Sophia Bush details harassment allegations against One Tree Hill creator Mark Schwahn

Last November, One Tree Hill creator and showrunner Mark Schwahn was accused of sexual harassment and physical and emotional manipulation by 18 female cast and crew members who worked on the TV drama. Among those women was star Sophia Bush, who recently went on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show, Andy Cohen Live, and spoke in greater detail about what it was like to work on the hit CW show for nine seasons.

“We’re not the only group of girls that’s ever had a boss who was a pig,” Bush said. “That show for us was very interesting because at times it was wonderful and at times it really wasn’t. Our writers’ room was in L.A., so we had plenty of time where [Schwahn] wasn’t on set.… We had great highlight-reel, coming-of-age, rom-com s— together, and then we also had like, batten down the hatches, he’s coming.”

Speaking to her own experiences with Schwahn, 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—ing hard.” From that point on, Bush said, he knew to stay away from her. That being said, “You heard comments,” she continued. “We knew about things he’d say to people, we knew about, like, 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. She had to be moved, her rooms were moved. And then her boyfriend came and stayed with her the next month and literally, like, it almost came to fisticuffs between the two of them.”

As for why Bush didn’t leave the show, she said, “Why am I supposed to suffer and kill my own career because somebody else can’t keep their dick in their pants?” She added that there was an entire crew to think about. If the show had ended, hundreds of people would’ve lost their jobs. “It’s not fair to make everybody suffer because one person can’t rein their entitlement in,” she said.

Bush noted that she has great relationships with many colleagues from One Tree Hill, and she said people finally talking about their experiences with Schwahn opened her eyes to things she never knew, including the time a writer was allegedly fired for marrying a woman whom Schwahn had a crush on.

Listen to Bush’s full interview above.