Hilarie Burton Details Sexual Assault Allegations Against ‘One Tree Hill’ Creator Mark Schwahn
“I didn’t know how to process it anymore...You can see that I’m not there,” the actor said on the latest episode of her Drama Queens podcast.
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If you’re a woman in Hollywood, a walk down memory lane isn’t always a pleasant one—in fact, it’s often traumatizing. In the latest episode of Drama Queens, a podcast hosted by One Tree Hill stars Hilarie Burton, Sophia Bush, and Bethany Joy Lenz, the three recap the OTH episode “It Gets Worse at Night,” which they filmed in Honey Grove, Texas. And while the episode itself is heartwarming (their friend group bails Mouth out of jail), things were much darker—and much worse—on the set. Burton said that show creator Mark Schwahn assaulted her multiple times over the course of filming the episode, which aired in 2007.
Burton told her former co-stars that she and Schwahn—whom she only refers to as the “boss” on the podcast—traveled to Honey Grove prior to filming to surprise a local high school that had won a contest with the CW, the channel OTH aired on. “The flight back from that is when he assaulted me. He assaulted me again in the car on the drive from Raleigh to Wilmington,” she said. (OTH filmed in Wilmington.) As if this wasn’t already traumatizing enough, Schwahn immediately started spreading rumors on set about the encounters: “He went straight to set and he told Danneel [Ackles] that he and I made out the whole time, and it was fun, and he was trying to make her jealous,” Burton recalled. “So, she confronted me about it and was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’”