at home with my parents, and trying to earn you do things everything the right way, my relationship with God, really trying to get everything right and do the things on the checklist and make sure
that I was earning my way. And it was an absolutely true observation that also in retrospect, is just such a cheap trick, because it's like going to see a psychic on a corner and they're like, oh, I'm feeling like you have a dog, but there's your jackets covered in dog hair, you know what I mean. Yeah, But you know, when you're twenty, you're like, oh my.
God, I feel so sane.
I was thinking so much about I want to ask about where your acting career was at this time, because the vulnerability of actors and creative people who need to audition and be rejected, and audition and be rejected and try and be rejected, and then if you get a gig, you get this massive attention, so that the whiplash of that must leave you kind of emotionally vulnerable to someone who says you're amazing, you're loved, you're the main event.
It does.
It definitely leaves you feeling like it well left me feeling like, see, this is what's to continue answering your question, Like this is what's so insidious about it to take something that is absolutely true. You as a human being have value. You don't have to earn it. You're not second place, you are always the first place. You're never runner up, because this is your life and your story and your relationship with the God of your understanding. All of those things.
But this is what the narcissist will do.
They get you into a position of vulnerability with something that is absolutely true and cracks you open and pours this love and positivity into you so that you feel attached to them and you feel a sense of loyalty to them, and then when they start saying really terrible things about you, you really believe those things as well, because obviously they can see what's really you know, in your mind, they can see what's really going on. I don't know if that exactly ends your question.
No, it does. One of the things that is so endemic in abuse and cults is isolation. And yes, who did the Big Family which is what this group called itself.
Right, the Big House House family?
Who was in the Big House? Well, and wasn't an actual house.
It was an actual house. It was in my story Pam and Ed's house. Ed was a doctor and you know, well respected in the community. So it was their house, and they, out of the goodness of their hearts, offered their home to Les and Martine who were being displaced
from their pastoral home at a previous church. If you're not involved in any kind of religious community, I will give you a basic rundown, which is that when oftentimes pastors are brought in from other states and their family is given a home to live in that the church owns. So it was some sort of a little mental gymnastics because there was no actual church. We didn't have an actual five oh one c three, we didn't have any kind of service times that's a central meeting place, none
of those things that qualified as a church. But because he was a pastor, and because Pam and Ed had this home that their kids had left, and it was this great, big house, and they just said, well, we're going to move into a smaller We'll move into the garage and convert it into an apartment and you can take our home and this will be like your pastoral home as it were. So again, mental gymnastics, but I'm sure he convinced them to do it on some level. I was not a part of that conversation, so I
can't say for sure. But living in the big house was in the garage we had Pam and Ed, and then in the big house itself there was Less and Martine,
their three boys. There were three girls, me Jasmine and Gretchen, and then in the basement there was another family of people who knew Less and Pam, and that was Kurt and his wife Lucy and their son Brandon, And so it was just like a little commune and then neighboring we had several other people who were a part of the group that all lived in homes within you know, to mile radius.
Who did they teach that the enemy were?
The enemy is a very common term in Christian circles to refer to Satan or the devil.
So that was the explicit.
Verbiage used around a dark spiritual enemy, the implicit youth or well, I guess, how do I explain this? The enemy was really anyone who just disagreed with the group any less, anyone who disagreed with Less, anyone who had questions about the group. But that was never flat out said, because that sounds too crazy, Like you would hear that and be like, well, you can't call my mom the enemy, but you could say the enemies attacking her working through her.
You know, pray for your mom because she doesn't know that, you know, the enemy's really attacking her right now.
So in scientology they call them suppressive persons.
Uh huh, exactly.
It's kind of anyone who threatens or challenges the ideology. And your parents, who were divorced by this point and are very religious themselves. I was suspicious of this whole situation. What were the early red flags for them?
Well, as I said, my dad was onto it. He was onto it pretty early. I think my mom was too. I think she was more concerned just that I wasn't visiting her as much. I had moved to California and we were on the same coast again, and I wasn't visiting as much. And I really thought of that more as just natural independence from a parent at a young age.
But I think my dad just saw the signs.
He was hearing me talk about things like I write about in the book. This conversation my dad and I had where I was trying to explain to him how I was asking God, like what should I wear today, you know, just any little thing.
I thought.
I was being really humble and open and just like I just want God, I just want you to tell me what to do in every area of my life. Ever, and my Dad's like, God gave you a brain, like you're supposed to be using your brain.
This is not just you just wait and see.
And so and then how can you tell that God is speaking to you? I mean, that's quite a thing to clean. Yeah, God's speaking to you, like, that's a very serious thing to clean, I think, and my dad thought so too, But at the time I didn't. I just thought it was very sort of whimsical and fun. But yeah, they caught on.
In this exchange that Joy tells from the audiobook version of her memoir, she illustrates the dangerous gender ideology that the cult promoted and some of the ways that it had gotten right under her skin.
Lucy interjected, Now, you're not married, but if you were, your husband would be your spiritual authority.
She rubbed Kurt's leg. My chest tightened instantly. In spite of hearing this statement. My whole life in church, gender roles in American Christianity never sat right with me, or my mother, or either of my grandmother's. But in the context of this Jezebel conversation, it occurred to me that perhaps that was exactly the point. I came from a long line of independent, dominant women, and just maybe the
Jezebel's spirit had already infiltrated my family my mind. Maybe that was why I could never get on board with the whole submissive wife idea. Was I being attacked by an ancient spirit of control? Was being a woman in submission the key I had been missing all along.
So as you're drawing closer to the Big House family, what was going on in your career around this time?
I was continuing to work as an actress in LA I was getting great jobs. I got a job on Felicity Charmed and I did a to bring it On called Bring It On Again, which my daughter.
Still has yet to see.
She's going to see that sometimes. Soon.
I was doing theater.
I got cast in Gary Marshall and Carol King's production of Happy Days the Musical. I did The Outsiders of Musical with Adam Lambert and Alison Munn who ended up being on Onntree Hill later. That was by Arthur Allen Seelman. I mean, I was really things were working. It was going really well.
Tell me about One Tree Hill? How did that come about?
This is one of the fun things that I wrote about in the book, is how I it originally came around and I said no, and then it came back around again, and I'd get really into detail about why I said no and what that time in my life looked like in the book. But for now, I'll just
tell you that it came around. I said, no, it came back around about two weeks before they started filming the first episode, and they were going to reshoot a couple scenes from the pilot that I would be in, and I said yes, I said, okay, let's give it a try. Why not, I'll just leave it up to God and see if you want me to move to North Carolina. And when I got the job, it was within days of auditioning, probably four days. I mean, it all happened very quickly.
It's funny. The tagline of your book is so brilliant life on a cult TV show while also in an actual cult. If I met you during that time when you were on One Tree Hill, if I was among the cast or crew, what would I have noticed about you that would have made me go, oh, that's a bit weird.
I think it really was mostly that I talked about my family, and then the more people would ask me questions about it, they would realize, oh, this isn't your actual family. And I detail this in the book. There's you know, there would be a moment where somebody might say, so your mom's in California and your dad's in New Jersey, but you spend all your time in Idaho with your family who's not are you related to them? And the more that I would explain, well, no, it's like a
spiritual family. It's like my chosen family, you know. And then I think those were kind of key moments where people were like, yeah, they do exactly what you just did, Like.
Okay, like backing slowly away.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's interesting.
And what do you guys do together? Yeah?
Yeah, was part of the Big House family and that family. Cults are about recruiting new people usually, So did you like proselytize and sort of we were evangelical and try to get people to join this family or was it very much a closed gait?
I think because we had well, I think because it became the Bank of Joy, like I just funded everything. So I don't think that there was a need for recruiting in Less's mind because he was able to. It's funny, he's kind of the worst cult leader ever because he just like I don't know if he was just lazy, like he definitely was lazy. I don't know if he just didn't want to work that hard, like it's just so much work to go out and recruit people, and he was already managing the twenty four of us that
were in the group. I also heard many years later, when I was speaking to the DA's office and presenting them with my financial case and everything that had gone down and money that had crossed state lines, and we were like, is the FBI need to get involved? The DA said, yeah, I don't think we can really prosecute this because it's less than seventy people, and anything less than that isn't really considered a danger to society.
It's just like a little club that's gone back like that.
Yeah, yeah, And maybe he knew that. I don't know if he knew that and tried to keep it small on purpose, or if it was just too much work and he just was happy to rest on his laurels and whatever he had around, which was us.
When did he start taking money from you?
Well, the first pitch was it was a low ball, ten thousand dollars. You're on a TV series, that's nothing for you. We want to open up a hotel. It's going to be a ministry. We're going to bring people in and help them fall in love with God and let them know how loved they are. And we're just going to be hospitable and it'll be a place where we can have meetings and conferences and just really bless the community. And I'm thinking I would love to be
a part of something that encourages the community. That sounds great. A motel isn't really my idea of that dream, but it's yours, and I care about you and I want to support you. Yes, Sure, here's the check. And I think that was the first like doorcrack open, Like how much is she willing? What is she willing to do? Oh, she'll give us money too. Oh, you know, we also really need a new we need a swamp cooler, we need to you know what else we need you know.
And it's just like all the little things started to in the same way that they sort of latched on and were sucking out my life emotionally. Then they started siphoning off financially as well, once the testing proved to be fruitful.
The rest of my conversation with Joy after this, did you still have friends? What about dating? Like friends? Relationships? You were engaged at one point to someone who wasn't part of the group.
Yeah I was. I was definitely still wanted to date, still wanted to get I was obsessed with getting married. I just really wanted to have a partner. And I was engaged to someone after probably three months of dating and knowing each other. It was so fast, and it was a very I do write about this in the book sweet Man, But we both just really wanted to
get married, really wanted to have a companion. And it didn't matter that we weren't combatible, and it didn't matter that we had only known each other for a little while, or that there were red flags from other friends of ours.
We just were like, let's do it. But I had this sort.
Of contingency in my mind of my family up here that I've become so tight with. These are my people, this is my tribe, This is who I want to do life with. If they disapprove of you as a spouse for me, then I probably am not going to marry you because I want them more than I want you, which in and up itself should have been a huge clue as to why not to get married to somebody? Right, Yeah, but you know again, you're so young, So yeah, I did.
I did really want a date, but because I felt like I had these confines of the family and location, because the man that I had been engaged to was a local in North Carolina.
How was that going to work?
How was I going to build a life there when I had this family back?
Idahow you did end up.
Marrying Les's son, one of his sons. Was that like an arranged situation or with a spots and the developing of feelings.
Natural, there were absolutely the beginning sparks of something that felt fun and playful and a friendship. I did explain to Less privately that I felt like I was having these feelings mostly just because I wanted to have them, because they were there for me to have with. I mean, I had them for like any boy that I was
interacting with that was single. I was hoping that I might be able to let this part of myself out, and as a concern that I was just doing that because I felt like I was stuck with having to marry somebody within the group. And as sweet as he was and as much as I enjoyed his friendship, I wasn't sure if it was really authentically Roman. Yeah, you know, so I was really confused about my own emotions, of course, and then it was certainly manipulated from there, and he
manipulated several relationships within the group. So I don't know what the specific definition of arranged marriage is, but in many ways I think that categorized.
And also, you were you know, you committed to save your virginity for marriage, So you're a young woman, and I imagine that played a part too in terms of you wanted to have a full life experience and the marriage was the gatekeeping for that.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, well, you know when you're a young woman and you're prime and thriving, well, I would say in my prime, but you know then I felt so alive and vibranton. I really absolutely just wanted to experience the fullness of my femininity and my womanhood. And yeah, that's just that's that's it. In so many religious circles, that is the gait that you just I know so many people that compromised on a partner because they just wanted to because they were a r that's it.
I know, you're right, it's biology.
What was your honey movie life?
Well, I do talk about this a lot in the book, and so I want to save a lot of that for people just to be able to experience on their own. But it did become clear that we were really not well suited for each other, and it was difficult. There was a lot of depression that set in for me upon realizing that I had made a choice that was going to take my life in a completely different direction
than I wanted or planned. And of course so hard to regret any of that though, because I have my amazing, beautiful daughter who is just like the light of my life. I'd go through all of it again and again if I had to, just for her, because she's the best.
As your fame started to climb around this time, you're on this cultiv show. You had a record dale because you're also an incredible singer. Were rumors starting to spread that perhaps you were in a cult and did that affect the opportunities that you were given and was it starting to impact on your career?
That was the impression I was given.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not in anybody else's office or head or conversations, but what I was hearing from managers, agents, from conversations with producers and things, it was like this subtle unfurling of information that she's involved in some kind of religious something. I don't know, maybe it's a cult, I don't know, but it was enough to be off putting for people. You know, if you're casting a project, you don't want to have any extra random stuff to deal with, Like I just want you to show up
to work and do your job. And as a director or producer, you think, I don't want to have to deal with somebody that's got this bizarre personal life that's a liability, Like what if they start losing their mind, what if they start doing something crazy. I don't know how to anticipate or what to expect. And I think it absolutely locked down my career into One Tree Hill as the only thing that was stable and everything else kind of went away.
Were there things that like career opportunities and jobs that you were turning down? Like was the cult impacting on your choices? Like how was it showing up at work?
Oh? Absolutely, Yeah. There were so many auditions that I got that I was really primed for. I was in such a good position because I was a singer, My character was singing on the show. The show was really it was like right in that sweet spot for the show when it had broken past the Middle America a secret like, oh are you watching this show? And it was really now it was trl and we're everywhere and everybody was talking about us, and I that was that's
the moment. You know, you've got to capitalize career wise, when when the momentum is happening. And I just every audition I would take to the group to take a look at and let's read the script together and let's talk about if this is a story that I should be participating in, if God really wants me to, you know, tell this story, or if it's going to do damage
in the world or something, you know. I mean, I remember getting the script from Mama Mia and having a phone call with the Mina character who said, oh, this is got to be a huge no, you.
Can't do this.
There's a dance of a pearl necklace and well, you know, because I mean, obviously you know the sexual connotation of a pearl necklace. And then there's that's the name of one of the songs that was in the show, was like the dance of the necklace, and it's just like it was just about this woman who was fornicating with all these men, and you know, you can't be a
part of telling a story like that. And I mean, I watched that movie with my daughter now, it's like one of our favorites, and I just such a great I just kick myself all the time because there were so many opportunities like that that I just said no to because I didn't have the.
Your poor agent and manager like, oh yeah.
I'm sure they were just exhausted beside themselves. Yeah that was It's really rough. It's so sad, but I just didn't have the maturity to know how to. I was getting bad advice, you know, I was just getting.
Bout and it was mind control, mind control.
Yeah.
Joy story is a complicated one, and it's one that she's taken a long time to untangle and make sense of.
And there is.
Still so much of it to hear because in part two of this conversation, we find out why and how Joy finally decided to leave the Big House Family cult, how she picked up the pieces of her life when she walked away, and how she's going now when it comes to trust, faith, and relationships. Here's a bit of our chat.
I remember her saying, are we ready to call it a cult? And I just was shocked, and I was angry because how humiliating, how embarrassing. I'm that stupid, I'm that weak. I got into a cult.
Meet me in Part two. For the rest of Joy's story, there's a link in the show notes.