Bethany Joy Lenz is making some startling, behind-the-scenes revelations about One Tree Hill, the beloved teen series that gave her a breakout role.
In her new memoir, Dinner for Vampires, Lenz credited One Tree Hill with having “saved my life” during her years as a member of an insular Christian group called the Big House Family. However, the actor also accused the show’s creator of deliberately writing storylines for her character, Haley James Scott, that made her personally uncomfortable.
“The more my personal beliefs and preferences interfered with the creator’s demands, the more he started writing things into the storylines that I assume were an attempt to humiliate or antagonise me,” she wrote, according to excerpts from the book shared by Entertainment Weekly. “Like making other characters call Haley ‘fat.’ Or having Haley ‘overreact’ to her high school boyfriend watching porn.”
Lenz took specific issue with the porn storyline, which appeared in a 2004 episode titled The Leaving Song”that aired during the show’s first season. The dialogue written for Haley, the actor recalled, was “degrading and doing a disservice to the young women who looked up to me.”
After a “big battle” on the show’s set, Lenz said she decided to rewrite some of Haley’s lines herself.
“It caused confusion and aggravation for the director, the other actors, the script supervisor, and the producers,” she wrote. “I felt awful. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
As Entertainment Weekly noted, Lenz does not identify the creator of One Tree Hill by name. The series was created by Mark Schwahn, whose credits also include Nashville and The Royals.
Representatives for The CW, which broadcasted One Tree Hill, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Lenz’s claims.
One Tree Hill aired on The CW from 2003 to 2012. Five years later, Lenz and co-stars Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton were among 18 women who supported former One Tree Hill writer Audrey Wauchope after she accused Schwahn of emotional manipulation and sexual harassment in 2017.
“One of the 1st things we were told was that the showrunner hired female writers on the basis of their looks. That’s why you’re here ― he wants to fuck you,” Wauchope wrote at the time in a lengthy thread on X, formerly called Twitter.
Later in the thread, she added, “He’s a man in a position of power who was allowed to run a television show for years where this behavior continuously went on.” In the thread, she did not identify Schwahn by name.
In 2022, Burton and Bush recalled how One Tree Hill producers were so “fixated” with “male numbers in viewership” that they allegedly forced the female actors to pose for a men’s magazine.
“They saw that a lot of young men were drawn to a violent assault of women and they went, ‘We should do more of it,’” Bush shared on an episode of her and Burton’s “Drama Queens” podcast.
Lenz is currently in the midst of a publicity tour to promote “Dinner for Vampires,” which hit retailers this week. Appearing on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast last week, she spoke at length about her decade-long involvement with the Big House Family, which she readily described as a cult.