When Rich Kids Go Bad

Oct. 10 -- At age 16 Leigh Horowitz had just about everything a precocious teenager could want.

She was smart and pretty, with cascades of chestnut hair adorning her rapidly maturing body. Her father, Joel Horowitz, was (and still is) chief executive of fashion giant Tommy Hilfiger.

The family lived well in a tony suburb in New Jersey and took ski trips to Lake Tahoe. Leigh attended a top-notch prep school, enjoying the status that came with Dad's generous donations. "She had," Joel says, "the biggest brown eyes you have ever seen."

Leigh also had a drug problem. She had been smoking pot since she was 8 years old. She had snorted cocaine, taken LSD and injected heroin. In her freshman year of high school she started coming home drunk late at night. By her sophomore year Leigh was flunking out.

The principal told her parents he suspected she was on drugs, and they feared as much. But when Joel Horowitz tried to talk to her, she would cry and disappear behind the slam of her bedroom door. When he grounded her, she would sneak out. When he sent her to therapy, she wouldn't talk.

His wife, Ann, suggested sending Leigh to a boarding school and had one picked out, but he refused: He could fix this. "I was in denial. Nobody wants to admit their child has a problem, that they aren't the perfect parent," he says now.

Packed Off to a Wilderness Program for Troubled Teens

His world fell apart the night after Thanksgiving in 1996.

A couple of hours into a family friend's party, he passed his 16-year-old daughter in a hallway and found her stumbling drunkenly, a tumbler of wine in one hand and the bottle in the other. He stormed into a bedroom, ripped open her backpack and found a pouch filled with hashish, marijuana and heroin.

Then he gave in. He told Leigh to pack for a ski trip and chartered a plane for the next morning. In-flight, Leigh was high on opium. When they landed in Sandpoint, Idaho, she learned she would be left with an outfit called Ascent, a wilderness program for troubled children.