Thursday, February 4, 2010

Townshend Follow-Up

OK, found this AP video from today's Super Bowl press conference where Pete defends himself.

Check it out:

http://video.ap.org/?f=AP&pid=iFv0IkH1SZqj6Ojgj_Tx4uKAvO0N2cLA

WHO DAT? LET TOWNSHEND PLAY

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of The Who and the band’s primary songwriter/guitarist Pete Townshend.


So yes, I know that The Who and Townshend are performing the Super Bowl’s halftime show on Sunday.

And yes, I also know that two – count them, two – supposed child advocacy groups in South Florida, where the big game is being hosted, are making a stink over Townshend’s 2003 arrest for suspicion of possessing indecent images of children. They did the same thing, but with less media coverage, when the Who was selected for the Kennedy Center Honors in 2008. This time it's getting more traction because the Super Bowl is a much bigger event than the Kennedy Center Honors, and you've got the specialized sports media covering it along with entertianment media.

First off, I have a two-year-old daughter, so do you think I would go around sporting Who T-shirts if I thought Townshend was a pedophile?

And do you think the NFL and CBS would have hired The Who if they believed this as well?

Obviously, I can never really know what went on with Townshend’s case, but there are several known, established facts that can be examined to draw conclusions.

An examination of the facts:

Was he on the U.K.’s sex offender registry as the South Florida protesters claim?
Yes, by admitting that he’d used a credit card once to access a site that advertised child pornography images, he was given a caution and placed on the sex registry for five years (2003-2008).


Did police find any child sex/abuse images on his computers or in his personal property?
No. Police seized 14 computers from Townshend’s collection at his home and office and found nothing. Here is a statement from Scotland Yard, which conducted the investigation: "After four months of investigation by officers from Scotland Yard's child protection group, it was established that Mr Townshend was not in possession of any downloaded child abuse images. He has fully co-operated with the investigation."

Was he convicted of any crime?
No.

Did he break the law?
Apparently so, as looking at such illicit images is illegal in the U.K. whether accidental or intentional, hence the formal caution by police and the requirement of being placed on the U.K. sex offender registry. (More on this later.)


Let’s go a little deeper.

The main argument against Townshend, besides the sex offender registry, which has now expired but can’t be disputed because it is a cut-and-dried fact, is that cynical people don’t buy his claim that he was doing research for a campaign against child porn and Internet porn and abuse in general. Furthermore, Townshend claims that he was sexually abused as a child while in the care of his maternal grandmother (who had mental issues) and part of his research was for an autobiography he was writing. Where is the autobiography, detractors ask? He has secured an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for it, but it has yet to be published. In 2003, he said he’d been working on the autobiography for seven years. Townshend in recent years has been a notoriously slow worker (it took The Who 24 years to release a new album and he hasn't released a new solo album since 1993), and also notorious for announcing projects that never come to fruition. The list of failed Townshend/Who-related projects is nearly longer than the band’s actual discography.

My guess is he is working on the autobiography but it became too voluminous and it’s been put aside as he wrote material for The Who’s 2006 album, ``Endless Wire,’’ the band toured internationally in 2004, 2006-2007 and some in 2008 and 2009, and as he worked on a new rock opera entitled ``Floss.”

But back to the anti-Townshend camp: Detractors cite ``research’’ as a common excuse that pedophiles use to rationalize their habits. I can buy that it sounds like a flimsy defense, too. Yet, wouldn’t you think a pedophile would have amassed a collection of kiddie porn and police would have found something, anything? If he had a kiddie porn collection, it must have been the old-fashioned hard-copy kind that he kept locked away somewhere that authorities could not find.

By comparison, look at the case of fellow U.K. rocker Gary Glitter. Glitter was arrested in 1997 when he took his laptop into a computer shop to be worked on and technicians discovered child pornography images on his hard drive. Authorities subsequently found that he had downloaded thousands of these images and he sentenced to four months in jail.

OK, I’ll play Devil’s Advocate. Prior to Townshend’s arrest, his name was leaked to the British tabloids as being part of a child porn sting. In fact, he held a press conference a few days before being arrested to state that he is not a pedophile and to lay out his defense. Hearing that authorities were hot on his heels, could he have quickly erased his computers’ hard drives and wiped away all traces and evidence of child pornography? Or could he have just taken the offending machines and chunked them in the Thames or hired someone to take them away and destroy them?
(I have asked a computer expert/IT geek about this and will update this blog once I get an answer.)


Also, don’t you think someone would have come forward, ala Michael Jackson, and claimed that Townshend molested them, sent them dirty pictures, or fondled their children even if it was just an attempt to extort money? And what about Townshend’s own three offspring – don’t pedophiles often victimize their own brood? Why haven't they come forward with allegations?

The reason I wrote this blog entry is because I’ve been infuriated by the lousy journalism by supposedly reputable media sources, including abc.com, cbs.com and aol.com covering this bubbling controversy leading up to the Super Bowl. The latest reports stem from two groups, Child Abuse Watch and Protect Our Children, peppering the area near Sun Life Stadium, where Sunday's game will be played, with postcards warning that Townshend is coming to the area.

Check out this attempt to be snarky item from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

"Who survivors Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are facing a slew of protests over their plans to perform halftime at the Super Bowl Sunday. Protect Our Children has been throwing pamphlets all around Miami's Sun Life Stadium featuring a grinnin' Pete above the headline SEX OFFENDER AT LARGE. Another outfit, Child Abuse Watch, sent a letter to the NFL demanding Pete be sent packing. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said the Who will be destroying guitars and amps as scheduled, if Pete, 64, can still manage it."

The ``slew'' of protest are by the same two groups - Protect Our Children and Child Abuse Watch - and two men, Evin Daly and Kevin Gillick.

And, for good measure, The Who hasn't destroyed stage gear and instruments as part of its regular act since the early '70s.


If the lack of fact-checking and blatant sensationalism wasn’t bad enough, it’s the idiotic user comments that got me really fired up, such as the ones calling him a convicted child pornographer. (We’ve already covered this ground; Townshend was convicted of nothing.)

Here’s one that I responded to on Entertainment Weekly’s site:

• Iolanthe

Mon 01/04/10 11:51 PM

He is not a good man. He has a long history of trying to get close to children and “troubled teens’’ through charities. Classic pedo.

My response: By that reasoning, then Who band-mate Roger Daltrey also fits the profile because he tries to get close to teens by raising mega-millions for the Teenage Cancer Trust, which builds care units for teenagers being treated for cancer.

Then there are the anonymous posters claiming that Townshend’s admission of accessing the site containing child porn, but not downloading anything – was how he avoided being charged and jailed. OK, I can’t even follow the logic on that one - ``yes, your honor, I am guilty.’’ Judge: “OK, thanks for being honest. Here’s your get-out-of-jail-free card.”

I must admit, this is a very weird case and it appears many facts are missing and obscured, and the timing of how it played out in the public eye is odd. Townshend hasn’t really addressed it, except talking about how difficult the ordeal was, and I swear I remember, but can’t find now, where he stated that as part of the official caution he received that he could not talk about the case.

Fanhouse’s David Whitley wrote a blog dissecting this brouhaha – here’s the link: http://nfl.fanhouse.com/2009/12/29/who-are-you-to-ban-townshend-from-super-bowl/
- and he probably addresses it better than I am attempting to do here.

But that credit card access bit does confound me; why on earth would a person as famous as Townshend use an easily traceable credit card on a child porn Web site?

According to an investigative piece in PC Pro Magazine (that stands for Personal Computer not Political Correctness), Townshend appears to have confessed to something he did not do.

Here is an excerpt from that investigation by journalist Duncan Campbell:

"Police never had any evidence that the websites concerned...had anything to do with children.
But the police didn’t tell Townshend that their entire evidence against him was a single entry made on Landslide on 15 May 1999 for the purchase of the Alberto website. Under pressure of the media filming of the raid, Townshend appears to have confessed to something he didn’t do."
But he has admitted to seeing child pornography images online, at first by accident, and being terribly disturbed by what he saw. He’s never denied this, actually. And in January 2002, a full year before his arrest, he posted an essay on his Web site entitled ``A Different Bomb’’ that blasted child pornography. This essay, variously, has been used to support his innocence – and argue his guilt.

Here’s my interpretation of what happened: Having seen how easy it was to access disturbing images of child porn online, Townshend, in his rock star arrogance, decided to take the fight into his own hands. There is evidence that he reported his activity to the authorities and to the Internet Watch Foundation. Furthermore, having read and seen many interviews with him through the years, his memory of specific dates and instances is spotty – like on the Royal Albert Hall DVD from 2000 he claims that the song ``Relay’’ was released in 1974, when in fact it was released in 1972; and in a recent interview by Billboard, he says that the 2004 song “Real Good Looking Boy’’ featured The Who’s late bassist John Entwistle, when in fact Entwistle died in 2002, and Greg Lake was brought in to play on the session. So, I think, like the PC Pro piece asserts in its investigation, Townshend recalled looking at the illicit images but couldn’t pinpoint when, where, if he paid for it, etc. and the cops say, “we have your credit card info,’’ so he says, “OK, you got me.” That is simplistic, but I’m guessing it went something like that.

For a brief timeline events and other resources related to this topic, check out the site http://www.petetownshendisinnocent.com/.
The conclusions you can draw from all of this:

- Townshend was very stupid – and arrogant - to think he was above the law

- If he’s a perv, he’s a very, very clever one and was able to construct a well-calculated back story to cover his tracks again and again; and he was also smart enough to erase all damning evidence on his computers and also convince everyone around him that he was not deviant

- We’ll never know what really happened until authorities unlock their vaults and release more info about the case; Or until Townshend can reconstruct what happened and relay that to the public

- The supposed child advocacy groups in South Florida have not been joined by any like-minded national or international groups in the effort to ban Pete Townshend from the Super Bowl

It’s all kind of scary, really, as I worried about the research I did for this blog entry and whether the powers-that-be monitoring my computer use would send up red flags for using the search terms ``Townshend Super Bowl’’ repeatedly as I sought to gather news, and some of the other online discussions I came across that I dared not click onto.

So, unitl further facts and evidence come to light to blow my stance, I'll keep on riding ``The Magic Bus.''