In a new episode of the Drama Queen podcast, which she hosts alongside Hilarie Burton and Bethany Joy Lenz, Sophia Bush talks about the harassment she suffered on the series “Chicago PD”, which she left with crash at the end of season 4.
The years pass, but the painful memories remain… Last March, actress Sophia Bush, who played Brooke Davis in The Brothers Scott, spoke in the Drama Queen Podcast, alongside her series co-stars Bethany Joy Lenz (Haley) and Hilarie Burton Morgan (Peyton), the behavior of Mark Schwahn, producer of the series.
Between wandering hands and photos of the lingerie of the actresses carefully guarded by the libidinous producer, these new testimonies were added to an already long list of accusations concerning him, since 2017.
The law of silence
In a new podcast from Drama Queen, Sophia Bush this time summons the painful memories on the set of the series Chicago PD, where she played the character of Erin Lindsay until season 4. “No one supported me” she comments, denouncing the deafening silence of her partners. She had thus left the series for questions of harassment, very similar to what Hilarie Burton says she experienced in the face of Mark Schwahn.
“What you went through, the way you got yelled at, that’s exactly the kind of shit I was going through on Chicago PD. And there was also a group of men who always said, ‘I love you so much, you are our best friend”. They never intervened, they never said anything”.
Adding a little further: “I know some of them aren’t happy that I’m pointing that out when we’re talking about this show, but you know what? I don’t care. The fear of me continuing to talk about it should cause you to act better on all the shoots you do. They better be scared.”
“I was really, really unhappy”
Sophia Bush thus recalls that a “story was coming out on one of [ses] Chicago colleagues and executives have managed to nip this info in the bud. My agent then said to me: “You will have to make a choice. Either you say what your first boss [Mark Schwahn] made you live, or you tell this co-worker story, but you can’t say both because we’re going to think it’s your fault”.
In 2018, then in the middle of the #MeToo period, the actress had already confided in her problems in the series Chicago PD, in the podcast by actor Dax Shepard. “I realized that by pretending to be a badass, by doing things right, by going to work, I was preparing myself to tolerate the intolerable. […] I quit because, I realized I was so programmed to be a nice girl, to be a workhorse or to be the tug.”
“I always put the good of the team, the series or the group first, before my own health. The reality is that my body was falling apart, because I was really, really unhappy.” If, at that time, she mentioned “abusive behavior”it had not explicitly indicated its nature.