Townshend placed on sex offenders register

May 8, 2003
Pete Townshend will be placed on the sex offenders' register for five years after accessing a child pornography website.

Townshend, 57, was cautioned today by police for accessing the images and his fingerprints, photograph and a DNA sample will be taken by police.

The Who guitarist was arrested in January as part of the Operation Ore investigation into accessing child porn on the internet. He admitted using his credit card to access images but said they were for "research" for a book he was writing.

Police said that it was not a defence "to access these images for research or out of curiosity."

His official police caution was for "accessing a website containing child abuse images" after the investigation found he was not in possession of any downloaded images of child abuse.

Scotland Yard said in a statement: "At 12.00 today at Kingston police station, the musician Pete Townshend was formally cautioned for accessing a website containing child abuse images in 1999.

"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."

Townshend admitted that he was wrong to access the website. But he insisted police had “unconditionally accepted” his explanation that he was looking at the site as research for his “campaign” against child pornography. He said in a statement: “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. “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,” he said. “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.” Operation Ore is an FBI-led crackdown on internet child pornography. Townshend was one of The Who's four founding members, along with bassist John Entwistle, singer Roger Daltrey and drummer Keith Moon. Moon died in 1978 and Entwistle died last year.