Townshend 'warned of net danger'

By JOHN INNES, Glasgow Record

Jerry Hall, the supermodel and actress, revealed last night how she and rock star Pete Townshend had spoken at length at a dinner party in his home about the dangers of child pornography on the internet.

In a statement publicly defending him, she said that he had advised her on how best to protect her children from inadvertently gaining access to such websites, and insisted that he did not match the profile of a paedophile.

Townshend, 57, who admitted using his credit card to enter a website advertising child pornography, claimed he had done so "purely to see what was there" and was conducting research for a book he plans to publish this year. At the dinner party, in October 2001, he also expressed his fears as a public figure speaking out on such a sensitive subject, Hall said.

Hall, who has known Townshend for 22 years, said: "Since 1992, I have campaigned for both public and private child welfare foundations both in raising public awareness and funds. Pete Townshend is an avid supporter of these causes.

"Over the course of our friendship we also have discussed his belief that he too was abused as a child. He also spoke about his pending autobiography and the difficulty he had in coming to terms with this aspect of his childhood.

"Pete Townshend is the least likely profile of a child abuser it is possible to construct, and that is because he isn’t one."

Townshend was yesterday condemned by internet watchdogs who dismissed his frank explanation for illegally entering the website as "no excuse".

Campaigners argued that his intentions were at best "incredibly foolhardy, naive and misguided", if, as he says, he was conducting research for a book he hopes to publish later in the year.

Mark Stephens, a lawyer with Finers Stephens Innocent who founded the internet Watch Foundation, said: "It is wrong-headed, misguided and illegal to look at or download or even to pay to download paedophiliac material and if you do so, you are likely to go to prison.

"Pete Townshend has admitted a criminal offence and this goes to mitigation and it’s a matter for a court to accept if he was merely doing research or something worse."

The Who star - idolised by fans since the 1960s - said that he had been shocked and angered by the explosion of advertised paedophilic images on the internet and had been curious.

Mr Stephens, who set up the IWF ten years ago and is now vice-chairman, said there were people employed across the globe to combat child pornography on the internet and whose job it was to monitor the content. It was not, he added, the role of a member of public such as Townshend to investigate themselves.

British police are pursuing their largest-ever operation into online paedophilia and child pornography. About 1,300 people have been arrested.

Jennifer Watkins, an intimate friend of Eminem from their difficult school days together, spills the beans on the rapper superstar's complicate love life in a new book, Cleaning Out My Closet. (In the pic above - Eminem with wife Kim, left, and minem with co-star Brittany in the movie, right).

Watkins, 30, the mother of three, was a longtime close friend of Eminem's wife, Kim Mathers. She often cared for the couple's child, Hailie, who became close with her own children.

Understandly, Eminem cut her off his life when news about the book first surfaced. He won't talk to her children and has changed his telephone number and the security code to the gates outside of his Manchester Estates home in Clinton Township.

The slim, 117-page tome, with its intimate details on the rapper's love life and behind-the-scenes stories, is a first-hand testimony on Eminem's off-screen romance with his partner in "8 Mile", Brittany Murphy.

The shocking scoop of the book, that goes on sale today via amazon.com, is that Eminem was caught bedding his co-star by his own daughter, six-year-old Hailie, who then told her mother Kim: "Mummy...last night Daddy got into bed with Brittany." According to the book, the pair became such an item that they would even cuddle up in bed and fall asleep with little Hailie—which led to their undoing.

British tabloid "News of the World" bought the rights for the first serialization, and these are the details:

Eminem's close friend Jennifer Watkins, who helped out as Hailie's nanny, told the News of the World: "Whenever Kim was away anywhere, she'd phone up Hailie to find out what Daddy had been up to.

"Hailie told her that she'd been in bed with Brittany when Daddy came home and fell asleep in the bed with them. Kim threw a fit. She screamed at Marshall down the phone, ‘How could you have that trash in bed with you and my daughter!'

"Marshall had been desperate to keep his lover a secret from Kim, because even though they were divorced at the time, they had joint custody of Hailie—and he was terrified Kim would go back to court and have her taken away from him.

"Marshall knew it was no use denying the affair so he tried to explain that he'd come home dog-tired and found Brittany snuggled up with Hailie. He climbed into bed without waking them up and making Brittany leave the bed.

"But that was the first time Kim had proof that he and Brittany had even been sharing the same bed, and she was mad as hell.If Kim had actually caught them in bed together there'd have been blood on the walls.

"She doesn't fight like a woman. She fights like a man." 8 Mile, in which Eminem plays a Detroit loser who uses his rapping talent in an attempt to break free from his downtrodden life, became increasingly complicated off-screen.

He is also rumoured to have had a fling with Kim Basinger, who plays his mum.

But 30-year-old Jennifer first realised how serious he was about Brittany when he took her to an Elton John concert in Detroit, where Eminem has his real-life home.

"I also knew Marshall's Aunt Betty had been playing matchmaker with them," she said. "But all he would say to begin with was, ‘She's really very sweet and cool to hang out with'.

"But next weekend I stopped by Marshall's house and she was there. I introduced myself and Brittany jumped up and down and hugged me. Then she kissed her hand and touched my forehead with it! I didn't know what to think of this chick. Was she for real?

"But her personality was so bubbly you couldn't help but smile.

"While they were making 8 Mile I went into his trailer on set to use his bathroom. And I found Brittany had stuck notes all over his mirror with little lipstick kisses on them. A while later we were all in Marshall's house and the two of them disappeared. As I walked past his indoor swimming pool I noticed the door was open and the lights were out, but I could still see them kissing passionately in the corner.

"It was after that that Marshall finally admitted they were lovers, but he told me to keep it a secret from Kim." But just a few weeks later, with that phone call to little Hailie, Kim knew everything.

Following the showdown, a year last November, Brittany never slept in Emimem's house again, though the affair continued until he dumped her a few weeks later on New Year's Eve. That gave everyone time to see how high-maintenance Brittany was on the set of 8 Mile, where she was ‘chaperoned' by her overbearing mother.

Desperate for a chance to let his hair down, Eminem, now tipped for an Oscar, threw a New Year's Eve party.

Jennifer writes: "He held it at the Ponchatrain Hotel in downtown Detroit for friends, family and people working on the movie.

"They worked hard, they had less than two weeks left and they deserved a good time."

Besides the main party area, Eminem also had a special suite in which he crammed a group of strippers.

"By the time I got there," Jennifer adds in her book, "they were carrying Brittany out of the suite.

"Someone went and got Brittany's mom and she started sobbing. She was yelling for someone to call a doctor. They didn't want 911 (the equivalent of our 999 emergency service). Oh God no! She wanted her own doctor to come to the Ponchatrain Hotel at 1am on New Year's Eve!

"I remember her saying, ‘Don't use Brittany's real name. She goes by Brittany Bertaloni'."

The story doing the rounds that night, adds Jennifer, was that Brittany had had a drink, then a stripper gave her a cannabis joint and she had a seizure. The following day Jennifer visited Marshall. "He was in the kitchen, chuckling in a way that told me he was angry and frustrated," she writes. "He said to me, ‘Last night was Brittany Murphy at her best!'

"When I asked what he meant by that he said she'd faked the whole thing. I asked him how he could be so sure and he said it was because she was talking to him just fine in the room he took her to...that is, until either her mother would come in or when he confronted her about it being an act. Then he said she'd act like she was having a seizure again.

"They were close to finishing 8 Mile and Marshall avoided Brittany. He said, ‘I don't want nothin' to do with her'."

Childhood sweet-hearts Eminem and Kim, 27, were reunited last October. She has to put up with his tattoo, engraved during their time apart, which reads: "Kim: Rot in Hell". Also during the split, Kim had a child named Whitney by her lover Eric Hartter. Now Whitney and Hailie live with Kim and Eminem. Yet Jennifer wishes that Eminem, whose hits include Stan, and The Real Slim Shady, had stayed with Brittany.

Kim Mathers said in a US radio interview that Watkins was bitter about not being allowed into the rapper's inner circle. "The fact of the matter of her writing the book is that she's mad because she tried to get with Marshall. He didn't want to see her in that way and because Marshall cut off ties with her, she's (upset)," Kim Mathers said on the show.

Dennis Dennehey, vice president of publicity for Interscope records, has declined to comment on the book, which comes out with the european release of "8 Mile."

James Andary, an attorney for Kim Mathers, has called allegations in the book "totally false."