Sophia Bush on Picking Between Talking About ‘One Tree Hill’ & ‘Chicago P.D.’ Allegations

On their Drama Queens podcast, former One Tree Hill costars Sophia Bush, Hilarie Burton Morgan, and Bethany Joy Lenz have not only discussed the episodes of the drama themselves but also opened up about their time on the show, including what led to the letter with allegations of sexual harassment against creator and executive producer Mark Schwahn.

Bush has also claimed that she dealt with abuse on the set of Chicago P.D., which she left in Season 4 in 2017. And now, in the latest episode of the Drama Queens podcast, she shared that her rep told her she couldn’t talk about both experiences when #MeToo first broke and one of the stories was about her “coworker in Chicago.”

“My rep said to me, ‘You’re going to have to pick. You can either tell the story about your first boss, or you can tell the story about your coworker, but you can’t tell both because then it looks like it’s your fault.’ That was professional advice,” Bush revealed. (She picked One Tree Hill, which she said she “would forever.”)

“When people on that other job say, ‘Why won’t you stop talking about it?’ or ‘Why did you need to bring it up?’ I’m like, ‘You have no idea what I’ve withheld that’s benefitted you,'” Bush continued. “In the same way we all feel about our boss on this show, the way I feel about the predator on my other show is I’m not going to be able to take this chip off my shoulder until you face some f**king accountability. Because you got to do this thing. You got to scar all these women. You got to hurt all these people. You’ve left a body count in your wake of people who have to go to therapy and do all of this gnarly work, and we didn’t ask for that.”

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What Bush wants, she said, is more accountability. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do that our boss was allowed to never make a comment. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do that my next employers rebranded sexual assault with witnesses as ‘anger management issues’ in the press,” she shared.

But she also made sure to note that she’s had great experiences on sets as well. “Every other environment has actually been amazing,” she said. “It just sucks that the ones we’ve been in the longest have been the worst.”