Sophia Bush is speaking out about the alleged physical and emotional trauma she experienced on set filming a past TV series — and when it all began.
“I had a workplace ongoing trauma revolving around an unending situation with someone old enough to be my father,” Bush, 42, claimed during the Tuesday, June 3, episode of the “Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky” podcast, noting that the NBC series was on her “bucket list” before the onset dynamic allegedly became toxic. “I was like, ‘What is happening?’”
While Bush didn’t call out Chicago P.D. by name, she revealed that alleged abuse took place on a series she signed onto after nine years on One Tree Hill.
When host Monica Lewinsky asked if she experienced something “emotionally abusive” during what was supposed to be a professional workplace, Bush replied that it was “every kind of abusive.”
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“When I look back at it, I had the opportunity after two years to go,” Bush explained, noting that the coping mechanisms she picked up during her early acting days caused not to walk away when she felt unsafe.
The actress recalled, “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.”
Bush, who played Erin Lindsay on the NBC police procedural from 2014 to 2017, said that the “next two years were like physical hell” before she finally walked away.
She remembered getting “spontaneous illness” and waking up “covered in hives.” Bush said she experienced “really crazy weight fluctuation” and watched her hair “fall out.”
The TV star also struggled with insomnia and “crippling anxiety” that she said she’d never had beforehand. “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 recounted. “I couldn’t talk to people anymore. I couldn’t talk to strangers anymore. I couldn’t be looked at anymore.”
She compared the trauma to a “physical attack,” noting, “My body was not my own. I couldn’t regulate anymore.” Bush further claimed that her last two years on Chicago P.D. led to her being on the defensive at all times.
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“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 alleged.
Bush claimed that she “finally got to go” in April 2017, just three months before the #MeToo movement took over Hollywood and beyond.
“By October [2017], I got a call from an executive apologizing for what they’d done and not done,” she alleged. “And [they] said, ‘We’re very aware we just made it out of that unscathed.’”
Bush quipped, “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.’” She noted, “It’s a weird thing to deal with.”
Bush exited Chicago P.D. at the end of season 4, initially staying quiet about her reasoning. However, in December 2017, she gave a little insight into the “why,” telling Refinery 29’s “UnStyled” podcast listeners that between seasons 3 and 4 she gave producers the option to change the environment or write her off.
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“It was then that I realized I’d been drowning. It was then that I knew just how miserable I was going to work every day,” Bush recalled during the podcast. “I had to respect myself in a situation where I didn’t feel respected.”
The following year, Bush revealed on the “Armchair Expert” podcast that she felt neglected on set. “Nearing my tenure there, I was probably difficult to be around because I was in so much pain and I felt so ignored,” she said during a December 2018 podcast appearance.
Bush added: “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.”
Us Weekly has reached out to NBC for comment.
