Sophia Bush Shares Brutal Way She Learned About All The Girls Chad Michael Murray Had Cheated With

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Getting (secretly) remarried doesn’t erase past pain.

More than twenty years ago, Sophia Bush and Chad Michael Murray were a hot young couple.

She’s now opening up about how she discovered his “brutal” serial cheating — only after they’d married.

Though they divorced and she is now in a much better relationship, she still feels haunted by that betrayal.

‘Girls I knew and plenty of girls I didn’t’

In her newly released memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine, Sophia reveals the heartbreaking way that she learned of Chad Michael Murray’s infidelity.

Unfortunately, she wished the she had found out earlier.

One of Chad’s friends never showed up to the couple’s wedding ceremony in April of 2005.

“It had always bothered me that one of [Murray’s] best friends had fallen mysteriously ill the night before the [wedding] day and not shown up to stand up there as a groomsman,” she wrote.

When Sophia looked into the matter, she uncovered the truth. It was not a stomach bug.

“Thinking about it that summer gave me the chills,” Sophia explained. “I needed to know why.”

It is not uncommon for people to intuitively pick up on deeper meanings to a friend’s behavior (though anxiety can make ordinary actions seem to have that same meaning). Similarly, sometimes people are unconsciously aware of a betrayal — but need to hear the truth out loud before they can accept it.

In her book, she wrote about calling him while Chad was away filming.

The friend, Sophia says, sighed and asked why she hadn’t called him sooner. It seems clear that he was aching to tell her the truth — but only if she felt ready to hear it.

“And then he told me. Everything he could about all the girls he knew of,” Sophia wrote. “Girls I knew and plenty of girls I didn’t.”

‘Brutal’

Even now, sharing her story, it seems clear that Sophia is still reeling from that betrayal.

“The number and the details are not important now,” she emphasized in her book.

“But at the time,” Sophia expressed, “they were shocking.”

She added: “Unimaginable, really. And brutal.”

Learning that your partner has betrayed your trust is shocking. Learning that this was not a one-off tryst but a pattern of behavior makes it feel like the relationship is a mockery.

Some may deride Sophia’s shock, arguing that Chad Michael Murray was a hot actor on a popular show. One Tree Hill‘s primary audience was young women.

The thing is that these actors who want to sleep around, boning fans and coworkers and more, could have that. They’d need to find partners (including spouses) who are fine with that, or even who cheer them on.

Trouble arises when, as we have seen with too many celebrity couples, the famous man (it is usually a famous man) wants to sleep around while also locking a beautiful woman who is also a celebrity into what she believes is a monogamous marriage. If monogamy isn’t for you, don’t pretend otherwise.

Fortunately, Sophia got her happily ever after. Just last year, she married former soccer star Ashlyn Harris.

Sophia came out as queer just a couple of years ago. It was only in her book that she revealed that she and Ashlyn had wed. Congratulations!