Sophia Bush Details Mark Schwahn Sexual Harassment On ‘One Tree Hill’
Sophia Bush says the first time One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn inappropriately touched her “I hit him in front of six other producers and I hit him f*cking hard.”
Bush, speaking on Sirius XM’s Andy Cohen Live, went into detail about the harassment by Schwahn that she says One Tree Hill actresses endured. (Bush’s co-stars Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz have also gone public with similar claims; Schwahn later was fired from E!’s The Royals).
Listen to the interview above.
“Yeah, look, my mom is a crazy Italian lady from New Jersey,” Bush told Cohen. “The first time Mark Schwahn grabbed my ass I hit him in front of six other producers and I hit him f*cking hard.”
Bush also says Schwahn was “super-obsessed” with another One Tree Hill actress.
“We knew about things he’d say to people, we knew about the late-night texts, we knew when he was super-obsessed with one girl on our show that he started trying to bang down her hotel room door in the middle of the night,” Bush says. “She had to be moved, her rooms were moved. And then her boyfriend came and stayed with her the next month. It almost came to fisticuffs between the two of them.”
Bush says, “The whole time you’re a kid who is going, I gotta figure out how to protect my friends, and I don’t want to lose my job and I don’t want every person on our crew to lose their jobs.”
“This is what people don’t understand they go through,” she says about people who ask “why don’t you just leave?”
“First of all, why am I supposed to suffer and kill my own career because somebody else can’t keep their dick in their pants,” she tells Cohen. “Second of all, there is a whole crew that people don’t know about.
“It’s the reason I am angry about Roseanne being hired back to TV at all. Two hundred people lost their jobs because she is a psychotic racist. There are people who have families, there are cameramen who are wondering how they’re going to pay their kids’ school tuition now.”
In December, after Schwahn was fired from The Royals, both Bush and Burton tweeted their support for the women who came forward with allegations.
“43 women came forward,” Bush tweeted. “To the ones who did and to the ones who didn’t or couldn’t, I hope this news is a salve to your souls. To the other predators out there? I hope this is a lesson that sometimes, even if it takes time, justice is served. You’re next.”
Bush currently voices the character Voyd in Disney Pixar’s Incredibles 2. She recently exited her role on Chicago P.D.
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