Sat, June 20, 2026 at 2:31 PM UTC
Content warning: this post mentions sexual abuse.
People from all walks of life can get caught up in cults – even when they’re mega-famous. Here are some celebs who have been associated with cults, and what they had to say about them…1. Hannah Murray was starring in Skins at age 17, was in Game of Thrones in her 20s, and by 27 was in a wellness cult. Now 36, Hannah has released a memoir called The Make-Believe about her experiences and the gateway “drug” that is wellness culture. Hannah said she was drawn into “the organization” through an “energy healer” her personal trainer recommended to her.
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“It’s easy to go, ‘Well, that would never happen to me’, but we do ourselves a disservice when we start saying that, because you don’t know,” Hannah said. “I thought, ‘I’m smart. I make good choices.’ Well, I made terrible choices.”
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2. Another Game of Thrones star, Maisie Williams, said that when she was a child, her father “indoctrinated” her into an abusive cult. While she hasn’t shared much about the specifics of the situation in order to protect other members of her family, she has opened up about its effect on her, saying a lot of “traumatic things” happened.
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“I was in a child cult against my mother. So I was really fighting it at the beginning, but basically my whole world flipped on its head,” Maisie said of being removed from her father. “And even though all these things I was feeling — ‘Oh, my God, I’m so glad I don’t have to see my dad anymore’ — it still was against everything I knew to be true.”
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3. One Tree Hill star Bethany Joy Lenz has been open about her years spent in a Christian cult, primarily in her memoir Dinner for Vampires. It was during the time she was working on One Tree Hill, and she said the cult took control of her career and her money – she even married a fellow member and had a baby with him.
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“For a while, they were all trying to save me and rescue me,” she said of her OTH costars. “But I was very stubborn. I was really committed to what I believed were the best choices I could make.”
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4. Michelle Pfeiffer said that after moving to LA when she was 20 years old, she fell in with a couple who were supposedly personal trainers but believed in “breatharianism” — the (impossible) idea that humans can live without food or water. Michelle said it was being with her first husband, Peter Horton, that “saved” her after he was cast in a movie about the Unification Church. While helping him research the role, it clicked to Michelle that she could relate to the psychological manipulation a cult victim described.
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“They were very controlling,” Michelle said of the cult-like couple she was involved with. “I wasn’t living with them, but I was there a lot, and they were always telling me I needed to come more. I had to pay for all the time I was there, so it was financially very draining.”
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5. When Glenn Close was a child, her father joined the group Moral Re-Armament and moved his family to Switzerland to be closer to it. Glenn didn’t officially leave the group until she was 22 and studying acting in college. She described being furious with her father afterward, and frustrated with her mother for enabling him, and having to work towards forgiveness.
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“I’ve learned more and more about [my parents] and more about what their situation was and how vulnerable they were at certain times,” Glenn said. “I think I really understand why they were so vulnerable to a group like that. Not knowing the devastation that it would cause their children.”
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6. Joaquin Phoenix’s parents were in a cult, the Children of God, when he was born, and he grew up in it for the first three years of his life. He said his parents’ interest in the organization was “really innocent,” and that they believed they had found a strong religious community of like-minded people, adding that they left and got their children out when they realized it was sinister.
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“Cults rarely advertise themselves as such,” he told Playboy. “It’s usually someone saying, ‘We’re like-minded people. This is a community,’ but I think the moment my parents realized there was something more to it, they got out.”
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7. Scream and Charmed star Rose McGowan also spent her formative years in Children of God until she was 9 years old, when she said her father removed her and her siblings because he began to fear they would be sexually abused.
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“I remember watching how the men were with the women, and at a very early age I decided I did not want to be like those women,” she told People. “They were basically there to serve the men sexually; [men] were allowed to have more than one wife.”
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8. Musician Christopher Owens, former frontman of the band Girls, also grew up in Children of God. He’s spoken about how, before he was born, he had a brother who apparently died due to the cult’s refusal to allow conventional medical treatment. Later, he was cut off from his sister and father for a number of years when they left the cult, but his sister then helped him escape, leaving their mother behind.
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“I kind of grew up being very indoctrinated by these beliefs that were very important to the people in my mother’s generation that joined this group, and it wasn’t necessarily the case for the second generation,” Christopher told NPR. “We kids kind of had a hard time just accepting blindly that we were supposed to live in the same way they had [chosen] to live in.”
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9. Christa B. Allen, best known for her roles in13 Going on 30 and Revenge, has said she’s “rebuilding” her life “after being in love with a charismatic wealthy cult leader who burned it to the ground.” In since-deleted TikToks, she shared that she had moved in with this man three days after meeting him and took “responsibility” for her actions while acknowledging his extensive “lying, cheating, and manipulating.”
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“I’ve sat with the hardest questions: why did I trust him? Why did I hand over my power? Why did I silence my own inner knowing? The truth is, he was selling fairytales and from luxurious penthouses and private jets, I foolishly bought in,” Christa wrote on TikTok.
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10. Smallville and Beauty and the Beast star Kristin Kreuk was a member of NXIVM for several years, although she maintains she only knew it as a self-help organization and left in 2013 without any knowledge of “illegal or nefarious activity.”
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In 2018, after accusations surfaced that NXIVM was a cult and its leadership forced women into sexual slavery, Kristin released a statement saying, “I am deeply disturbed and embarrassed to have been associated with NXIVM.”
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11. Kristin’s Smallville costar Allison Mack joined NXIVM after she did, but remained a member when Kristin left and rose in the ranks of the organization to become a senior member. This meant, among other things, that she recruited other members and subjected them to abuse. In 2021, she was sentenced to three years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking offenses, ultimately serving 21 months of that sentence before being released in 2023.
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In a 2025 podcast called Allison after NXIVM, Allison said, “I don’t see myself as innocent,” while describing her years of wilful ignorance in the cult: “If I recognized that Keith [Raniere, the leader] was manipulating all of us, and that this was a strategy for his own perversion, I had to acknowledge what I had chosen and that I had hurt people.”
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12. Slaughterhouse-Five star Sharon Gans, who died in 2021, was accused of being a cult leader. In the ’70s, together with her late husband Alex Horn, she founded a spiritual “school” and ran a theater company that was allegedly a center for cult-like behaviors and abuses.
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A former member of Sharon’s group wrote in 2019, “It has taken me many years to recover from this 23-year trauma and attack on my very dignity. I didn’t just drink the Kool-Aid, I mainlined it.”What are your thoughts on this? Have you have your own experiences with cults? Tell us in the comments or anonymous form below.
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