One Tree Hill Stars Describe The Misogyny Behind Their Maxim Cover Shoot

Good news! Your favorite One Tree Hill girlies are back with more stories of hideous behind-the-scenes misogyny (allegedly) on the part of the show’s creator, Mark Schwahn. Sorry, I lied. It wasn’t good news. On their One Tree Hill recap podcast Drama Queens, Hilarie Burton, Sophia Bush, and Bethany Joy Lenz recapped the season-four episode “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started,” in which Rachel (Danneel Ackles) poses for Maxim magazine, coinciding with the real Maxim cover Burton, Bush, and Ackles posed for at the time. According to Burton and Bush, they were coerced into doing the shoot through threats to their jobs with a side of verbal abuse, while Lenz was specifically told she was not wanted for the cover because she was too fat. I know.

According to Bush, showrunners, seeing that young men were attracted to violence against women, decided to double down on the misogyny with the “Psycho Derek” character and the Maxim cover in order to draw in more male viewers. “I literally got told, ‘If you do not go and shoot this cover with your costars, we will guarantee you that you will never be let out for a press day, a movie, an event, any of your charities. We will keep you here for ever,’” Bush said. Burton, who apparently didn’t want to do the photo shoot either, remembered Schwahn telling them, “Look, all the other shows have been on the cover of every single magazine and no one wants you guys. No one wants you and you finally have someone that wants you and you’re really gonna turn your nose up at that?”

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The women added that Schwahn had gone out of his way to pit all the stars against one another, and said he had tried to put down Bush and Ackles by showing blatant favoritism toward Burton on set. According to them, while he told Bush and Burton that Lenz had been allowed to turn down the Maxim shoot, she was told she’d been replaced by Ackles because she’d become insufficiently hot. “They told me that they didn’t come to me because I was too fat,” Lenz said, to the shock of her cohosts. According to Bush, “When I said, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I was like, ‘But Joy’s not doing it! She said no. Why does she get to say no?’ They go, ‘Well, she said no, so you have to say yes. She said no first.’ They scapegoated you to tell the three of us we couldn’t say no…. We weren’t mad at you but we were pissed about it.”

It’s not the first time we’ve heard stories like this about Schwahn. Back in 2017, Burton, Bush, and Lenz joined other former stars of the show in signing an open letter accusing him of sexual harassment and manipulation. Stacy Rukeyser, who wrote for the show for two seasons, said in an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, “Showrunner Mark Schwahn created, from the top down, a writers room that I described at the time, perhaps naively, as a frat house—and that I now see as a misogynistic quagmire.” In 2019, Bush said on Andy Cohen Live, “The first time Mark Schwahn grabbed my ass, I hit him in front of six other producers and I hit him fucking hard.”