Pete Townshend, guitarist and co-founder of The Who, was cleared of charges of possessing child pornography earlier this week.
London’s Metropolitan police announced that Townshend “was not in possession of any downloaded child abuse images,” but because he visited a web site in 1999 that contained such material, he was placed on a national register of sex offenders for the next five years.
In a statement, Townshend admitted that he was wrong to access such a web site, however he was doing research for his autobiography. He maintained that he has campaigned against child pornography in the past and had no “nefarious purpose” in visiting the questionable web site.
“As I made clear at the outset, I accessed the site because of my concerns at the shocking material readily available in 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.”
