Sophia Bush allegedly suffered “every kind” of abuse from an older man while working on her dream show.
“I had a workplace ongoing trauma revolving around an unending situation with someone old enough to be my father,” Bush said in Tuesday’s episode of the “Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky” podcast.
The actress said the show was on her “bucket list,” and while she didn’t name the title, Bush confirmed that it was a series she signed onto after starring in “One Tree Hill” from 2003 to 2012.
Bush, 42, notably portrayed Erin Lindsay in “Chicago P.D.” from 2014 to 2017 — leaving after Season 4 due to its alleged toxic work environment.
When Lewinsky asked Bush, who has previously discussed being “miserable” on the set, if she experienced something “emotionally abusive” on set, Bush described it as “every kind of abusive.”
“I did the thing I learned to do and said, ‘I will not have my integrity diminished by someone else’s behavior. I will be unflappable. I will come to work and do my job.’ And I couldn’t,” she said.
Bush described the last two years on the show as a “physical hell” before she ended her run on the police drama.
She allegedly suffered horrific symptoms from the stress of the situation, getting a “spontaneous illness,” waking up “covered in hives,” having “really crazy weight fluctuation” and even losing her hair.
Additionally, Bush couldn’t sleep due to her “crippling anxiety.”
“To be hit with anxiety in such a way that I could barely be out of the house. If people touched me in public, I would jump out of my skin,” Bush recalled. “I couldn’t talk to people anymore. I couldn’t talk to strangers anymore. I couldn’t be looked at anymore.”
Bush, comparing the trauma to a “physical attack,” said she could no longer self-regulate and felt that her body was not her own.
“Because I had to go to work ready for war all the time, I had to learn where to stand to not get elbowed in the ribs or how to block a scene to not be touched. It was just exhausting,” she claimed.
Bush said she was “finally” able to exit the show in April 2017 – just three months before the #MeToo movement rocked Hollywood.
“By October [2017], I got a call from an executive apologizing for what they’d done and not done,” she claimed. “And [they] said, ‘We’re very aware we just made it out of that unscathed.’”
Bush continued, “I was like, ‘Glad you did, I’m in so much therapy. I’ve been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder, but I’m thrilled you guys didn’t get dragged through the press.’”
The “Good Sam” star admitted that it was a “weird thing to deal with.”
While Bush initially left the show without giving a reason, she later admitted to “drowning” on set of the NBC show in a December 2017 interview.
The following year she shared on “The Armchair Expert” podcast that she “felt so ignored” during her stint on the series.
“I feel like I was standing butt naked, bruised and bleeding in the middle of Times Square, screaming at the top of my lungs and not a single person stopped to ask if they could help me,” she said at the time.
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