Pete Townshend: Super Bowl Pariah?

Jan. 29, 2010 — -- Pete Townshend may be one of the greatest guitar players of all time, but more than one organization wants to stop him from strumming along with The Who at the Super Bowl in Miami.

The reason? A past incident with child pornography.

The 64-year-old rocker was reprimanded by British police in 2003 and placed on country's sex offenders' register for five years after he admitted that he paid to view images on a child porn Web site in 1999.

According to Townshend, it was all in the name of research: in a 2003 statement, he said that while it was wrong for him to visit the site, he did so because he needed information for a campaign he was launching against Internet child porn and for his autobiography. (In the past, he has said he believes he was sexually abused as a child.)

In Townshend's 1972 rock opera, "Tommy," the title character is sexually abused by his Uncle Ernie. In 2002, Townshend wrote a report about child porn and posted it on his Web site. He compared the path to free "pedophilic imagery" to a "free line of cocaine at a decadent cocktail party: only the strong willed or terminally uncurious can resist." Townshend subsequently removed the report from his site; it still lives on TheSmokingGun.com.

After a four-month-long investigation in 2003, in which police examined more than a dozen computers Townshend used, officials decided neither motive served as a defense to access the images. As part of an official cautioning procedure, Townshend's fingerprints, photograph, and a DNA sample were taken and he was placed on Britain's sex offender registry for five years.Protect Our Children has distributed 1,500 of these flyers throughout Miami.

Daly added, "Even someone looking for a job as a groundskeeper at Land Shark Stadium wouldn't get hired with a sex offender status in his past -- why then does Townshend?"