One Tree Hill Creator Tried Humiliating Bethany Joy Lenz

“It caused confusion and aggravation for the director, the other actors, the script supervisor, and the producers,” she wrote. “I felt awful. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

As Entertainment Weekly noted, Lenz does not identify the creator of One Tree Hill by name. The series was created by Mark Schwahn, whose credits also include Nashville and The Royals.

Representatives for The CW, which broadcasted One Tree Hill, did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Lenz’s claims. 

One Tree Hill aired on The CW from 2003 to 2012. Five years later, Lenz and co-stars Sophia Bush and Hilarie Burton were among 18 women who supported former One Tree Hill writer Audrey Wauchope after she accused Schwahn of emotional manipulation and sexual harassment in 2017. 

“One of the 1st things we were told was that the showrunner hired female writers on the basis of their looks. That’s why you’re here ― he wants to fuck you,” Wauchope wrote at the time in a lengthy thread on X, formerly called Twitter.

Later in the thread, she added, “He’s a man in a position of power who was allowed to run a television show for years where this behavior continuously went on.” In the thread, she did not identify Schwahn by name.

In 2022, Burton and Bush recalled how One Tree Hill producers were so “fixated” with “male numbers in viewership” that they allegedly forced the female actors to pose for a men’s magazine.

“They saw that a lot of young men were drawn to a violent assault of women and they went, ‘We should do more of it,’” Bush shared on an episode of her and Burton’s Drama Queens podcast. 

Lenz is currently in the midst of a publicity tour to promote Dinner for Vampires, which hit retailers this week. Appearing on the Call Her Daddy podcast last week, she spoke at length about her decade-long involvement with the Big House Family, which she readily described as a cult.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.