The guitarist for the legendary rock band The WHO was once arrested on child pornography charges.
On January 13, 2003, Pete Townshend was arrested after police said he used his credit card to access a child porn website. Since Townshend did not actually download any pictures, he was given a warning by police; but he was placed on the national register of sex offenders by London’s Metropolitan Police.
One of the reasons Townshend was placed on the sex offenders list was because he refused to go to court. Townshend explained, “A forensic investigator found that I hadn’t entered the website, but nonetheless, by the time the charges came to be presented to me, it was 5 months...I was exhausted. I felt that if I went to court I would be offering myself up for sacrifice.”
But there is more to the story.
Pete Townshend said that he was the victim of child abuse at the hands of his grandmother. As Townsend was working on his autobiography, “Who I Am,” he wanted to research sexually abused children and that led him to a child pornography website.
After spending nearly 5 months going through Townshend’s computers, police cleared him of all charges on May 7, 2003. The investigation proved that Townsend had not downloaded any images of child pornography.
In an official statement to the press, Townshend explained:
“The police have unconditionally accepted that these were my motives in looking at this site and that there was no other nefarious purpose. I accept that I was wrong to access this site and that by doing so, I broke the law.”
Appearing on "The Today Show" in 2012, Townshend revealed that part of his goal in going to the child porn websites was to prove his belief that banks and credit card companies were complicit in the child pornography trade industry. Townsend said, “I was trying to prove that credit card companies were taking money for child porn websites. I didn’t enter a website, I didn’t look at images. A couple of us were campaigning and we gave it up in the end because it seemed futile.”
But there was one thing that resulted from the police investigation into child porn charges that Townshend said saved his life. “Just for the record, my arrest was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It probably saved my life,” explained Townshend.
He said that while the police were going through his computers, he decided to do something he had been putting off for years: a long overdue colonoscopy. His father had died from colon cancer, and it is a hereditary disease.
The colonoscopy found a cancerous polyp in his bowel. The doctor said it was so advanced that, if Townshend had not had the procedure done, he would have been dead within 6 months. For Pete Townshend, his arrest on child porn charges actually saved his life.
Researching topics on the Internet can be risky. Pete Townshend was doing research for his autobiography and searched child porn as he was writing about his own experiences with sexual abuse, and the full investigation supported his claim.
Be careful what you search for on the Internet. I onced googled the 90s band, The Goo Goo Dolls, and I must have been slightly off in my search because immediately a porn site popped up! It wasn’t pretty! After several hours I realized that it was not the website for the band. Just kidding!