pete townshend goes to child porn site "purely to see what was there"

Pete Townshend denies being a paedophile

Pete Townshend has denied that he is a paedophile.

It follows newspaper claims that police are investigating internet child porn allegations against an unnamed famous rock star.

The Who guitarist said he had studied child pornography for research into a campaign against it and had told police what he was doing.

The 57-year-old said: "I am not a paedophile. I think paedophilia is appalling."

He spoke out after a report in the Daily Mail claimed an unnamed internationally-famous musician had been passed to detectives dealing with an American pay-per-view porn ring. The report said Scotland Yard officers are now investigating and deciding whether to make an arrest.

Townshend, who is married with children, said: "To fight against paedophilia, you have to know what's out there. I have been involved in a campaign against paedophilia on the internet but it fizzled out.

"I think I may have been sexually abused as a child and I was doing research into it. I've been writing my life story and the research is for a book.

"I've been in touch with Scotland Yard to tell them what I was doing. I have contacted them but no police officers have contacted me. I am waiting for the police to talk to me but they haven't been round.

"I have done a lot of work on paedophilia and my website has highlighted it. I have looked into the abuse that children have suffered in Chechnya and Kosovo and the portrayal of these children on the internet."

Scotland Yard have refused to comment. British police are conducting their largest-ever investigation, code-named Operation Ore, into online paedophilia and child pornography.

Pete Townshend has denied that he is a paedophile.

It's like a vocabulary exercise in verb tense with creepy implications.

Basically I believe Townshend's account and I hope to god that this 'research' stuff is genuine. I think it will be. IF he was genuinely researching I hope there are others who can confirm this. It seems fair enough to want to actually SEE how this filth is presented on the web if you're trying to understand it. Perhaps the smarter way to do it would have been to contact an anti-paed organization and see the stuff via them avoidiing going online.

How much more OTM can you get?

The subject of rubb excuses reminds me of the guy who got caught by police with an entire plantation's worth of cannabis growing on the balcony of his flat. He told them that it was the set for a biopic he was making about Bob Marley.

Um - The Who would invent an excuse this bad. (Look at the plots invented for their rock operas after all. Deaf, Dumb & Blind kid = Pinball wizard (and goes on to populate South Africa to then be sung about in the Special AKA's Free Nelson Mandela).

Townshend has already spawned the popular meme : instead of Fancy A Pint it is now Fancy Reasearching About A Pint. (FRAP).

Apart from that; yes I believe PT's side of the story but also that he was incredibly naive, not just to access but to pay to access (and thus disclosing his credit card details), without working in conjunction with the police and/or anti-paed groups.

Meanwhile, someone out of Girls Aloud gets thrown in the slammer after allegedly making a racist assault on a law student forced to work as a toilet cleaner to make ends meet, and hardly anyone comments on it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2651617.stm

My hunch re. Townshend is that he's being sincere about his motivations but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it was a post-facto justification after he'd visited the site and felt apalled, guilty, disgusted etc. I don't think he's a paedophile in that I don't think he's attracted to children - I suspect he might be a porn addict who is compulsively curious about the worst/most extreme things out there.

plus gratuitous racist abuse thrown in, possibly.

No excuse for the GRA though. But witnesses will be required, who will all get bought off by the popstars mafia I daresay.

And you sigh and think, yes.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/5787239/man-blames-cat-for-child-porn-downloads/

I read that yesterday and was admittedly impressed. That takes some serious boldfaced lying.

Cats can be pretty vicious creatures.

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~calle/gif/catbert.gif

Acquitted! http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/08/08/cat-cleared-of-illegal-porn-charges/

However, cats do seem to be genuinely interested in porn:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/bizarre/5486969.html Curious cat finds child porn stash, leading to man's arrest

play him off, keyboard cat

"mmm some fresh young juicy kittens"

http://billthe3.net/dvc/mm171/10pics/kitty_gun.jpg

So:

In an interview to publicise his autobiography, Who I Am, Townshend said his actions were a misguided attempt at "white knight syndrome" – his desire to be seen as a hero.

"It's a product of success. I had experienced something creepy as a child, so you imagine, what if I was a girl of nine or 10 and my uncle had raped me every week? I felt I had an understanding, and I could help. What I did was insane," he told the Times newspaper, which is serialising the book.

He said he intended to reveal the financial trail of child abuse from Russian orphanages to British banks by paying a £7 fee to access a child pornography site with his credit card, which he cancelled immediately, but he fell foul of officers investigating the sites as part of the FBI-led Operation Ore crackdown.

Let my love open the door.

it doesn't get any more convincing the more he elaborates

^

yeah really, does he think he is helping himself?

As Dave Marsh put it at the time, "Yes, the cops had a right and an obligation to look into this. But that isn't what happened. They took somebody and dragged him through as much mud as they could dig up. This is basically about criminalizing investigative behavior — saying, 'You're not allowed to investigate certain things.' And any journalist who doesn't feel threatened by that is not paying attention."

Also, Townshend posted an essay on his website a full year before his arrest wherein he openly admitted to doing exactly what he describes above. He tried to alert law enforcement and anti-child-exploitation organizations, and was ignored at the time.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here but he really should shut about it. It serves neither his own interest nor that of the cause he purportedly supports.

tarfumes otm. also has he been talking about this and trying to explain himself a lot over the last few years or is he specifically doing it now because, well, he's finally releasing the book that he'd said he was working on when all this happened?

It's fair that he discusses it. On his book tour, this is probably going to be question #1. And Townshend has never been one to say "no comment" and i doubt he'd start now.

I haven't seen the subject come up at all in interviews since 2006. In fact, this is the first time I've seen him talk about it in about five years (he didn't even address it when an organization in Florida tried to keep the Who from playing at halftime during the Superbowl).

So yeah, I'm sure he's talking about it now because of his autobio.

xp

I do believe that, on some level, he was trying to research with good intentions, but it doesn't really help his case that he kind of shut up about it and not really followed through. If it was as issue he was/is so passionate about, you'd think he'd still be banging that drum. I don't know, the whole thing is just weird.

I guess I mean if he was still in some capacity involved in trying to expose people who peddle in it or really following through on efforts to track the money flow, I'd be more tempted to believe the best.

as difficult as it proved to be for him to try and do something about the problem as a civilian, it probably became a whole lot harder once he became a public suspect

it doesn't get any more convincing the more he elaborates

it doesn't really help his case that he kind of shut up about it

some dude otm. And we don't know how much/if he's followed through or not. Even he knows that to follow up a statement like "What I did was insane" with "But people have to know what's out there, and fight to stop it!" would come off as disingenuous at best. He may be doing a lot of work for the cause that he'd prefer not to address publicly, lest it reflect poorly on the organizations he's working with.

as a public figure he just showed really poor judgement. he should have worked with law enforcement or started his own organization. if he wanted to help.

and he totally missed the opportunity to call that organization The Mod Squad.

WHO ARE YOU, LLC

Actually, he tried working with law enforcement, and he had been trying to work with an anti-child-exploitation organization in the UK prior to his arrest. This same organization publicly excoriated Townshend after his arrest; when proof surfaced that they'd brushed off his offers to help, they had to do some serious backpedaling.

yeah i would say 'he should just donate some of his fortune to organizations fighting those issues if he hasn't already done so privately' but of course if he did so publicly it would probably look like some kind of apology or admission of guilt to a lot of people

One annoying thing I remember in the immediate aftermath of his arrest was a "classic rock" station in Michigan (I think) made a big sanctimonious deal of never playing Who records again. The station's website was full of banner ads for "barely legal" porn.

Because I listen to his music all of the time, and I truly believe he is against child abuse and either he or someone he knew experience sexual abuse as a child. That is how people with that experience behave sometimes - they get angry and go and try to find predators on their own.

I probably shouldn't say this but an FOAF from our church used to spend a lot of his time looking for child porn or child molesters. Sometimes people get so upset about something it becomes an obsession. Of course they should get therapy about their anger, but a lot of people are afraid to do that.

Only a chapter or so into the new book but am enjoying it. Almost feels like reading a journal...he's very open. and he's carved the chapters into, sort of, memory vignettes? which I like. ...which makes it sound terrible but it's not anywhere as wanky as I'm explaining it

isn't it possible that he both:

1) is a victim of childhood abuse and wants to help in the effort to root out child pornography

2) has been a consumer of child ponography.

people are complex and contradictory. think of all the virulently homophobic american politicians who were simultaneously engaging in homosexual liaisons.