“What i did was insane”, said Pete Townshend while admitting to accessing child pornography website

Pete Townshend, the guitarist of pop band The Who, has admitted to have paid to gain access to child pornography website in 2003, and said that British banks were also part of the conspiracy in reaping profits from the paedophile crimes.

Defending his decision to have paid $7 (£4.3) to access images of abused youngsters and describing his actions as “insane”, Pete Townshend said he was trying to investigate the industry. This was the first time in nine years that the rocker spoke out since 2003 when he was warned by police and put on the sex offender’s register.

Pete Townshend maintained that he was looking at the website only while conducting ”research” for a campaign against internet porn involving children.

In an interview with The Times, which is serialising his memoir ‘Who I Am’, Townshend said, “It’s White Knight Syndrome. You want to be the one that’s seen to be helping. I had experienced something creepy as a child, so you imagine, what if I was a girl of nine or 10 and my uncle had raped me every week? I felt I had an understanding, and I could help.”

Townshend said that he intended to show that child abuse has a financial chain that runs from Russian orphanages to British banks by paying a £7 charge for a child pornography site, which he cancelled immediately. When police confiscated his computers and files and ran through them they found nothing incriminating, but the damage to his image had already been done.

When asked why he took so long to come out with a public statement, he said, ”Because there was no sense of ‘the truth will out’. I’ve had the misfortune to read online comments where I’m judged as a paedophile because I’ve got a big nose.”

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