‘Degrading:’ ‘One Tree Hill’ star accuses creator Mark Schwahn of using storylines to punish her

Bethany Joy Lenz has a memoir out, Dinner For Vampires, and she’s speaking about her negative experiences on the One Tree Hill set. One Tree Hill was helmed by Mark Schwahn, who lost his career in 2017 when multiple allegations about his sexual misconduct came out.

Entertainment Weekly has excerpts of the book. Lenz doesn’t mention Schwahn by name in her memoir, but it’s very clear who she’s talking about. According to her, Schwahn made her life difficult and would punish her with storylines whenever she disagreed with him about her character, Haley James Scott.

“The more my personal beliefs and preferences interfered with the creator’s demands, the more he started writing things into the storylines that I assume were an attempt to humiliate or antagonize me,” Lenz alleged. “Like making other characters call Haley ‘fat.’ Or having Haley ‘overreact’ to her high school boyfriend watching porn.” The “fat” comment particularly stands out as cruel. Young women in the public eye often have a very difficult time with body image.

Schwahn is one of the many men who went down in the wake of #MeToo, the movement that drew attention to sexual harassment and misconduct. First, One Tree Hill writer Audrey Wauchope called him out on Twitter, accusing him of mistreating her and her writing partner Rachel Specter. “Sometimes we wouldn’t luck out and he’d just squeeze his disgusting body in between us and put his arms around us, grinning. He pet hair. He massaged shoulders. I know he did more but not to me so they’re not my stories to share,” she wrote back in 2017.

This allegation caused the lead actresses and crew members of One Tree Hill, including Lenz, to write a letter in condemnation of Schwahn. They claimed, “Many of us were spoken to in ways that ran the spectrum from deeply upsetting, to traumatizing, to downright illegal. And a few of us were put in positions where we felt physically unsafe.” It was an upsetting situation and clearly it still weighs on Lenz’s mind.

Lenz said that the One Tree Hill porn storyline was especially difficult to navigate in the face of Schwahn. She believed it was “degrading and doing a disservice to the young women who looked up to me,” but Schwahn wouldn’t adjust it. So, Lenz said, she rewrote her own lines in the end. “It caused confusion and aggravation for the director, the other actors, the script supervisor, and the producers. I felt awful. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

Dinner For Vampires also featured details of Lenz’s involvement with a cult, and she believed Schwahn had similarities to her cult leader, a man she named as “Les.” She believed, she wrote in her book, that both men “isolate[d] us young and trusting people from our support systems and pressure[d] us into doing what they wanted.” Thankfully, she was able to break free from the cult—and Schwahn has no power in the TV industry anymore. The story stands as a sobering reminder of the risks women in the TV industry face. Although the situation has improved since #MeToo, it’s still far from perfect.