NEW YORK – Sophia Bush is unwrapping her newly cleaned wedding ring at USA TODAY headquarters, giddy to finally wear it after hiding her marriage to Ashlyn Harris for over a year.
She puts one of the matching hers-and-hers bands on to discuss her memoir “And I Will Tell You Mine” (out now from Flatiron Books), and the chapter that revealed she married Harris, a former professional soccer player, in a spontaneous, quiet ceremony last summer. But unlike the general public, Bush doesn’t see anything “secret” about the wedding. She’s just reluctant to do anything that “borders on performance,” she says.
“I had something that was mine for the first time since I was 21 years old,” Bush says. “For all the wonderful things that come with an artistic career
and a life getting to pursue your passion and make films and make television shows and whatnot, you completely lose a private life and it felt really important to me over the years to figure out ways in which I can reclaim that.”
Bush, 44, has been in the public eye since she played Brooke Davis on “One Tree Hill.” In her memoir, she chronicles where that fame journey has led her, including a high-profile, short-lived marriage to costar Chad Michael Murray, her wide-ranging activism and exposing sexual harassment on the set of her cult-favorite TV show. But she's not calling it a tell-all.
“This book was never meant to be a ledger of everything that happened,” she writes. “It was an attempt to understand what happened to me.” She says she wrote hundreds of pages that didn’t make it into the book. While writing was a “forensic analysis” on her life, she’s learning to save some stories for herself.
“They might have been interesting, they might have been titillating, they might have been great for clickbait and in some circumstances, rage bait, I'm sure, but they didn’t feel necessary,” Bush says. “They were very important for me to honor and say, I’ll put this away.”
Sophia Bush opens up about marriage to Ashlyn Harris, becoming a stepmom
There are few photos of Bush and Harris on their wedding day in Vogue's announcement, a backyard affair with vows tucked into a book of Mary Oliver poems. Even her memoir is more feelings than details. She describes her wife as “whole” and “tender beyond measure.” She dedicates an entire chapter to the experience of loving someone with kids and becoming a stepmother to Harris’ young children.
Though she hoards the privacy when she can, the public is still fascinated.
The pair were first linked in October 2023, one month after Harris filed for divorce from former teammate Ali Krieger and two months after Bush and divorced businessman Grant Hughes. Internet sleuthing and Reddit thread timelines ensued. Many were convinced the relationship began as an affair. But Bush is continuing to shut down the rumors in her memoir, writing that she and Harris were instead part of the same support circle of women “pulling their lives apart” amid change and divorce. They first met in 2015, she writes.
“The story that I lived was much more heart-wrenching and complex. You know, the tabloids love a rumor that feels sexy or salacious,” Bush says. “I had this incredible group of people to lean on. It certainly wasn't the room, the metaphorical room, I walked into going, ‘I'm going to figure out my next love here.’ I was like, ‘Are we going to survive?’”
'I would so much rather risk looking like a fool'
If you were around to watch her first engagement, the discretion might make sense. Bush was 22 when Murray got down on one knee on a balcony in Australia. MTV aired the proposal. In her memoir, Bush says she viewed the proposal as a “grand gesture” after a hard summer of time apart and infidelity rumors. “Well, this has to mean something,” she writes.
The pair were married for only five months. A turning point was after Bush called a groomsman who dropped out of the wedding the night before. She had a gut feeling there was more to the story. The groomsman told her about a “shocking” and “unimaginable” number of women Murray allegedly cheated on her with. She eventually befriended some of them.
Bush is uncomfortable talking about Murray, calling their relationship her “don’t ask, red-line item for decades.” But she realized it was one of her experiences that had to go in the memoir.
“It's the least interesting part of my life,” she says. “Unfortunately, the news loves it and people want to talk about it. I know for myself and certainly for him, we don't want to talk about it. But when something's a matter of public record, unfortunately, as an individual, you don't have a choice. You're going to get asked whether you want to be or not.”
That’s not to say she regrets that chapter of her life, or her second marriage to Hughes from 2022 to 2023.
“At the end of the day, I would so much rather risk looking like a fool than living the wrong life,” Bush says. “It’s tricky to know you’re going to have to reflect honestly if you want to be a truthful writer and then all of that will be picked apart. But here we are. We do it anyway. We pick up and we live another day.”
Behind closed doors on ‘One Tree Hill’ and ‘Chicago PD’
If Bush is going to “tell all” on anything, it’s the mistreatment female cast members faced on “One Tree Hill.” In 2017, Bush was among the female cast members to sign an open letter accusing “One Tree Hill” creator Mark Schwahn of sexual harassment. Several castmates, including Hilarie Burton, came forward with allegations of sexual assault and manipulation. Schwahn printed out photos of the female cast in underwear fittings and tacked them to his bulletin board, she writes.
“It was a lot of whiplash between your dreams coming true and certain circumstances being very nightmarish. There were great times, and then we’d get the call that the boss was coming into town for the next week or two weeks, and we would brace,” Bush says.
Bush and her peers banded together to warn the younger cast members about Schwahn’s behavior. They’d show up uninvited to meetings so the women wouldn’t be alone. Bush made a group chat of all the female cast – called the “Wilmington Witches” for their love of Halloween parties and in reference to witch trials – and they started gathering their experiences for the open letter. They still keep in touch and cheer each other on, Bush says.
A month after the open letter, Schwahn was fired from his current project, "The Royals." He has since retreated from the entertainment industry and public life.
Workplace sexual harassment is common, but often goes unreported. Thirty-eight percent of women experience it and one in seven women will quit a job or seek a new assignment because of sexual harassment and assault, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. On “Chicago PD,” Bush was one of those women. She was diagnosed with PTSD after the assault, she writes.
Today, in her 40s, Bush’s activism is as central to her career as her acting. But there was a time that she was told that talking about social issues could jeopardize her career. There was a time when she felt more “a body part” than a person. Schwahn once told her she would do “whatever we write,” even if it made her uncomfortable, she writes.
But, crediting Brooke’s confidence, she pushed for more nuance for her character and autonomy for herself anyway. She helped shape the “Clothes Over Bros” businesswoman who stands up “for the little guy.” She hopes that those who read her memoir will feel “permitted to take up more agency.”
“They shouldn't get to tell any of us what to do with our bodies. They're ours. And that was the crux of that fight for me,” Bush says. “I'm proud of where it landed us, Brooke and I.”
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, covering buzzy releases, chatting with authors and diving into the culture of reading. Find heron Instagram, subscribe to our weeklyBooks newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: From ‘One Tree Hill’ to new marriage, Sophia Bush is doing things her way
