Sophia Bush: 'Assault' and 'abusive behavior' made me quit 'Chicago PD'

Sophia Bush is opening up about her decision to quit NBC's "Chicago PD" in May 2017 after four seasons, describing a nightmarish on-set environment that drove her to leave.

Speaking to Dax Shepard’s on his "Armchair Expert" podcast Monday, Bush described the negative impact filming the show had on her physical and mental health.

"The reality was that my body was, like, falling apart, because I was really, really unhappy,” she said, citing the set's cold weather as one unpleasant aspect of the set.

At one point, Shepard asked her about whether she had experiences filming "One Tree Hill," the teen drama Bush starred on during the show's eight-season run from 2003 to 2012. In 2017, the show's female cast wrote a letter accusing showrunner Mark Schwahn of "traumatizing" sexual harassment.

“Our experience on 'One Tree Hill' was unpleasant, but our boss who was a bad dude lived in L.A.,” she said. “Eighty percent of the time we were on set loving our experience and each other and then he would come to town and it’d be like, 'Watch out for (expletive) Handsy-McHandsy over there.' There was a lot that was inappropriate but it wasn’t all the time…it wasn’t the same.”

“One was like, a guy who we’re like, ‘Oh God, he’s back.’ And one was a consistent onslaught barrage of abusive behavior,” Bush said, comparing "One Tree Hill" to "Chicago PD." “You start to lose your way when someone assaults you in a room full of people and everyone literally looks away, looks at the floor, looks at the ceiling, and you’re the one woman in the room and every man who’s twice your size doesn’t do something, you go, ‘Oh that wasn’t worth defending? I’m not worth defending?' ”

More: 'One Tree Hill' cast write sexual harassment accusations against Mark Schwahn

Bush, who did not elaborate further on the extent of any mistreatment she experienced on the "Chicago PD" set, described the difficulty of departing the show early after signing a seven-year contract, claiming that she was told there was "no way" for her to leave.

“I said, ‘OK, you can put me in the position of going quietly of my own accord or you can put me in the position of suing the network to get me out of my deal, and I’ll write an op-ed for The New York Times and tell them why,'" she said, claiming that she eventually found out that her complaints were "hidden" from former NBC president Jennifer Salke.

Bush summed up her experience filming "Chicago PD" to Shepard as feeling "like I was standing butt naked, bruised and bleeding in the middle of Times Square, screaming at the top of my lungs and not a single person stopped to ask if they could help me.”

USA TODAY has contacted NBC for comment.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Sophia Bush: 'Assault' and 'abusive behavior' made me quit 'Chicago PD'