For Pete’s sake

Pete Townshend has never been a stranger to controversy. The songwriter with The Who has been there, seen that and done the other – in more ways than one. The group was often at the cockpit of the excesses of self-indulgence that were permitted by the ginormous successes and the consequent riches, which fell to the rock idols of the ’70s.

The Who’s drummer Keith Moon – notoriously the most excessive of them all – paid the price, with an early and ignominious death. But Pete Townshend was always a more complex character than the average rock or pop star – more tortured and driven, as well as more intelligent and artistically ambitious. No Gary Glitter or Jonathan King, he. Townshend had become a kind of respected elder statesman of angst, with an interest in books, theatre and the arts to balance with his role as a greying enfant terrible.

Which is why it came as all the more of a shock when, at the weekend, Townshend issued a statement, identifying himself as the rock star who had become the subject of a police investigation, as part of the so called Operation Ore – the British arm of an FBI-led probe, which has traced an estimated 250,000 suspected paedophiles around the world by unscrambling the details of credit cards used to pay for accessing child porn.

In his statement, Townshend admitted having, on one occasion, used a credit card to enter a site advertising child porn – apparently the Landslide Promotions ‘gateway’ which enabled users to access some 5,700 sites located around the world, and which was closed down by the US authorities. “I did this purely to see what was there,” the songwriter said. “I spoke informally to a friend who was a lawyer and reported what I’d seen.”

At no point in his statement does Townshend acknowledge that he might have made an error of judgement, in accessing the paedophile site. On the contrary, the tone of the statement is self righteous, angry and at times apocalyptic. Clearly, it is the work of a man under intense pressure and fighting desperately to clear his name.

“I am not a paedophile,” Pete Townshend insists. “I have never entered chat rooms on the internet to converse with children. I have, to the contrary, been shocked, angry and vocal (especially on my website) about the explosion of advertised paedophilic images on the internet.”

In his statement, Townshend reveals that he has been writing his childhood autobiography for the past seven years. He believes that he was sexually abused between the ages of five and six and a half, when he was in the care of his maternal grandmother, who he says was mentally ill at the time.

“Some of the things I have seen on the net have informed my book, which I hope will be published later this year,” he states, “and which will make clear that, if I have any compulsions in this area, they are to face what is happening to young children in the world today and to try to deal openly with my anger and vengeance towards the mentally ill people who find paedophilic pornography attractive.”

In its way, it is a powerful defence against the assumptions that will inevitably be made, especially by the UK tabloid press, who are quicker than Linford Christie to rush to judgement on anyone who finds themselves in even the metaphorical dock, in relation to allegations of sleaze, of whatever kind. But there is also, in Townshend’s statement, a vindictiveness and hatred that one hopes will not now be directed at Pete Townshend himself.

“I have felt for a long time that it is part of my duty,” he goes on, “knowing what I know, to act as a vigilante to help support organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation, the NSPCC and Scotland Yard to build up a powerful, well-informed voice to speak loudly about the millions being made by US banks and credit card companies for the pornography industry. That industry deliberately blurs what is legal and what is illegal, and different countries have different moral and legal values about this. I do not. I do not want child pornography to be available on the internet anywhere at any time.”

Just how active Pete Townshend has been in opposing child porn will doubtless emerge, in due course. In reports to date, at the time of writing, the founder of Internet Watch Foundation, the lawyer Mark Stephens, had denied any knowledge of emails that Townshend says he sent to the internet watchdog complaining about the site. Overall indeed, Stephens was clearly unsympathetic to the Who songwriter’s plea of innocence.
“It is wrong-headed, misguided and illegal,” he insisted, “to look at, or download or even to pay to download, paedophilic material and if you do so you are likely to go to prison. Pete Townshend has committed a criminal offence. It is a matter for a court to accept if he was merely doing research or something worse.”

The truth is that it is impossible to offer anything like a definitive judgement. Pete Townshend wanted to describe the experience of undergoing child abuse in his book. It is possible that, in a rash and unthinking moment, he engaged in a transaction, to have access to images which might be of assistance in his attempts both to recall and to describe incidents that took place all of fifty years ago.

Whether this is an appropriate thing to do on a legal level is one question. Whether it is appropriate for a writer, who must be true to his or her memory is another. On both accounts, the answer may be a resounding ‘no’. But on balance, and taking the tenor of his statement and what we know of Pete Townshend into account, I think his explanation is plausible. It is the kind of thing that writers do – except in other similar cases, it is not something that sucks them into illegality, and the inevitable disrepute that is the consequence of any hint of an active interest in child porn.

In Ireland, a number of high profile figures have been questioned – and some of then charged – as a result of the same world wide operation, called Operation Amethyst here by the Gardai. Paedophilia is an utterly abhorrent thing – there is not a shred of justification for an active participation in it, on any level.

Tracing people via their credit cards is proving hugely useful in identifying those who have, by buying into sites and paying for downloads, supported what is a grotesque and repulsive business. But there is enough credit card fraud about to know that it is far from infallible. And besides – while it may be rash and even arrogant – there is at least the possibility that any one-time user was involved in the act of finding out what is out there, rather than indulging.

Watching the early stage of the story about Pete Townshend’s difficulties unfold, brought home to me the extent to which it is important that we do not rush to judge those who are named – whether here or elsewhere – as being the subject of investigation on charges of this kind.

I hope that nothing that might genuinely damn the maverick Who leader emerges. I believe he will clear his name. In the meantime, a bit of an acknowledgement that you fucked up might not go astray, Pete.