Sophia Bush has heard it all. For more than two years, since the moment her relationship with former soccer star Ashlyn Harris became public, the internet has asked one question over and over again: was there overlap? Was there an affair? On the newest episode of Call Her Daddy, released Wednesday, the One Tree Hill alum finally answered it herself, in her own words, and she did not dance around a single syllable.
Sitting across from host Alex Cooper, Bush, 44, was asked directly whether she had already filed for divorce from her then-husband Grant Hughes when she started a relationship with Harris. Her answer was short, firm, and clearly rehearsed in her own head long before she ever sat down in that studio.
“Two people who had filed for divorce and lived in separate residences from their exes went to dinner,” she said.
No overlap, she insists. Two divorces already in motion. Two separate homes. One dinner. That, at least, is her account of how the most talked-about relationship of her life began.
The question she could not escape
The timeline is what made this story such catnip for gossip accounts. Both women were married to other people, and both marriages ended in 2023. Bush married entrepreneur Grant Hughes on June 11, 2022 in his home state of Oklahoma, then filed for divorce about 13 months later, in August 2023. Harris filed for divorce from her wife, US women’s national team star Ali Krieger, in September 2023 after nearly four years of marriage. By October 2023, Page Six had confirmed that Bush and Harris were a couple.
For online observers, the calendar wrote its own ugly story: an affair, a betrayal, a wrecked home. Bush says that story is simply false, and on Call Her Daddy she said it in the bluntest possible terms.
“But I’m a little bit chickens**t, so this whole, like, ‘Oh, they must have gotten drunk and had an affair…’ Anyone who thinks that was a casual leap for me doesn’t know me,” she said.
This is not the first time she has pushed back. In her April 2024 Glamour cover story, when she came out as queer, she addressed the same speculation head on, dismissing claims that she had left Hughes because of “some hysterical rendezvous” with Harris and insisting the rumored infidelity “never happened.” But the Call Her Daddy episode marks her most direct answer yet to the specific question of whether she had filed for divorce before Harris entered the picture.
The one thing she would change
Here is the part nobody saw coming. While Bush denies any cheating, she admits she is not entirely at peace with how things unfolded. She does have one regret, and it is unexpectedly sweet.
“Everybody wishes they could have done a million things differently at the time,” she told Cooper. “Like, do I wish that instead of flying home and stopping in New York because I already had tickets to a comedy show and taking [Ashlyn] on a date that I’d taken her on a date six weeks later? Yeah, of course I do. But I can’t change it.”
Her regret is not about Harris, or about the relationship. It is about the optics of the timing, and about the fact that she cannot control how strangers choose to read her life. She went on to say that she cannot reshape her reality for anyone else, and she cannot keep trying the same thing over and over with no result.
“I’m never going to change anybody’s mind who made it up,” she said.
Why the rumors cut so deep
What clearly bothers Bush most is not the gossip about her, but the collateral damage she believes these narratives cause to the people around her. On the podcast, she spoke about how online storylines can take on a life of their own, damaging careers, reputations, and families.
“There’s also a part of me that goes, ‘I’ve done too much work on myself to hurt someone when I’ve been hurt.’ Especially when there’s children involved,” she said.
That last part carries real weight. Harris shares two children, daughter Sloane and son Ocean, with Krieger, and Bush has described herself as a stepmom to them. She said she does not think she would have survived the scrutiny without knowing Harris as well as she does, and without seeing the heartbreak she went through during her own divorce.
“I don’t think I would have made it through that had I not known her for so long and had I not seen the work and the sadness and the heartbreak and the absolute crushing experience [going through a divorce],” Bush said. “When [online narratives] affect people’s jobs, when they destroy someone’s ability to provide for their family, when they destroy someone’s credibility unfairly… I don’t want to be party to that.”
The backstory: how they actually met
For all the speculation, the origin story is almost aggressively normal. Bush and Harris first crossed paths in 2019 and ran in the same social circles for years. Bush is a self-described lifelong soccer fan and even an investor in LA’s Angel City FC. Their friendship deepened in the summer of 2023, when both were navigating the end of their marriages. They appeared together on a panel at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June 2023, and what was supposed to be a casual lunch turned into a four and a half hour conversation.
Their Hollywood debut as a couple came at Elton John’s Oscars viewing party in March 2024, followed by a run of public appearances that included the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. They kept a relatively low profile for a while, then came the red carpets, the candid interviews, and eventually a wedding they deliberately kept far away from the spectacle.
From whispers to a wedding
The Call Her Daddy appearance arrives just weeks after another headline moment for the couple. In late September 2026, Page Six revealed that Bush and Harris had secretly been married for more than a year, tying the knot in the summer of 2025. Bush shared the news in an excerpt from her new book, which is out October 27, describing the private ceremony in her own words: “We wept. We laughed. We exchanged rings. The invisible string pulled tighter around us.”
Speaking to Vogue about the wedding, Bush said the private ceremony felt right for where they are in life. The kids ran around, picked flowers from the property, and, she said, it was fun for them precisely because it was not a pressure filled day that would be too much for young children.
When you put it all together, the picture Bush is painting is clear. Two people went through two very public, very painful divorces. They found each other at the other end of that tunnel. And more than two years later, she is still explaining herself to strangers.
“What I can’t do is change my reality for anyone else,” she said. It may not change every mind online, but it is the clearest statement she has ever made about the timeline that started all of this.
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