“He goes, ‘I watch your show, so I pay your f**king salary. You are a piece of meat to me,'” the “One Tree Hill” alum recalled.
Sophia Bush is opening up about a fan encounter that made her feel like a “zoo animal.”
The “One Tree Hill” alum detailed a cringe experience with a male fan on St. Patrick’s Day at a bar in Chicago. Bush stars in procedural series “Chicago P.D.”
“I had a beer and there was a guy at the table next to me and all my friends, who walked right up to me and stuck his camera right in my face to take a picture, almost hit me right in the face, with his phone,” Bush said during Penn Badgley’s “Podcrushed” podcast. “He keeps going and he’s getting rowdy and I can hear him swearing.”
Bush continued, “I say, ‘Hi, I’m a person. I’d like to shake your hand. My name is Sophia. You’re making me really uncomfortable, man. I’ve asked you to stop. I’m a girl in a bar. You are a man I do not know. I don’t wanna be videoed on your phone. And my friends don’t either. Can you please stop?’”
The fan replied, “I don’t have to stop. You’re in public,” to which Bush said, “OK, but is there no world in which you can understand that you are making me feel like a piece of meat, like I’m not human?”
Bush added, “And he goes, ‘I watch your show, so I pay your fucking salary. You are a piece of meat to me.’ And I just went, ‘What?’ ‘You’re just a TV prostitute.’”
She noted that “one of the guys on our crew like flipped out and it started to get physical between these guys” in her defense.
Bush said it was an “insane” experience and that the fan identified himself as a lawyer who “knows his rights.”
“It’s very strange because in one sentence people will say, ‘Well you signed up for this’ and the other sentence they’ll say, ‘We’re entitled to this,’” Bush said. “I don’t think anyone is entitled to anything.”
Bush, who along with her fellow “One Tree Hill” co-stars, formerly accused the showrunner of sexual harassment, noted that she doesn’t “enjoy being in public anymore.”
“Now I’d much rather be at home. I used to love to go out and be in the world, so I think that’s obviously a wild example, but it’s not the first time that I’ve experienced that,” Bush said.
Oscar nominee Paul Mescal revealed a “creepy” fan experience where a woman “put her hand on my ass” following a West End performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Penn Badgley also claimed he was “molested” by “Gossip Girl” fans in 2018, and Channing Tatum said a dental assistant made an inappropriate joke about him stripping down like “Magic Mike.”
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