"In Google it is possible to reach a questionable array of offered sex sites with a very few keystrokes, and without typing a single word. The pathway to ?free? paedophilic imagery is - as it were - laid out like a free line of cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally uncurious can resist."
Pete Townshend, guitarist with the Who, and one of rock's most respected veterans, wrote these words in January 2002, in an online essay titled "A Different Bomb." The piece was written after the suicide of a close friend who had suffered childhood sexual abuse, was posted on his own Website, but later removed on the advice of his attorneys. Early in the emotional self-revelation, he describes his shock as when, during a Web search for details about the adoption of Russian orphans, he accidentally stumbled onto a child porn site.
"As a charity fund-raiser (and, I suppose, philanthropist to boot) I wanted to support the work of such (Russian) 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 and 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 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 to book.
"Then I thought twice about it...I spoke to a lawyer instead. He advised me to do nothing. He advised me to that I most certainly should not download the image as ?evidence.? So I did as he advised. Nothing."
A year later, in January 2003, a very different bomb fell on Pete Townshend himself when he was detained and questioned by Scotland Yard detectives from the anti-child porn Operation Ore. Ore is the British offshoot of Operation Avalanche, the massive U.S. Department of Justice child pornography offensive, that, in August 2001, after a two-year investigation, had successfully jailed a Texas computer consultant, Thomas Reedy, for 1,335 years, and his wife Janis for 14 years. The Reedy's company, Landslide Productions, was described by a spokesman for the combined FBI, Customs Service, and Dallas Police Department task force as "an online porn empire stretching across three continents, and the largest that it had ever discovered". AVN Online reported that "the sites themselves were run by operators in Russia and Indonesia, for whom arrest warrants had been issued. Landslide provided credit card verification for the child porn sites, according to court records."
BBC World News, in November 2002, described how Landslide was nailed when Federal agents seized and decrypted company records, including the credit card numbers of up to a quarter of a million subscribers. "Once the authorities cracked the code, it was a relatively simple job of tracking down the owners of the cards"; who presumably needed little prompting to roll over on Landslide. Unfortunately, Landslide's operation was not confined to the U.S. The Feds "told authorities in London that at least 7,000 of the pedophiles linked to Reedy were probably in the U.K. In America, the breakthrough was hailed as a major success in child protection, but the reality is that the scale of the investigation is overwhelming. Officers have already appealed to the (British) government for emergency funding."
Sensing a celebrity sex scandal, the media had gone into wildly inaccurate action when Townshend was held for questioning. Although there has been no official statement that Townshend's credit card number came from the Landslide files, CNN's Connie Chung linked the two in her January 14 newscast. Other news services misinterpreted the wording of the statute; "making and possessing indecent images of children, and of incitement to distribute them" to mean that Pete was actually under suspicion of taping and selling kiddie porn, an error that forced a retraction and apology from the Associated Press. Even in the matter of his arrest, most got it wrong. In fact, Townshend was not technically arrested. He voluntarily allowed himself to be taken into custody, and gave up his computers for examination, after stories had been leaked by sources close to Scotland Yard that "an un-named musician was among people identified by U.S. detectives investigating a pay-per-view Website." Further leaks promised 1,500 arrests in the U.K. including teachers, priests, police officers, a judge, and a member of the British parliament. On Saturday, January 11, Townshend's lawyer, John Cohen, told reporters that he and his client had "met with police this morning and said that we should meet... by mutual agreement."
Townshend then made a far less impassioned statement than "A Different Bomb." "I am not a pedophile. I have never entered chat rooms on the internet to converse with children. I have felt for a long time that it is part of my duty, knowing what I know, to act as a vigilante. I have, to the contrary, been shocked, angry, and vocal (especially on my Website) about the explosion of advertised pedophilic images on the Internet. I have been writing my childhood autobiography for the past seven years. I believe I was sexually abused between the age of five and six-and-a-half when in the care of my maternal grandmother who was mentally ill at the time. I cannot remember clearly what happened, but my creative work tends to throw up nasty shadows - particularly in Tommy. 'Anger and vengeance'. Some of the things I have seen on the Internet have informed my book which I hope will be published later this year, and which will make clear to the public 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 pedophilic pornography attractive. I hope you will be able to see that I am sincerely disturbed by the sexual abuse of children."
Roger Daltrey, the other surviving co-founder of The Who, sprang to his bandmate's defense. "My gut instinct is that he is not a pedophile, and I know him better than most. Pete may be a little naive in the way he has gone about it, but I believe his intentions are good."
Despite Townshend seemingly baring his soul, and his good intentions, the media furor continued. Where acid freaks had once searched his lyrics for the secrets of the universe, now journalists studied them for a smoking pedophile. "Fiddle About", the song from Tommy in which the deaf, dumb, and blind hero is molested by his wicked Uncle Ernie, was the first under the microscope, until someone with half a brain pointed out that it was written by John Entwhistle. "Rough Boys" followed with its strange lines "I want to buy you leather" and "I want to kiss and bite you", and also "Pictures Of Lily" and "How Can You Do It Alone" that can easily be interpreted as being about masturbation. The media, however, missed the 1993 album Psychoderelict, the only new music from the less and less prolific Townshend in the last ten years, with its plot about an aging rock star ruined by a ravening media after an affair with an underage girl. "A Different Bomb" also flew rapidly around the Internet, and the essay was quoted in print and read on television.
In the United Kingdom, the Director of Public Prosecutions has up to a statutory year to bring charges in the Townshend case. Before any court hearing, Pete will face judgment by the media and public opinion, and much of that judgment would seem to be based on whether or not we believe, like Daltrey, that his intentions were good. Over the years, I have crossed paths with Pete Townshend a number of times. In the ?60s and ?70s, we got high and argued about ideology and the direction of the counter culture, and in the ?80s, we worked together on a book of mine he intended to publish. I like and respect him, but, deeper than that, and for me and most rock fans between the age of 30 and 60, the music of The Who is irrevocably interwoven with personal memories. We cannot just put aside the anarchic energy of the young Who smashing their instruments and singing for their generation, or the roar of the crowd at later stadium concerts; "It's only teenage wasteland!"
The last time I saw The Who was live on TV, the Madison Square Garden, post-9/11 concert for the cops and firemen, where The Who proved a vibrant life-affirming force at an event that had the triple purpose of raising funds, providing a party for the emergency workers who had been spending their time in a close approximation of Hell, and to prove to the world that New Yorkers were not afraid to assemble in large numbers and enjoy themselves. Right now, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see Pete exonerated of any wrongdoing. He always impressed me as one of the most morally and intellectually honest rock stars, and a seeker after truth well past the point where seeking ceased to be comfortable. He was always totally open about his drinking and his drugs, his belief in the teachings of Mehr Baba, and what he considered his occasional homosexual impulses. As one of his friends, Martin Lewis, commented, "There was never a whisper of anything like this about Pete Townshend ever before. He's a very straightforward, honest man. He wears his heart on his sleeve. He also wears his demons on his sleeve. When he's had problems with drink or drugs, he's been up front about it. It's been in his music"
If Pete were given a legal clean slate, it might remove this poisonous cloud that has suddenly seemed to taint so many of our yesterdays; all the nights, the faces, places, and events, all the significant junctures in our lives where a record by The Who happened to be playing. I received much the same response when I called a number of veteran rockers back home in London who knew Pete from back in the day. All felt the same way. Something had been lost or tarnished, and would never be quite the same. "I gotta give Pete the benefit of the doubt, but what the hell was he doing laying down his credit card?"
"There are no secrets in rock & roll. If Pete had been swagging young boys up to his hotel room, somebody would have talked sooner or later. Or slapped him stupid. There are a lot of guys who get very violent when there are kids involved."
"A lot of big stars get it into their heads that the rules for us regular mortals don't apply to them. And they get themselves surrounded by flunkies and nobody has the balls to tell them, 'listen, Pete, old son, that's a really bad idea.?"
"If you ask me, it's the Catholic church trying to get the heat off all those child molesting priests."
The general summation was, "I figure it all depends on whether people buy his story."
Possibly the most disturbing part was that none of these old buddies and rock & roll barflies wanted to talk for accreditation. "I don't think so, man. I don't want to get on any kind of list."
In this sad new century, we have obviously started living in a culture where the possibility that we might be put on a list is now as frightening a prospect as it was in the McCarthy era. The investigative journalist in me was ready to sit down at the computer and attempt to replicate Townshend's accidental child porn hit. But then I backed off. I didn't want to be on any list myself. Instead, I talked to Joan Irvine of Adult Sites Against Child Pornography (ASACP), the industry watchdog group that will shortly be granting a seal of approval to adult sites that can demonstrate no underage models or performers are being used. I asked her how plausible she found Townshend's claims.
"You can encounter pop-ups that direct one to the home pages that offer images of children and use keywords like 'lolita? to access than. To get to what he describes by complete accident would be hard, but not impossible. I would think that someone of Pete Townshend's visibility could have contacted authorities and told them that he was going to do this kind of research and sought some kind of official sanction and official contacts. He's high-profile enough that if he called Scotland Yard and said ?I'm doing research on this, can you put me in touch with someone?" They would have been happy to help.?"
The possibility of accidentally accessing an illegal porn site was confirmed by Gary Delabate, the producer of the Howard Stern show, who recalled on-air the time he found himself on the home page of an underage site. "I was doing a search for information on some boy band for my kids. I was looking and looking and I suddenly found myself on a site offering pictures of 12-year-old boys."
Much of the plausibility of Townshend's defense seems a matter of "What did he do and when did he do it?" If his credit card number came up in the Landslide bust, the implication is that he paid for a subscription a number of years ago, and could have had over a year to clean up his cyberspace and write "A Different Bomb" to cover his tracks, in what Brian Doherty, in an editorial on the Reason Website called "a devilishly clever attempt to lay the groundwork for an alibi a year in advance", but then went on to comment, "Those who want to hang him will be quick to believe that. But Townshend has always been known for a disarming, even if often foolhardy, openness."
Pete Townshend is well liked, and maintains a healthy credit balance of good will, despite the flaws and contradictions in his statements. He may, however, need more than good will and a foolhardy openness to make it through the next few months with his reputation intact. Scotland Yard has yet to tip its hand, but should Pete's involvement prove more substantial than he has so far admitted, this credit will rapidly erode. He will also have to face the always-present potential for hysteria that surrounds any case where a combination of children and sex is involved.
In the 1980s, the McMartin pre-school case created a lynch mob mass psychosis in Manhattan Beach, California when an over zealous Assistant D.A. tried to build a child abuse case on the original testimony of a paranoid schizophrenic, and the dubious investigative methods of an operation know as Children's Institute International. In the 1990s, we had the Michael Jackson scandal and the morbid fascination surrounding the death of JonBenet Ramsay. In this new century, we are confronted with Internet child porn and the clouds that hang over Pete Townshend, Paul Reubens, and actor Jeffrey Jones. Any abuse of children can create a rage like an atavistic imperative to protect the young of the tribe; violent and easily triggered. Pete may not be helping his own case by invoking that rage by making reference to his "anger and vengeance towards the mentally ill people who find pedophilic pornography attractive", or attempting to present himself as the Witchfinder General of the Internet.
An overwhelming majority refuse so much as to discuss the idea that draconian laws may not be the only way to prevent the sexual exploitation of the young, or that not everyone who logs onto a child porn site may be an active - or even potential - pedophile; just stupidly curious, mistaken, or engaging in some very ill-advised research or experimentation. Among the small minority who continued to question was journalist Rod Liddle, writing in the London newspaper The Guardian. "How absurd the law is. But at least it is an appropriate reflection of our collective neurosis and confusion about pedophiles generally. The one laudable and necessary aim - to protect children from abuse - has become warped by our consuming, obsessive hatred for those who find children sexually attractive. There is no causal link between viewing child porn and abusing children. And even if there were, it would not be sufficient, within the philosophy of our judicial system, to simply assume that an unpleasant penchant for the former presupposes guilt of the latter."
And Amy Adler, in the Columbia Law Review, wonders if our obsession with child porn is creating a climate in which kids are regarded as sex objects. "The legal tool we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse threatens to enslave us all by constructing a world in which we are enthralled - anguished, enticed, bombarded - by the spectacle of the sexual child."
It is my sincere hope that we have no future shocks in the case of Pete Townshend. Recent times have not been good in rock & roll. Death has claimed Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, Joe Strummer of The Clash, and John Entwhistle. I would hate to see Pete Townshend, one of the few true rock & roll geniuses, brought down like some post-millennium Oscar Wilde. Already the photograph has been widely circulated in the media showing the furious guitar god reduced to a sad, somewhat creepy, frightened old man in the back of a police car. For me, that too was a pornographic image, and I want to see no more like it, even if he may have brought it on himself.
Mick Farren is an Englishman living in L.A. He is a journalist, novelist, recording artist, and all-around troublemaker. He has written songs for bands, including Motorhead and Metallica, and he made legal history by defending himself at a lengthy U.K. obscenity trial for publishing the work of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb. You can read Mick's musings on porn, the Web, and other subjects in his monthly column for AVN Online magazine. For more, visit www.thanatosoft.freeserve.co.uk.
