Sophia Bush 'was pitted against other women'
Sophia Bush has recalled being "pitted against" other women during her younger years.
Sophia Bush feels she was "pitted against" other women early in her career.
The 44-year-old actress has revealed that she reached out to her former One Tree Hill co-stars individually before releasing her memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, because she didn't want to create any friction with them.
She told Bustle: "We’ve got an incredible group chat, but I chose to have individual conversations with every single person and individual dissemination of pages and things because I didn’t want anybody to feel swayed by the group."
Sophia was determined to protect the relationships she'd built with her former co-stars.
The actress feared that her memoir might create divisions, so she decided to approach each of her colleagues individually.
She said: "When I started working on TV in the early aughts, the machinery loved to input women and chew them up and spit them out.
"The benefit to the machine itself is to cast you, the woman, in a role that they can then clickbait to death, but that’s not who you are.
"The hours are crazy. If you have a not particularly great boss, like we all didn’t, you’ll be taught to compete instead of collaborate. You’ll be pitted against each other and then won’t understand why suddenly everything feels weird. And you can’t talk about it because you can’t have a fight with your friends at work. So then it buries and it festers and it just cements."
Last year, Sophia recalled suffering "every kind" of abuse on the set of a TV show.
The actress joined the cast of a TV series after leaving One Tree Hill, the hit drama show, back in 2012, but Sophia encountered a toxic working environment and claims to have suffered abuse from "someone old enough to be [her] father".
During an appearance on the Reclaiming With Monica Lewinsky podcast, Sophia shared: "I had a workplace ongoing trauma revolving around an unending situation with someone old enough to be my father. I was like, ‘What is happening?’"
Sophia actually had the opportunity to leave the show after two years, but she was determined to continue.
The actress - who refused to name the TV show - explained: "I had the opportunity after two years to go.
"I did the thing I learned to do and said, ‘I will not have my integrity diminished by someone else’s behaviour. I will be unflappable. I will come to work and do my job.’ And I couldn’t."
