Alex Cooper and her Call Your Daddy podcast is a big deal these days, having signed a $125 million contract with Sirius XM to continue hosting conversations about sex and wellness but also provide a place for celebrities and influencers to confess details about their lives so that they don’t have to start their own podcasts. There are enough. If you’re already in line to host one, you can stay in line, but the rest of you: We’re done. We’re full up. Check back in four years.
Meanwhile, when she’s not hosting Presidential candidates like Kamala Harris, Alex Cooper is hosting folks like Bethany Joy Lenz, the former One Tree Hill star who is still actressin’ in what appears to be a steady diet of movies that appear, based on their titles and movie posters, to air on networks like Lifetime or Hallmark. She’s also a co-host of the One Tree Hill podcast, where she admitted that she was in a cult for ten years.
On the Call Her Daddy podcast, Joy Lenz expanded on that ahead of the release of her memoir next week, Dinner for Vampires. Basically, she went to a Saturday night bible study at a friend’s house in Los Angeles, where she encountered a “pastor without a home.” Never trust a man with a religious message and no home! That man’s name was Les, he would become the leader of the cult, and Lenz would end up marrying the son of the cult leader in an arranged marriage type of situation despite the fact that she had little attraction to him.
The lack of attraction would prove challenging because the cult really wanted them to have sex, so much so that sex had to be scheduled, as Lenz told Cooper. “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. 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.”
That sounds less like a cult and more like the Southern Baptist Church (which is like a cult, only much, much larger). In either respect, she’s divorced from the son of the cult leader now (although they do have a kid). However, the situation gave her the kind of PTSD that still makes it difficult to pick boyfriends up from the airport all these years later because it reminds her of picking up her ex and being put back on the sex schedule.
It’s worth noting that Joy Lenz was in a cult while she was starring in One Tree Hill. She said that only one cast member ever asked her if she was in a cult, Tyler Hilton, and she shamed him.
“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?”
I’m glad she’s been deprogrammed.
(via Jezebel)