Child porn arrest saved my life says Pete Townshend
ROCK star Pete Townshend reveals today how his arrest on child pornography charges saved his life after it indirectly led him to discover he had cancer.
The Who guitarist speaks candidly about the episode for the first time in The Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine.
It came in 2003 when Townshend, now 74, was arrested for using his credit card to access a website offering child pornography, though no images were downloaded.
He accepted a police caution and was placed on the Sex Offenders Register for five years after saying he was trying to prove big banks were complicit in the childporn industry.
He tells Event: ‘Just for the record, my arrest was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It probably saved my life.’
Townshend had kept putting off having a check for bowel cancer after his father died from the hereditary disease. ‘I had a cancerous polyp in my bowel,’ he says.
‘While I was waiting for the police to go through my computers, I decided to have that long-postponed colonoscopy. The doctor showed me the polyp. He said, “This would have killed you in six months.” So it sort of saved my life.’
Townshend, who survived abuse himself as a child and is about to release a novel about sex, drugs and rock ’ n’ roll, says that the stigma of his brush with the law still haunts him.
‘It’s something I think about a lot,’ he says. ‘I’m very much involved in supporting charities that deal with the consequences of the sexual abuse of children, including those that are photographed. ‘So no, I don’t think it has passed.’ He says it also gave him a more realistic idea of his own limitations: ‘The arrest saved my life in other ways too because it freed me from this notion that I could fix everything. The arrogance of the charity work, the arrogance of the mentor, my white knight syndrome.’
He turned to campaigning as a way of dealing with his own abuse, suffered at the hands of his grandmother, from teachers and in the Sea Scouts.
He adds: ‘ I feel released from that. I’ve been able to let it go. It’s what old ladies say when they have a heart attack, “God has ways of slowing you down.” This was something I needed.’
Of the original Who line-up, only Townshend and frontman Roger Daltrey, 75, survive. Drummer Keith Moon died of a drugs overdose in 1978 aged 32 and bassist John Entwistle died in 2002 aged 57 from a heart attack. The band are about to release a new album next month called Who.
Townshend puts the band’s incredible longevity – 55 years and counting – down to its faithful cadre of male fans, rather than ‘fickle’ teenage girls.
‘They still roll up to see us… and they’re incredibly loyal.
‘It’s like they’re following a crap football team and they don’t care how badly we do.’