Dan Wootton is a GB News presenter, and MailOnline columnist, facing allegations that he has been using fake online identities to trick men into sending him sexually explicit images in exchange for tens of thousands of pounds. While the claims are investigated, the MailOnline has paused his regular column.
Returning to his show last Thursday, Wootton stridently denied the claims:
“So good to be back from my scheduled holiday in New Zealand, with my family,” he said, the Union flag backdrop tessellating behind him. “It was really special actually, that family time, because, of course, they are the people who really know you.”
For those outside of the Wootton clan, here’s the story of how a 12,000-mile journey across the world turned Wootton into one of Britain’s most well-sourced and salacious journalists – before leaving him at the eye of the latest storm.
Born in 1983 in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, to British parents, Wootton was raised in Lower Hutt, a city to the east of Wellington Harbour. He was a near contemporary of future Oscar-winner Anna Paquin in this English-speaking enclave of the Pacific Ocean. Cut off from the rest of the world (even Sydney is a 4-hour flight from Wellington) the New Zealand of the 1980s and 1990s was a significant importer of British and American culture.
Marvin Gaye, David Bowie and Michael Jackson all had long runs at the top of the charts in the year of Wootton’s birth – and by 2004 Wootton made the decision to move to the UK, reversing his parents’ migration a few decades earlier. Despite promising gigs as a cub reporter at The Dominion Post, one of New Zealand’s top dailies, and on the TVNZ 1 show Good Morning, the lure of European celebrity culture was too strong.
As a British passport holder, he had no difficulties coming to the UK, and found there were plenty of Kiwis he could bunk with. He spent a month or so couch surfing in the west London outpost of Acton, before moving into a flan in Gunnersbury. Like many young Antipodean travellers to the UK, these early days were spent largely in pursuit of a job, a foothold in the industry that he aspired to be part of.
Wootton told GB News viewers that he was the victim of a ‘smear campaign’— (GB News)
After a brief flirtation with becoming a financial journalist (“I was dealing with hedge fund managers who would have had fortunes of £100,000,000 or something,” he later told a website for New Zealand expats, “and here I was earning absolutely no money, and talking to them about something I knew nothing about”) Wootton found himself gravitating towards entertainment journalism. And London of that era was a far cry from a childhood spent watching Grease, his favourite movie, and listening to ABBA, his favourite band, stuck on the other side of the world.
The entertainment world he encountered in Britain during those years was one dominated by manufactured and mainstream popular culture. McFly would prove the most successful music act of 2004, while sequels to the Shrek, Harry Potter and Spider-Man film franchises battled for box office supremacy. Wootton was in his element: by 2007 he had bagged a plum job as TV Reporter at the News of the World, and, when the paper was shuttered in scandal a few years later, he crossed the streams and joined ITV’s Lorraine as an on-air entertainment reporter. Mixing an ear for gossip with a contacts list that covered the great and good of the new millennium’s social scene, Wootton was swiftly identified as a rising star of tattling reportage.
A decade on Lorraine, a daytime talk show hosted by Scottish journalist Lorraine Kelly (playing, for tax purposes, the role of “Lorraine Kelly”), beamed Wootton into the public consciousness. During this period he also took on a column at The Sun, continuing his association with Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and giving him a soapbox for an increasingly gossipy, and conservative, worldview. In the same year that he joined The Sun, Wootton publicly came out as gay. “I am gay and I believe in equality in every way,” he tweeted. “If the media hides gay relationships then how will they ever be normalised?”
Although generally private about his personal life, Wootton celebrated his partner Alan Longair at his 40th birthday event in March, describing him as “the love of my life”.
Though he had long been open about his sexuality privately, this announcement came at a time when The Sun was under the cosh for outing a closeted celebrity. Wootton’s response typified his prickly relationship with the LGBT community. In 2015 he published a column in The Sun titled “HOLLYWOOD HIV PANIC”, as rumours swirled that a major star (later confirmed to be Charlie Sheen), was HIV positive. The article was widely condemned as scaremongering and regressive, with a spokesman from the Terrence Higgins Trust stating that “at its best this is irresponsible journalism, at its worst an insidious headline grab.”
Wootton began as a TV reporter at the News of the World before moving to ITV and The Sun— (Getty Images)
But Wootton was consistently undeterred by controversy. In recent years, he is perhaps best known for his crusade against Meghan Markle, and her house husband, Prince Harry. Across many platforms – including his current gigs at GB News and the Daily Mail – and several years, Wootton pursued the Sussexes, tapping into a prevailing public mood. He referred to Markle as a “gutless woman” in a crusade that saw the couple disengage from The Sun and other tabloid newspapers. This didn’t stop Wootton from breaking the news of “Megxit”, the Sussexes’ departure from the UK and resignation from royal duties, his biggest scoop to date. Prince Harry was reported to blame his father, the King, for utilising Wootton as a prop in the court psychodrama. “This all feeds into this narrative of Harry and Meghan” he later told American talk show host Megyn Kelly, “as these uber paranoid people who love to drag each other down with conspiracy theories.”
In his best-selling autobiography, Spare, Prince Harry referred to Wootton as “a sad little man”. There was little sign, however, that Wootton cared about the opprobrium from the palace-in-exile. Picking up a presenting slot on News UK’s TalkRadio in 2018 – another arrow in his ever-expanding professional quiver – he became a leading voice advocating for the controversial “herd immunity” policy at the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. This led Labour MP Chris Bryant to label the presenter “a complete and utter nutcase” during a slot on Wootton’s drivetime show in which the politician cut his appearance short. As ever with Wootton’s bear baiting tactics, it made for box office radio.
This courting of the fine line between talking point and provocation has typified Wootton’s columns and ensured he’s never been far from the headlines, even when he’s not reporting them. Most important was the 2020 defamation lawsuit launched against Wootton’s employers, News Group Newspapers, by the actor Johnny Depp. Depp alleged that Wootton’s column in The Sun, which referred to the actor as a “wife beater”, was libellous. Following a three-week trial at the High Court in London, judge Andrew Nicol found in favour of the defendant. “I accept,” Nicol wrote, at the conclusion of a 129-page judgment, “that the Defendants have shown that the words they published were substantially true in the meanings I have held them to bear.” Despite this setback, Depp took his ex-wife Amber Heard to, televised, court in the United States, and successfully sued her for defamation.
Johnny Depp sued The Sun after Wootton’s colum referred to him as a ‘wife beater’ following the breakdown of his marriage to Amber Heard— (PA Wire)
Then in 2022, a different judge placed a restraining order on Andrew Brady, a former contestant on The Apprentice and boyfriend of the late presenter Caroline Flack, after he launched a campaign of harassment against Wootton. Brady blamed Wootton, who was a friend of Flack but had covered many challenging stories involving her, after she died by suicide in 2020. The presiding judge condemned Brady’s “craving for celebrity status”, but the case proved another example of the tangled way that Wootton dealt with the world he notionally covered.
The Gospel of Matthew’s most famous proverb – “live by the sword, die by the sword” – could’ve been written for Wootton. Over the past decade, as celebrity culture has done battle with the gossip trade (whether that’s Peter Thiel destroying Gawker, or the endless procession of phone hacking lawsuits) Wootton has accumulated a reputation – and a suite of enemies. “As a journalist, I feel uncomfortable being the story,” he told viewers of his GB News show – Dan Wootton Tonight – as he took to the air following this week’s revelations. “I have been the target of a smear campaign by nefarious players with an axe to grind.”
As Wootton fights for his professional life and reframes the story as an assault on the right-wing channel that employs him, the Wootton’s words he said recently about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle float, inexorably, to mind. “They were lazy, they were entitled, they only cared about themselves,” he told Sky Australia, after the royal couple were dropped from a Spotify deal last month. “Who do they blame for this?”
Now at the centre of his own storm, the controversial presenter – brutally branded a “shock jock” by former GB News colleague Andrew Neil – has to, finally, be his own man.
