Caught Up In the Web

By Richard Lacayo Sunday, Jan. 19, 2003
    • The first song Pete Townshend ever wrote for the Who was called I Can't Explain. The title seemed particularly apt last week, after police in London questioned him for 80 minutes on suspicion of possessing child pornography taken from the Internet. Actually, Townshend insists that he can explain. One of rock's great human conundrums — aggressive softy, poetic guitar buster — Townshend has admitted that he once used his credit card to enter a child-porn site. But he maintains that he went there only because he is researching pedophilia for his autobiography, a book that he says will deal with his suspicion that he was molested in early childhood.

    "I have looked at child-porn sites maybe three or four times in all, the front pages and previews," he told a London tabloid. "I have only entered once using a credit card, and I have never downloaded." If it's true that Townshend, 57, was sexually abused as a child, that could help explain his best music, which reached into reserves of fear and rage that many other rock musicians only pretend to possess. As both a head-banging rocker and the beseeching man-child who wrote, "See me, feel me/Touch me, heal me"--for Tommy, about a boy who has been molested — was Townshend making a lifelong reply to some primal outrage?


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    British law exempts people who possess child porn for "legitimate" reasons. If he had been arrested in the U.S., however, it might not matter whether Townshend was using the images for research. In 1997 an American journalist was indicted and later pleaded guilty when a judge did not accept that he was sending and receiving over the Net pornographic pictures of children while researching a story about online pedophiles. Operation Avalanche, the investigation that netted Townshend, began in the U.S. in spring 1999 when a postal inspector came across Landslide, a husband-and-wife operation out of Fort Worth, Texas, that offered access to a variety of child-porn websites for $29.95 a month.

    It turned out to be the largest commercial child-porn operation ever uncovered. In September 1999 law-enforcement officials raided the operators' house and seized their computers, which held information on about 250,000 paying subscribers worldwide. Postal inspectors, who arrested about 120 of the heaviest users in the U.S., forwarded the Landslide information to Interpol headquarters in Lyons, France. Interpol in turn identified buyers in 60 countries, including 7,272 in Britain. Some 1,200 have been arrested there so far, including Townshend.

    Though Townshend, who is divorced and the father of three children, has not been charged with a crime, he signed an agreement to return to answer any further questions from the police. Last year, according to thesmokinggun.com , Townshend posted a lengthy treatise on his website describing how he had stumbled across a child-porn site while surfing the Web, was horrified by what he saw and made up his mind to help stop it.

    Townshend's essay lends support to his claim that he has been campaigning against child porn for some time. But investigators will want to know if he was aware when he posted the treatise that the porn site he had visited had been busted. The Landslide trial in August 2001 was well publicized. Attorney General John Ashcroft himself announced it to the press. Townshend's Web account could be a self-serving effort to pre-empt suspicion. It could also turn out that his motives are more mixed than even he knows. If he was abused as a child, could he separate his revulsion at child pornography from his curiosity about it? Does Townshend saying "I have never downloaded" sound too much like Bill Clinton saying he never inhaled? Or is he being unfairly singled out by authorities who are using him to show that their crackdown is working?