Sophia Bush Confirms Ashlyn Harris Relationship, Hits Back at ‘Home Wrecker’ Label

For her cover story with Glamour magazine, Bush wrote an essay in which she opens up about her divorce from Grant Hughes, the friendship she has with the One Tree Hill girls and her headline-making new relationship with Harris.

Bush and Harris first met back in 2019, however, it wasn’t until Bush was navigating the obstacles of her divorce in 2023 that she ended up connecting with other women going through the same circumstances … including Harris.

“I didn’t expect to find love in this support system. I don’t know how else to say it other than: I didn’t see it until I saw it,” Bush revealed to Glamour about how their relationship began to deepen, before adding that neither of them saw it coming.

“And I think it’s very easy not to see something that’s been in front of your face for a long time when you’d never looked at it as an option and you had never been looked at as an option,” she shared. “What I saw was a friend with her big, happy life. And now I know she thought the same thing about me.”

As for how the pair went from divorcée group members to dating, Bush asked Harris out on a “non-friend-group hang” when Harris was in the midst of her split from her then-wife Ali Krieger, with whom she shares two children.

“That meal was four and a half hours long and truly one of the most surreal experiences of my life thus far,” Bush said.

“In hindsight, maybe it all had to happen slowly and then suddenly all at once. Maybe it was all fated. Maybe it really is a version of invisible string theory. I don’t really know,” she wrote. “But I do know that for a sparkly moment I felt like maybe the universe had been conspiring for me. And that feeling that I have in my bones is one I’ll hold on to no matter where things go from here.”

As for whether she is “labelling” herself and her sexuality, she believes her fans already knew she liked to date women.

“It’s funny, because people who pay attention are like, yeah, we know. All my fans who paid attention are like, ‘Yeah, I mean, we’ve watched her like date women on camera forever, we knew that wasn’t the first time she did that,'” said Bush.

However, what feels best for herself at this time is the term “queerness”.

Over time Bush — after conversations with her best friend — discovered that maybe she was consistently having issues with men wasn’t because they were threatened by her success, but because “they don’t make” her happy, period.

“I went to my best girlfriend about this, and she was like, ‘You know, as your best friend, it was always really easy for me to look at you and go, well, this isn’t quite right, because he wants to be supportive, but he’s jealous of her success,'” she recalled. “‘He loves the limelight, but wishes it was his, and that she was on his arm, not that he was on her arm. Yeah, maybe it’s societal, and maybe misogyny and patriarchy’s made it very hard for a lot of men to be with a woman who doesn’t need them. And maybe they just don’t make you happy.'”

Now Bush feels a lot lighter, after feeling like she was wearing an 80-pound weighted vest for “a decade”.

Bush also wondered why a label needed to be discussed in public. “To be outed [chuckles] is all so wild. And in a way I’m like, well, why do we even have to talk about it? This feels stupid,” she added.

The former One Tree Hill actress and her new girlfriend did not had an easy start to their relationship.

News broke that Harris and Bush were together in October 2023, shortly after Harris and Krieger announced their divorce. Thee media and online critics then began to insert their opinion into the narrative — and Bush was labelled a “homewrecker.”

Bush stressed the relationship wasn’t just an overnight occurrence, adding that “people from the outside weren’t privy to just how much time it took, how many painful conversations were had.”

“The online rumor mill began to spit in the ugliest ways. There were blatant lies. Violent threats. There were the accusations of being a home-wrecker. The ones who said I’d left my ex because I suddenly realized I wanted to be with women — my partners have known what I’m into for as long as I have (so that’s not it, y’all, sorry!).”

Read her full essay here.