‘Getting straight A’s at Stanford’ kept Rob Lowe’s son in denial about addiction

In a new interview with People, Rob Lowe’s son, John Owen Lowe, gives his father a lot of credit for helping him to accept that he had a substance abuse problem and needed to get help.

In the same interview, Rob Lowe said he recognized a lot of himself in his 26-year-old son, who graduated from Stanford University and now works as a writer on “9-1-1: Lone Star,” Rob Lowe’s series about a veteran Manhattan firefighter, the lone survivor of his fire station in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, who starts anew Texas.

The elder Lowe said he started drinking heavily as a teenager. In the 1980s, the actor shot to fame as a teen idol and as one of the hot young “St. Elmo’s Fire” stars who hung out together in the infamous “Brat Pack” — all of which meant he liked to work hard and party hard as well.

Lowe, now 57, began to see that his son was similarly struggling in his teens and early college years. “I really knew Johnny was a chip off the old block, as his big thing was, ‘Dad, I’m getting straight A’s at Stanford. How much of a problem could I have?’ That [justification] was my thing.”

By his mid-20s, the elder Lowe realized he couldn’t justify his drinking anymore. In 1988, he was caught in an infamous scandal over a sex tape that showed him having sex with a 16-year-old girl the night before the Democratic National Convention. Lowe was never prosecuted because the age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time, but it took some time for his career to recover.

Two years later, he decided to quit drinking for good and completed an extensive alcohol rehabilitation program. He has maintained sobriety for the past 32 years, saying it was the best decision of his life.

As Lowe dedicated himself to having a family and being the father to two sons, Matthew and John Owen, he began to worry about his younger son, he told People. Certainly, John Owen never has dealt with being a regular tabloid figure or with a sex tape scandal, but Lowe said his son was driven in ways that could potentially mask problems.

John Owen has written about how he worked hard at getting good grades so he could go to his dream college, Stanford, according to HuffPost. In a tweet, he described his academic focus in 2019, in response to reports that wealthy parents, including TV stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, had paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to get their children fraudulently admitted to top colleges.