Pete Townshend, Sex offender? Who banned from Superbowl? Link.

[old mark]

Townshend, guitarist/songwriter for The Who, scheduled to play halftime show at the Superbowl, is on the sex offender's list in the UK for downloading kiddie porn on his home computer several years ago. He claimed it was for a "research project". Link:
http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/12/28/2009-12-28_pete_townshend.html


mark

[vadawg]

1. that seems to be the excuse that is always used when they are caught

its amazing how many people are doing research or who are trying to catch pedophiles...

[EOTE]

3. I suggest you read into Operation Ore and the book "A Different Bomb"

before you condemn Townshend. Everyone investigating the matter agreed that Townshend was falsely accused. I suppose you have information that they don't?

[vadawg]

11. why do i need to read it, im just stating that every online pedo i talk to has the same excuse

on a side note i used to live in silver spring, totally hated it :) i still own a property there...

[ChairmanAgnostic]

16. Ah, the famous ignorance is bliss theorum.

How's that coming, anyway?

[vadawg]

18. nope just wondering if he wasnt a rich guy would it have ended the same way

kinda like the michael jackson situation... now i have experience dealing with the online pedos and all i said is that everyone of them uses one of two defences and the doing research is one of them....

[EOTE]

22. Maybe it wouldn't have, but it would have been wrong.

Are you suggesting that the wealthy aren't deserving of justice?

[vadawg]

23. lol nope, i dont care if hes wealthy or not, wasnt involved in the case either

just stating that the two excuses i hear when dealing with the pedos is that they are doing research or that they are trying to catch pedos... make of it what you will...

[EOTE]

26. Well, in this case, he was telling the truth.

Maybe some of the people you helped lock away were telling the truth too, but ended up in jail for not being able to afford better representation.

[vadawg]

29. mayby they were, thats the jury's decision,

[spiritual_gunfighter]

34. You obviously no nothing about what happened

and believe all people are guilty until proven innocent. How anti-American of you.

[left coaster]

24. I remember when this all unfolded..

And, yes, I too read ADB, etc.. I agree as well that Townshend was falsely accused, given the information available.


But I know that some folks won't let the facts get in the way.. not when there are uninformed snap judgments to be made here..
Ignorance lives.

[Hello_Kitty]

6. I know. I want to do a "research project" on the heroin trade.

So I think I'll smuggle a bunch of heroin into the country. What? That's illegal? But I'm doing it for research! Honest! :eyes:

[Kalyke]

10. Except in his case, he was.

He accessed a site, realized what it was, reported it to an attorney who advised him to do nothing and then wrote a very public article on it. He was not even noticed, looked at nor charged with any crime until police needed an example THREE YEARS later.

Here's the story:

It was obvious to me (though obviously not to the rest of the country) while the man I knew was on trial, that 'lolita' is not a word to use carelessly when searching the internet - even if one happened to be studying Nabokov for a literature degree. So I had my first encounter with internet paedophilia by accident.
Ethan Silverman, a film director friend, had made an extremely moving documentary about an American couple who adopted a Russian boy. As a charity fundraiser (and, I suppose, philanthropist to boot) I wanted to support the work of such orphanages and decided to see if I could - via the internet - find legitimate contacts to help. (I had tried many other methods and failed). The various words I used included 'Russia' and 'orphanages'. I used no words that could usually be taken to be sexual or lascivious, except - perhaps ill-advisedly - the word 'boys'. Within about ten minutes of entering my search words I was confronted with a 'free' image of a male infant of about two years old being buggered by an unseen man. The blazer on the page claimed that sex with children is 'not illegal in Russia'. This was not smut. It was a depiction of a real rape. The victim, if the infant boy survived and my experience was anything to go by, would probably one day take his own life. The awful reality hit me of the self-propelling, self-spawning mechanism of the internet. I reached for the phone, I intended to call the police and take them through the process I had stumbled upon - and bring the pornographers involved to book.
Then I thought twice about it. With someone on trial who had once been connected with me - however loosely - I spoke off-the-record to a lawyer instead. He advised me to do nothing. He advised me that I most certainly should not download the image as 'evidence'. So I did as he advised. Nothing.
I mentioned my own internet experience to a few people close to me. The trial of the man who had been in my musical was on everyone's agenda. It became clear very quickly that some people I spoke to were sceptical of me. I think they thought that if I had searched using the right words, my exposure to that terrible image would not have occurred.
It might be strange to hear that I was glad I found it. Until then, like my ostrich-like friends, I imagined that only those who communicated on the internet using secret codes, private chat-rooms and encrypted files would ever be exposed to this kind of porn. But I learned through this accident that such images were 'freely' available through the machinery of common search engines and User-Groups, and openly available for sale through subscription via credit card. I was then concerned that there would be those 'providers' of paedophilic porn who felt the need to regularly 'refresh' their supply of images. It is a chilling thought isn't it? Even so, I found myself wondering whether that thought brought fears for me that were, perhaps, quite out of proportion with reality: maybe I was stirring my own subconscious memories; maybe I was just being pompous. Now my friend has joined a long line of suicides who were sexually abused as children, and I feel I must speak up.
Since 1997 I have been attempting to prepare some kind of document with respect to all this for wider publication. My feeling is that if internet service providers (ISPs) can be enlisted by the police and other authorities to 'snoop' and provide information about customers downloading illegal pornography, they could just as easily filter search terms - or better yet, practice combinations of such search terms on a regular basis and then block specific site names. Many ISPs do such work. It is part of their regular housekeeping. But the pornographers are rich, determined, and - in the area of under-age pornography - criminal. Banned sites are replicated, renamed and replaced in days.

http://www.petetownshendisinnocent.com/adifferentbomb.html


Police took somewhere around 20 computers from his home and offices at Eel Pie and found NOTHING, NADA. The only thing he was charged with was the "crime" he wrote publicly about three years earlier.

And, as of May 7, 2008, he is no longer listed on the British Sexual Offender Registry; therefore, he's not a sex offender. Florida authorities really should get their facts straight.

FWIW, Pete has been a friend of mine since I was 14 years old and he's never said anything untoward to me. I KNOW Pete is not a pedophile.

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. That is horrible!!

Thanks for sharing.

[Kalyke]

15. It was a horrible time.

I volunteered tirelessly writing letters and talking with child advocacy groups - many of whom realized later that Pete was not guilty of this. If anything, he was a victim, as well.

http://www.petetownshendisinnocent.com/

But, as horrid as it was, I managed to make some lifelong friendships.

[ljm2002]

31. Thanks for the info...

...I never looked into it but did find it unlikely that Pete Townshend was really an offender.

I can attest to how easy it is to get unwanted smut, although I thankfully never got underage stuff. Once I wanted to get some pictures to illustrate an article a friend and myself were writing on the subject of software bugs. We thought it would be fun to use picures of insects to illustrate the piece. So I searched for "free insect pictures" and the first hit that I clicked on without reading closely was a site with "incest pictures". Well hopefully it was not real incest pictures but who the hell knows? It was offensive anyway and not something I wanted to see. You definitely do not need to be looking for it, in order for it to show up in your searches.

[EOTE]

2. Wasn't he removed from the list because it was determined he was telling the truth?

Hasn't he already been removed from the list? Aren't these groups just arguing over something that's already been established? Jeebus, is this really necessary?

[Orrex]

5. That's the problem with these lists.

Once you're on them, you're on them forever. Even if you shouldn't have been on them in the first place.

[EOTE]

8. What a shame.

Although it seems that the U.K.'s policy on this is better than the U.S.'s, there still needs to be a better way of handling situations like these.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

17. tell that to a 15 yr old who is sleeping with his 14 yr old girlfriend.

and explain how his life is fucked up for good.

It doesn't make sense to them at that age, but give them 10 yrs.

[Orrex]

21. Wait. What?

Are there jurisdictions in which it's a sex offense for a 15-year-old male to engage in consensual sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend?

I'm not saying that this isn't the case, but I wasn't aware of it. Does the 15-year-old then wind up on a sex offender registry?

[Kalyke]

12. Yes.

Removed on May 7, 2008 - 12 days before his 63rd birthday.

[Sebastian Doyle]

4. Where the hell were these protestors when N'Sync was on stage at the Super Bowl with Aerosmith?

N'Sync's manager was a convicted pedophile. Shouldn't that have been enough to keep them off the stage? :shrug:

Pete was never even charged, much less convicted of anything, if I remember correctly.

[sharesunited]

7. He was cautioned. It is a much more civilized system than ALWAYS going for a prosecution.

[tmyers09]

9. Oh please! The dude's gonna play a 20 minute concert.

Obviously if he was on the list, but isn't now, then either it was false, or it was deemed not a problem. IMO, they're making an issue where there wasn't one.

[goldcanyonaz]

14. This occured years ago and it was supposed to be corrected. He actually was doing research...

At least that is what the FBI or Scotland Yard concluded.

[Kalyke]

25. Statement from Pete's attorney

From Julian Stockton:
(For those of you not following the news via this site, Julian Stockton is Pete's solicitor.)

Pete Townshend Press Statement

After months of investigation officers from Scotland Yard's Child Protection group have confirmed that they have not found any downloaded child abuse images on rock guitarist Pete Townshend's computers. They added that Pete co-operated fully with the investigation and that the decision to caution was made in accordance with the MPS Case Disposal Policy for this investigation.

Pete stated "From the very beginning, I acknowledged that I did access this site and that I had given the police full access to all of my computers". He added "As I made clear at the outset, I accessed the site because of my concerns at the shocking material readily available on the Internet to children as well as adults, and as part of my research toward the campaign I had been putting together since 1995 to counter damage done by all kinds of pornography on the internet, but especially any involving child abuse"

The Police work closely with the Internet industry through the Internet Watch Foundation to monitor paedophile activity and any member of the public accidentally discovering such images should notify the IWF through their website.

Ironically Pete later contacted the Internet Watch Foundation on the subject of the offensive site. He pointed out that "The police have unconditionally accepted that these were my motives in looking at this site and that there was no other nefarious purpose, and as a result they have decided not to charge me. I accept that I was wrong to access this site, and that by doing so, I broke the law, and I have accepted the caution that the police have given me."

[timeforpeace]

19. Always wondered if Tommy was his way of expressing the torment of being abused as a child. Uncle

Ernie, Cousin Kevin etc.

[Kalyke]

20. Sort of.

Pete was abused by his deranged maternal grandmother, whom his band-member parents left him with when they traveled.

The only problem with the Wicked Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin bit are that John Entwistle wrote those songs for "Tommy."

[timeforpeace]

30. Thank you for clearing that up. Excellent info.

[Kalyke]

32. You're welcome.

I've been a Who fan since I was 2 years old. :)

(I used to make my parents play "Won't Get Fooled Again" over and over when I was a tot. :D )

[Chef Eric]

27. When the story broke a few years ago, the Onion's headline was "Townshend Can't Explain". nt

[EOTE]

28. But in this case, he could.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Townshend#Operation_Ore_investigation_and_police_caution

[BCAtlanta]

33. More facts about Pete

For anyone wanting more information about the Pete issue or to read the initial parts of his writings on child abuse, here's a good source:
http://www.petetownshendisinnocent.com

And here's a link to a Fresh Air interview, originally from 1993, where he talks about his own abuse as a child:
Pete Townshend on Fresh Air