Leif Garrett checked into the latest season of VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab” to battle years of drug abuse, but according to the pop singer and actor, the reality show had just the opposite effect. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Garrett claims that the “Rehab” producers encouraged him to relapse for dramatic purposes.
“[The producers] asked to get some footage of me using, and I said, ‘I haven’t been using,'” says Garrett, who entered the Pasadena Recovery Center along with celebrities like Eric Roberts and Jeremy London for the show’s fourth season. “They said, ‘We really have to get footage of you using.’ Anyway, I was easily talked into showing them.”
Leif Garrett Pleads No Contest to Drug Possession
Scott Acord, vice president of VH1 Communications, denied Garrett’s claim. “The show’s producers would never ask anyone to use… PERIOD,” he says.
The 49-year-old Garrett, best known as a child TV actor and for his pop single “I Was Made for Dancin,'” was arrested in Los Angeles last February for possession of heroin, after previously serving jail time for the same charge in 2006. After filming wrapped on the fourth season of “Celebrity Rehab” — which continues Thursday night (Jan. 6) with a new episode on VH1 — Garrett pleaded no contest to the heroin charge and entered a court-ordered rehab program in October.