I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.
—Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
In October 2017 I was lying in bed live-tweeting during my episodes of Lethal Weapon when a tweet caught my eye from @ShaniceBrim, who was talking about Ben Affleck in the aftermath of the news about Harvey Weinstein: He also grabbed Hilarie Burton’s breast on TRL once. Everyone forgot though.
My heart jumped. I couldn’t believe that somebody else remembered that. It had been my own personal grievance, a distant memory that no one mentioned anymore. I felt something akin to shame, that another woman out there had spoken up on my behalf when I’d swept so much of my own shit under the rug so as to not cause a scene.
I didn’t forget, I tweeted back.
@ShaniceBrim wrote me again: I’m so sorry that happened to you. It’s infuriating that people never bring up all the gross, predatory things he’s done.
Seriously, thank you for that. I was a kid, I wrote. Then I found the old video of the incident on the internet. I saw myself laughing and then saying, “Well, he played that card, huh. Ha ha.” Then there was a video of me later saying, “Yeah, I would’ve preferred a high-five.”
I sent @ShaniceBrim that video and said: I had to laugh back then so I wouldn’t cry. Sending love.
I went to bed that night and thought nothing of it. But I woke up to a shit show, as all the #MeToo news shook out. I found myself watching old footage of a nineteen-year-old me trying so hard to laugh off the ugliness of being a girl. By the time the week of chaos and unwanted requests from every news outlet under the sun was over, I was drained. I’d worked in media just long enough to know that none of those outlets really cared about me; they cared about dragging a famous guy through the mud. I let the old footage speak for itself, staying silent and fuming that the real story—the bigger trauma of my years on One Tree Hill—was of interest to no one.
In my youth, being a “good sport” led me down a rabbit hole. I thought I could protect myself by just being “one of the guys,” by laughing at the crude jokes, by sidestepping advances, and by being one of those loud, lippy girls who shrugs off pretty much anything.
So I was the loudest and rough around the edges, and I feigned an “I don’t give a shit” attitude. But in the end I was a young girl who wanted approval and was assaulted anyway.
I never tried to tell the truth to the media after I left One Tree Hill because I believed it was a lost cause. And I was a coward. I had walked away from jobs I loved just to remove myself from toxic situations. I stopped auditioning. I abandoned my childhood dreams of being an actress because playing the game was simply not worth it to me.
I’m so sorry about the girls and young women who have come after me and been traumatized. I’m sorry it took me so long to join the chorus. I’m hopeful for a future when cowards like me will be the exception and not the rule. Because I will be damned if my daughter ever becomes a “good sport.”
That whole confusing week, my daughter kicked and squirmed inside me, making her presence known. She will be here soon. This shit has got to stop.
The timing of all the chaos couldn’t have been worse. I put my head down and got back to work. Animals. Gardens. The nursery. And our second Ghost Stories event. I met Sonia from Astor over at the venue for a walkthrough.
“You doing okay?” she asked me. It was a loaded question. Sonia works with the kids at Astor every day and knows when people are covering their true feelings, denying their vulnerability. Her eyes are twinkly and a tad mischievous, and she has a presence that feels like a warm hug.
“It’s been . . . hard.”
“You must be tired. Just know that because you spoke up, other girls and young women will feel like they can speak up too.” I immediately thought of the girls at Astor—girls who deserved to have their truths and traumas heard and recognized. I couldn’t encourage them to be brave and audacious if I wasn’t willing to do that myself.
“When do you think everything about Mark will come out?” Sophia asked me about the creator of One Tree Hill, Mark Schwahn.
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“But it’s got to, right?”
It had to, but after all the Affleck business, I was weary of being labeled a troublemaker. Mark could be incredibly malicious, and I was afraid to be the one to strike first. But then, one of the writers on the show, whom I had never met, Audrey Wauchope, acknowledged the abusive environment of One Tree Hill through a series of tweets. A fan forwarded Audrey’s tweets to Sophia, Joy Lenz, and me, asking, Hey girls, does any of this ring a bell?
I called Sophia. “Oh fuck, it’s happening.”
I knew that Mark had gone after the actresses, but I had no idea that there had been abuse in the writers’ room. We publicly supported Audrey through Twitter. I cheered her on with Burn it down sis, a catchphrase that became a rallying cry for women who were now ready to name names. On One Tree Hill, Sophia had been the pretty one, Joy the talented one, and I the angry one. But now, I began to realize, we were all angry.
Sophia started a text thread with a large group of the women from the show. Each one of us would bring in another actress or crewmember whom we knew had been hurt by the toxicity of that production. At the suggestion of Daphne Zuniga, eighteen women from the show wrote a joint letter stating that we had all been negatively affected by Mark’s abusive behavior. The letter was direct, polite, angry, but vague; it did not detail specific events. There would have been too many to recount anyway.
E! News wouldn’t cover the story because Mark’s current show, The Royals, was on the E! network. They had done multiple articles on Ben Affleck groping me for one second almost twenty years before, but when a multitude of women were coming forward about years of abuse from the showrunner whose series was on their network, not a peep.
Nothing was done. Mark Schwahn wasn’t fired. Then, the women from The Royals wrote a letter, and the lead actress made a personal statement. He was put on probation. But the media didn’t care—not without gory details.
Variety needed specifics that could be backed up. Our text chain of women from One Tree Hill was on fire. Many of us wanted to talk, to tell the full, unexpurgated truth, but that idea was as frightening as it was liberating. When our letter didn’t get the traction it needed, I wrote to the group:
You guys, we can’t be vague. They want the shitty details; otherwise, they’ll think we’re being dramatic.
We knew some of us were going to have to bite the bullet. A series of responses followed:
Yes.
Let’s do it.
Talk to them Hilarie, and then I’ll do it the next day.
So I spilled my guts to Daniel Holloway at Variety; I talked to him for five hours. Danneel Ackles bravely detailed her abuse. Daniel’s horror listening to our story validated so much of what I’d felt. And worse had happened to other women. But when he tried to follow up with some of those others, they were reprimanded by their management firms, their publicists, and their agents and told that doing this was career suicide. Some of them called me in tears, saying, “I’m so sorry—I hope you don’t think less of me.”
I looked around at my life and thought, If I never work on another show or film, I’ll be okay. Mischief Farm was in the middle of its full autumn display, similar to the way it had looked when we’d seen it for the first time. This is real, I thought. This is who I am.
The farm. Samuel’s Sweet Shop. Astor. The community. My children. Jeffrey.
This is what matters.
There is a moment of absolute freedom when you realize that the things that used to scare you have no power over you anymore. I had the freedom to tell the truth.
My daughter had steeled me. I was a farmer. A shop owner. A soccer mom. A board member at Astor. I was finally a person that I sorta kinda liked, and all the creeps out there could go straight to hell.
By the end of the year, Mark Schwahn had been fired.