Sophia Bush says she did not have an affair with Ashlyn Harris, pushing back this week on the rumor that their relationship began while both were still married to other people. Speaking on Call Her Daddy, Bush said the two connected through a support group for women going through divorce and were already separated and living apart by the time they got together.
The timing is why the question has followed them. Bush and Harris began dating in 2023 and went public two months after each announced splits from previous partners, which fed speculation around a relationship that later became one of the most closely watched in Bush’s personal life. Bush was addressing the subject while promoting her new memoir, and the public has kept revisiting the same overlap in dates ever since.
But Bush’s account was not only a denial. She said the relationship felt immediate and unusual to her, telling Cooper that what she felt for Harris was not just attraction. She described it as a moment of recognition, saying she wondered whether Harris was “the other piece of the puzzle,” and added, “God, this sounds so gay.”
That openness came with a sharper admission. Bush said in hindsight she had known all along that her marriage to Grant Hughes was not meant to be and that she should have listened to her gut. She also said she had never been in a serious relationship with a woman before Harris, then added that she does wish she had waited longer before going on the first date, even though she also said the relationship was above board and that the date happened while she was on a trip and already had plans in New York. “Anyone who thinks that was a casual leap for me doesn’t know me,” she said.
The details matter because the rumor has always been about timing, not just attraction. Bush and Harris married in 2025, long after the first public speculation had set in, and the relationship now sits in the open with its own timeline: a 2023 start, a public reveal two months after their breakups, and Bush’s insistence this week that the story was never an affair. The unresolved part is narrower now — not whether she denied it, but how quickly a private connection can become a public narrative once the dates are close enough for strangers to fill in the blanks.
