In his own words

[SicilianMother@xxxxxxx]

This is the article from The Observer...............completely riveting, I 
think it answers questions, and brings up some new ones.  I am glad *we* put our 
faith behind him.

Jo :)


Won't get fooled again... 

Twelve months ago, Pete Townshend faced the world's press and confessed to 
accessing child pornography on the net. In this extraordinary interview, he 
tells the whole story for the first time and states plainly: 'What I did was 
wrong. And stupid. My culpability is clear, but my innocence is absolute' 

Sean O'Hagan, interviewer of the year
Sunday December 28, 2003
The Observer 

'It's a very complex thing, and I don't know if I'm getting it across.'
Pete Townshend speaking about his rock opera, Tommy, in 1968. 
Looking out through the extravagantly high and wide windows of Pete 
Townshend's big, bright and airy living room, it is hard to believe you are still in 
London. Even in deepest December, the uninterrupted view, which stretches for 
miles, is about as green and pleasant as the metropolis gets, with the Thames 
glinting silver in the winter sun far below. It is a view shared, I am reliably 
informed, by Sir Mick Jagger, who owns a house further along the same 
exclusive Richmond street. 
Like Jagger, Townshend looks remarkably trim and fit for, as one tabloid put 
it recently, a '57-year-old multi-millionaire former hellraiser'. While he 
remains a prominent member of the ageing English rock aristocracy, it is also 
safe to assume that Townshend's chances of a knighthood are now forever linked 
with the words 'snowball' and 'hell'. 
Over coffee, he is recalling the events of a similar winter's morning almost 
a year ago when, at this very table, on 11 January to be exact, he lifted the 
phone and found out his world was about to fall apart. He is speaking calmly, 
though occasionally he will rub his watery eyes, or stare silently at the 
floor, in the manner of someone still convinced that those events might yet turn 
out to be one long bad dream. 
'I was having a cup of tea, looking out at the river, when I got this phone 
call, and someone says, "Have you seen the Daily Mail?" I said, "No, I don't 
take it", and they said, "Well, this is what it says." They read me the front 
page down the phone, and then they said, "It sounds like you, Pete", and I said, 
"Yeah, it sounds like me."' 
The Mail had led with a story, leaked to them by a police officer who has 
since been sacked, that a rock star who fitted Townshend's description was one of 
the names on a list of suspects passed to Scotland Yard by the FBI following 
Operation Ore, an international investigation into child pornography internet 
sites. A Texas-based site, which operated under the name Landslide, had been 
infiltrated by the FBI, and netted more than 6,000 British names who had logged 
on to the site and used their credit cards to view obscene images of 
children, some aged as young as two. 
What, I ask Pete Townshend, went through his mind after he put the phone 
down? 'I went into deep panic and anxiety. I had sensed, or I knew that there was 
a developing witch hunt in progress, and I thought, "Oh my God, this is going 
to be hung on me."' He was still taking this all in when he looked out his 
front window and saw that his house 'was surrounded not just by scores of 
reporters but a ring of satellite vans'. 
The shock and disorientation of those first few hours, he says, are still 
difficult describe. 'I was just spinning. It was a bit like being shot. I didn't 
really quite know what to do. When I recognised myself in the Mail piece, I 
called my lawyer and he called the police. I very nearly went to the local 
police station. I was halfway there with my girlfriend, then I said, "Maybe I 
shouldn't do this."' 
Instead, he later emerged in his dressing gown to face the throng of 
reporters and news crews outside his front door. Looking haggard, he read a 
pre-prepared statement in which he not only outed himself as the Mail's mystery rock 
star but confessed that he had indeed on one occasion used his credit card to 
access a child pornography site on the internet. 
That oddly meandering statement must have had the Operation Ore detectives 
rubbing their hands with glee. It had the rest of us, particularly those of us 
who grew up listening to Pete Townshend's music, scarcely believing our ears. 
In it, he spoke about his shock and anger towards 'the explosion of advertised 
paedophilic images on the internet', and claimed that the 'three or four 
times' he had looked at images of child porn on the net, including the one for 
which he paid five dollars, were done 'purely for research'. He made reference to 
his belief that 'I was sexually abused between the ages of five and six'. His 
first words back then were: 'I am not a paedophile.' He repeats them 
passionately now. 
'All the trouble I caused,' he says, shaking his head, 'was driven not just 
by curiosity - this wasn't curiosity or, if it was, I promise you it was not 
prurient. I know where my prurience begins and ends. I am not a paedophile. I'm 
not. I'm not sexually attracted to children. I know some people will say, "Oh, 
of course he's going to say that". I understand that. But I'm certain of my 
own standing before God, which is the level at which I'll be judged.' 
Though I had assumed we might tentatively broach the subject of his 
subsequent arrest some way into the interview, Townshend seems remarkably willing to 
talk about it, and in some depth. He is, though, a frustrating interviewee, 
given to wandering off into areas that are only tangentially pertinent to the 
question at hand. This, I realise about halfway through the interview, is a 
Townshend trait. It denotes, I think, a certain abstraction of thought rather than 
any wilful evasiveness on his part. It must, though, have driven the police to 
distraction. Like most rock stars with a conscience, Townshend likes to 
pontificate, and is used to being listened to unconditionally. His opinions, like 
his rock operas, are extravagant and free flowing. Or, at least, they were until 
11 January last year. Since then, he has, by his own admission, belatedly 
discovered that reflection, rather than instant reaction, might be a more 
productive route. He is also, as he admits, in no position to pontificate to anyone. 
'What that one act did,' he says, 'was stop me completely in my tracks. It 
paused my life. It made me wait. I've never had to wait ever in my life for 
anything. I've never had to stop and wait while someone else made a decision about 
the future of my life. It was a fucking long wait.' 
Four months to be exact; between the arrival at his door of 12 plainclothes 
detectives with a search warrant and the return of his 13 computers, along with 
all his diaries, DVDs, videos and photographs. Four months, too, from 
Townshend's confession to his caution by the police. As a result of that caution, his 
name will remain on the Sex Offenders List for a minimum of five years. The 
police will also have taken a sample of his DNA. 'I came out of the police 
station, going, "It's over, it's over." Except that I had been branded a sex 
offender.' 
For anyone who came of age in Britain in that halcyon period of pop culture 
between the mid Sixties and the early Seventies, for anyone whose teenage 
confusion was mirrored and made real by the petulant sneer of songs like 'My 
Generation', for anyone who experienced a vicarious thrill in the image of a 
precious Gibson being smashed in a squall of feedback, it felt, for a moment back 
there, like all those defining teenage memories had somehow been sullied, 
demolished as brutally and mercilessly as those mangled guitars. 
This was Pete Townshend, after all, the original Modfather, the angriest 
young man of Sixties Brit Pop. The Pete Townshend who went on to create the first 
rock opera, Tommy, all about a 'deaf, dumb and blind kid' exploited by every 
adult he comes into contact with. The same Pete Townshend who, quietly and 
without fanfare, subsequently ran a charity for drug addicts and alcoholics who 
had suffered sexual abuse. A man who had admitted in interview that he, too, was 
a victim of abuse as a child. And who now had admitted to, well, what 
exactly? This was the question that I wanted answered clearly and concisely when the 
story broke back in January and, like everyone else, I waded through the 
slough of broadsheet analysis and tabloid innuendo that followed in its wake. Was 
he another victim of the ongoing moral panic that surrounds the whole subject 
of paedophilia? Was he someone who acted out of naivety? Did he happen 
initially on these kinds of images by accident? Can you, indeed, happen on them by 
accident? 
Is there a broader issue here about individual freedom and intellectual 
curiosity? And, leaving aside for a moment the whole thorny question of his 
original intent, why did he go back there, and why did he pay? Was this celebrity 
hubris on a massive scale? Or something deeper and darker? 
The law, of course, is not concerned with all these questions, and clear on 
the consequences: it is criminal offence punishable by a five- to 10-year 
prison sentence to download images of child pornography or view it on your computer 
screen. Townshend, it appears, is still not entirely clear on this point. 
When I ask him what he felt like after the police decided to caution him, rather 
then exonerate him, or, indeed, send him to prison, he says: 'It's tough. 
Although I'm at the lowest status, and it's a technicality, and I didn't commit a 
crime, and they didn't find anything, but I was cautioned for the use of a 
credit card, which is interpreted as encouraging people to disseminate more, 
inciting others to disseminate more.' 
Which, of course, is a crime, not a technicality. Throughout the interview, 
perhaps unsurprisingly, Townshend does seem to have some trouble accepting 
this. He says more than once that the credit-card incident he was cautioned for 
was not a crime when he did it in May 1999, but became one subsequently when the 
law was changed. He even says at one point: 'I feel that what I did was for 
the best of intentions, and I know I broke the law legally, but the law was 
broken when it was retrospectively changed. I wonder whether Blunkett changed the 
law to gather up the names that had been found by the FBI on the Landslide 
list. It's quite possible he did.' 
This, in the words of John Carr, internet adviser to the children's charity 
NCH [National Children's Home], is 'the realm of total fantasy'. (Carr is 
actually a life-long fan of the Who, who tells me he has just bought the band's 
retrospective box set for his son for Christmas.) Carr points out that the 
current legal framework governing the viewing of child pornography was established 
in 1988. Perhaps Townshend, then, is thinking of a case at Southwark Crown 
Court in 1998, in which the judge made it clear what constituted possession: that 
you were in possession of child pornography not just if you actively 
downloaded it, but if it appeared on your computer screen at all. 
Townshend seems to have thought that by viewing, but not downloading, he was 
not breaking the law. Carr points out, too, that had Townshend committed his 
offence after the Criminal Justice Act of 2000 came into force, steered through 
by Jack Straw, not David Blunkett, he might now have been serving a five-year 
jail sentence. 'He is,' says Carr, 'a very lucky man.' 
He is also, for all his perhaps understandable confusion over the legal 
aspects of his case, a very contrite man, and, to his credit, betrays not an ounce 
of self pity. 'I know that I caused the most incredible chaos by that one 
single neglectful careless act, the most incredible chaos. For my ex-wife, for my 
son, who's only 13, for his school friends, for the parents of all his 
friends' children, for my two daughters [Emma, 32, and Aminita 31], for my 
girlfriend, all of whom had to make a snap decision whether to swing behind me or not. 
And they all did. It was a test for them, too. For my neighbours, for the local 
paper, for the people in my band, for the fans. For the poor woman, for heave
n's sake, who found my name on the list in the US, who apparently was a huge 
Who fan, and broke down in tears.' 
I kind of know how she felt. The Who, you see, were not just an ordinary pop 
group. They were one of the select few who changed the way a generation, and 
every ensuing generation, looked at the world. In England, as Townshend has 
often said, they were a reaction against the stultifying conservatism of the 
times and against what he calls, 'that whole sense of postwar denial'. 
Unlike the Beatles, who were loveable, and the Stones who were sexual, the 
Who were simply fucked up and angry. Their music evinced aggression and 
frustration, spoke of a deep and violent sense of impatience with the old order. And, 
they were Mods: modernists who merged terrace hooliganism with art school 
attitude. 
Long before punks stole their stance, the Who, and Pete Townshend in 
particular, seemed both supremely bored and effortlessly provocative. He didn't pen 
silly love songs about being 64; he said what he felt about a world run by 
people who seemed suddenly to be old and in the way. 'Things they do look awful 
cold,' he concluded, in a couplet that has echoed through every moment of rock 
rebellion ever since: 'I hope I die before I get old.' 
There must have been moments in the last year when those words came back to 
haunt him, when he had maybe even wished that his casually arrogant teenage 
boast had been fulfilled. He tells me he 'fell to pieces' on 11 and 12 January. 
'I remember thinking, "Do they want me to kill myself?" ' He looks at the 
floor. 'If I had had a gun, I would have shot myself. And, I think, if I had shot 
myself, it would have been fucking awful because it would have confirmed what 
everybody thought.' 
His girlfriend, Rachel Fuller, a musician whom he met in 1996, stuck by him 
throughout, as did his ex-wife, Karen Astley, who he was married to for more 
than 30 years. He says, too, that his son, his teachers and the parents at his 
son's school have been totally supportive. 'Two or three of them specifically 
sent their sons around to stay with Joseph as a way of expressing trust. I 
thought: would I be that generous spirited? Or would I err on the side of real 
caution? But I'm so grateful; it made me feel I could go on.' 
When he made his statement to the press, though, the Who's lead singer, Roger 
Daltrey, rang him in a rage. 'He was very angry. He was shouting, "Anybody 
could have used that credit card." And I said, "Roger, I think it was me." He's 
going, "You think? You think? For fuck's sake, you couldn't have done it, 
you're confessing to something you didn't do." 
(Townshend and Daltrey are the last surviving members of the Who, following 
the death of bass player John Entwistle from a heart attack last year after a 
cocaine binge with an American hooker. Keith Moon, their infamously dissolute 
drummer, died from his excesses in 1978.) 
The public, too, seem to have had an incredible faith in Pete Townshend, and 
their attitude was perhaps best summed up by an acquaintance of his I spoke to 
last week. 'He's an artist and an artist with a conscience, someone who 
worries and frets on our behalf about the state of the world. He's abstract, and 
often wrong-headed, and, in this instance, he's been a stupid fool. But, no, 
he's not a paedophile.' 
As his rock opera, Tommy, first hinted, though, Pete Townshend is a troubled 
man with some dark shadows of his own. In it, a young boy is violently abused 
by Uncle Ernie, one of the creepiest characters to feature in a pop song. He 
has spoken before, albeit abstractly, about being abused as a child, aged six 
or seven, while staying with his maternal grandmother in Westgate, Kent. 
'She was not very well. My parents' relationship was in trouble and it was 
convenient. I was there for about a year and a half and when I came home again, 
my parents got back together again, so it kind of fixed everything.' 
Was his grandmother violent towards him? 'Yes, she was.' And, it was around 
this time that he was abused? 'You know, I don't remember, Sean. What I do r
emember is a sense of disturbed eroticism. She was promiscuous, she was crazy, 
and she was seeing men, and she didn't lock my bedroom. I think men came into my 
room.' Has he tried to recall this in therapy? 'Yes. In '82 and '83. But I 
stopped. I went to my therapist and said, "I can't do this."' 
He describes waking in the middle of the night to write stuff down: 'I 
started sweating, my pen fell down, and I just erupted. I had some sort of 
convulsive fit. I think I either witnessed something, or was part of something, or 
something was going on,' he says, sounding palpably frustrated by his own lack of 
recall. Then he adds: 'This is not in the context of trying to justify the 
public perception that there's a possibility that I may have been somebody who 
downloaded images on the internet of children being used and abused. It isn't in 
that context; it's in the context of the greater denial, the big postwar 
denial when nobody talked about anything.' 
It was later, when when he started writing and performing, Pete Townshend 
says, 'that it all just came out'. Revealingly, what he calls his 'first guitar 
smashing exercise' was sparked by the reappearance of his grandmother in his 
life. 'I was with John [Entwistle]. We were about 12. I'm strumming away on my 
guitar which is going through a little Selmer amplifier that I had done two 
years on a paper round to buy. She came in and said, "Turn that bloody awful 
fucking row down! Nobody can think." I just looked at her, and I picked up the 
amp, and I threw it at her. She shut the door and it went right through the 
plateglass, and she went white with fear. Suddenly, she realised I was a man and 
that she couldn't fuck with me any more. That was the very first time it 
happened, and I remember thinking, "Anger will fix this."' 
>From the start, that anger underpinned the music he wrote and performed with 
the Who. 'It's what made me rich,' he quips. That anger has also been the 
defining force in his charity, which tries to mend lives broken first by abuse, 
then by addiction. It's there, too, in his internet diary, in essays like 'A 
Different Bomb', first posted in January 2002, where he laments the death of a 
friend called Jenny, who 'has joined a long list of suicides who were sexually 
abused as children'. 
That anger made him contact the Internet Watch Foundation, an 
anti-pornography organisation that monitors material on the web, after he first came across 
images of child abuse. (At the time of Townshend's arrest, the IWF's chairman, 
Roger Darlington, said: 'We have no reason to believe at this stage that he 
has been in contact with us.' Townshend later found the emails that proved he 
had.) And, it seems, the abiding notion that 'anger will fix this' may well have 
contributed to his 'one terrible mistake'. 
'I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that 
blunts and blurs my sense of proportion,' he says. 'I mean, this is something I 
shouldn't have done; there's no question about it. I shouldn't have associated my 
real and active ground-based charity work with this mission, this white 
knight mission, to get this information across to the public that there was some 
correlation between the child porn industry and the credit-card companies.' 
I ask him when, and how, he first came across child pornography on his 
computer. 'It was late '98, early '99,' he says, 'and, believe me, that image was 
not welcome, it was not invited. I did not go looking for it, it just appeared. 
It was a very cleverly constructed thing; it was shocking and violating. The 
impact of that one image took me a long time to come to terms with.' 
What was the process, though, that led to this image appearing 'uninvited'? 
Townshend says that he had seen a documentary about a Russian boy adopted by an 
American family in early 1999, and had rung the the filmmaker, Ethan 
Silverman, and said: 'I want to do something on these Russian orphanages. I want to 
find a legitimate way to help financially.' He says he then went online and 
typed in a string of words. 'I think it was the words "boy", "orphanage", "young", 
"Russia", and up came the image of this child. The first image I saw I 
genuinely saw by accident.' 
It was this image that led Townshend to believe he could start a campaign 
that would tackle the problem of internet child pornography. 'I'm not religious,' 
he says, 'but I am spiritual, and I felt like this was something I really 
needed to look at as a grown-up living in the real world. I'd come from this 
world of good, this film where this Russian kid had been saved, into the real 
depths, the filth and the swill. I started to just look at lists of what was going 
on, and then I started having conversations with people about what I was 
seeing, and I got angry again.' 
What, though, possessed him to access a pay-per-view child pornography site, 
to take such a risk, to do something not accidentally but intentionally, not 
to mention illegally? There are numerous other methods of finding out about the 
subject - contacting organised bodies, the police, academic research units? 
'Well, the thing with the credit card, it's important to look at the actual 
incident,' he begins. 'What happens is I was looking at a user group somewhere, 
and this is where you find out about what's really going on. My hope was, and 
this is one of the reasons why I first communicated with Scotland Yard, I 
thought that a 12 Step group would be a good thing to have on these user groups, 
and maybe somebody who had a problem with it might be helped by being guided 
to somebody who would say, "Don't fucking go there, don't do this."' 
He pauses to collect his thoughts, and I am just about to say: 'But you went 
there, Pete, you were that person', when he says something extraordinary. He 
says: 'Then I saw sight of this thing - now I'm reconstructing this a bit, I 
have to confess, because I just vaguely remember this - but I saw sight of this 
thing that said, "Avoid this site - it's an FBI sting." I remember the name 
Alberta or the name Landslide. That was in May 1999.' You actually saw this 
warning on one of the listings, I say, and yet you took out your credit card and 
accessed the site? 
'Yeah. I was really, really curious, and I think that's the mistake I made. I 
saw that it was a five dollar listing, and that it was in America, and that 
it didn't promise, contrary to what the police said to me when I was 
interviewed, to lead to child pornography. I told them, "Well, actually, I don't 
remember." This is one of the problems - I don't really remember it very well, 
because I did a lot of searches. I was just meandering around generally. I'd done a 
fair bit of that, but this was exciting to me - the FBI was running a sting. 
This is maybe where the naivety set in. I can't remember my state of mind but, 
looking back, it was stupid and it was wrong. I think I made a terrible 
mistake.' 
Did that not cross his mind at the time, though? He seems to have acted in a 
manner that was both naive and utterly reckless. 'Worse than naive,' he 
replies. 'I was fuelled in the smoke of my own compassion, identification and anger. 
And I found it very difficult to share. I'm not going to beat myself up about 
that, though, because I felt ultimately I couldn't find people to help. I 
contacted the NSPCC, and they were about to start a campaign called Stop It Now. 
I spoke to a helpline called NAPAC [National Association for People Abused in 
Childhood]; they were struggling for funds. I contacted the Internet Watch 
Foundation.' He pauses for a moment. 'Look, what I did was wrong. And stupid. The 
legal position is clear; my experience is clear, my culpability is clear, but 
my innocence is absolute. I feel completely and totally innocent.' 
Since that moment, Pete Townshend's life has been changed utterly. Two 
child-related charities have sent back his most recent donations, and, he says: 'The 
whole thing has changed my standing in society substantially.' He is 'nervous 
but confident' about going back out on the road with the Who, and says that, 
'ultimately all I really want to be able to do is wander the streets on my own 
and end up somewhere unfamiliar, and still feel confident.' 
What, I ask him, has he learned from all this? 'That this world is all about 
limits and boundaries,' he says, 'and this year I found the end-stop. When the 
police came through this door, it stopped being nightmare and insanity, and 
became reality. I just thought, I have to look at who I am, and what I did, and 
get through this calmly. Soon after, I realised that the public hadn't bought 
into it, and that was so humbling. I had hundreds of letters of support from 
friends and fans and strangers. 
'The fact is I've survived. I've learned a huge amount because I've been 
tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted. I don't know if it's even 
appropriate to say this but in some ways I've had the most incredible year.'