Less than a week after One Tree Hill‘s cast and crew wrote a powerful letter accusing showrunner Mark Schwahn of sexual harassment, one of the show’s lead actresses has expanded on the allegations against him. Hilarie Burton, who played lead character Peyton Sawyer, detailed her allegations against Schwahn in an interview published Friday by Variety.

She alleged to Variety that Schwahn kissed her twice against her will and once slid his hand into the back of her pants while his wife was present. Burton also elaborated on Schwahn’s behavior on set: She says that Schwahn began grooming her by letting her attend production meetings and “pushing her character to the forefront.” Meanwhile, she says that she fought him about her character becoming unnecessarily sexualized, and that he would pit the women of the show against each other, pushing them into Burton’s orbit by encouraging offset friendships and then lying about physical relationships he said he was having with the show’s actresses, particularly with Danneel Ackles.

Burton alleges that in one of the instances of Schwahn forcing himself on her, he began making out with her in a limo from Raleigh to Wilmington after a show-related trip they’d taken together—while Schwahn was on the phone with the CW’s president, Dawn Ostroff, persuading her to let One Tree Hill stay on the air for a fifth season.

“I’m leaning in listening, and when it’s Dawn Ostroff’s turn to talk, he just leans over and starts kissing me,” Burton told Variety. “I push him off, but I can’t say anything, because he’s on the phone fighting for our show to stay on the air. I’m just in this position where I’m thinking, ‘You’ve got to take it, Hil. Just laugh it off. You’ll get to Wilmington in 45 minutes.'” After they got back to the set, Schwahn allegedly told Ackles (and, later, another actress) he and Burton had made out; Ackles promptly called Burton, who detailed what happened.

She detailed other allegations of misconduct as well, like an invitation to a swinger-type meet-up (he got “pretty angry” when she stood him up), and him kissing her for a second time in front of “everybody” when the cast and crew met up a bar. Ackles and Burton both recounted a time when, after unsuccessfully trying to get into Ackles’ hotel room, he allegedly went to Burton’s, complaining Ackles wouldn’t open her door to him.

Burton confronted him about his alleged behavior when they were shooting season four’s finale. She says Schwahn began rubbing her shoulders and back, and that’s when she went off. “You gotta stop,” Burton told Variety she said. “Mark, I’m telling you, as your friend, your wife is going to hear about this shit. You’re going to lose your job. You can’t touch the girls anymore.”

What happened next sounds terrifying: He grew angry because she’d confronted him in front of others. He later had her come to his office and “screamed at her for half an hour.” “I know exactly what this man’s hands look like, and they are my fucking nightmare,” she told Variety. “I think of hands when I think of him, because they were relentless.”

Burton left the show when her contract ran out a the end of season six, despite an offer of a raise from Warner Bros. She said she didn’t want to be viewed as “a problem” by the studio and wanted to work for them again—hence why she didn’t speak up at the time. She says that ultimately working with Schwahn has been detrimental to her career: It indirectly caused her to be dropped by her agent and led to missed acting opportunities,

Other allegations were made by different cast and crew members to Variety. An unnamed actress said that he touched her inappropriately when she approached him with a professional question and that, later, when she approached him about touching other female cast members, he also got angry and “threatened her job.”

A writer on the show that spoke to Variety, Michelle Furtney-Goodman, recalled an incident that involved Schwahn allegedly pulling her head between her knees, saying that “the back of my head was so flat and that I was the perfect woman, because I could give a guy a blowjob and he could rest his drink on the back of my head,” she told Variety. She alleges he set a soda can on her head to illustrate his point—all in front of the show’s other writers. She felt obligated to compose herself and go back to work: “I was scared that if I said anything [to Warner Bros.], I would never work in this town again,” she said.

A former male writer on the show, James Stoteraux, wasn’t immune to Schwahn’s toxic workplace culture, either. He says the showrunner gave him a T-shirt for Christmas that said, “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look.” He said he was “relieved” to leave the “toxic, demoralizing workplace” after writing for the second and third seasons of the show.

Schwahn is currently suspended from his position as showrunner for another CW show, The Royals.

Related Stories:
–The ‘One Tree Hill’ Cast and Crew Accuse Showrunner of Sexual Harassment in Powerful Letter
–11 Little Things From One Tree Hill You Never Noticed Were Truly Terrible for Women
–Hilarie Burton Reveals the Emotional Reason Why She and Sophia Bush Will Always Be Friends

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