Byline Times has released Part 4 of their ongoing investigation into Dan Wootton. Wootton is still currently employed by GB News, and he’s been on air this week. He’s still technically employed by the Daily Mail, although it’s been a full month since he’s written anything for the Mail. The bulk of Byline’s current investigation is for Wootton’s time in Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire, namely the now-defunct News of the World and The Sun. Wootton climbed the editorial ranks at the Sun with record speed until he was swiftly shown the door in 2020. That’s something left unsaid in Byline’s reporting, that Wootton likely had a “professional motive” to do certain despicable things – he was getting kompromat on his bosses or colleagues, blackmail material which he used to “help” his ascent up the corporate ladder. Speaking of, Byline’s Part 4 details exactly how Wootton made arrangements with p0rn stars:
GB News presenter Dan Wootton paid adult film stars to meet gay men he had catfished in order to secretly record them having sex, Byline Times can reveal. Wootton ‘rented’ the Facebook profiles of at least three different male p0rn performers for up to £500 a time, before posing as them and tricking his targets into meetings to be covertly filmed with cameras he supplied.
At least one of these meetings took place in a hotel paid for by Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun newspaper – of which Wootton was associate editor at the time. The journalist also charged a £1,500 p0rn star’s fee for the ‘private work’ to his then employers News UK – disguised as payment to a ‘contact’ for a front-page story about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
This newspaper has interviewed two of the adult performers involved and has evidence from another man also paid by Wootton to make secret sex tapes for him.
Byline Times has also identified two of the victims of Wootton’s catfishing conspiracy, which is separate to his use of the pseudonyms ‘Martin Branning’ and ‘Maria Joseph’, to trick scores of other male victims into revealing compromising sexual material.
Byline then interviews a few of the adult-film actors who rented out their social media pages to Wootton so he could use them as “bait” for certain targets. Wootton would pretend to be these actors on their Facebook pages and set up meetings/sexual encounters with the targets, then he would pay the actors to have sex with the targets and film all of the encounters. I’m kind of blown away by Wootton’s detailed schemes and yet… the crimes were somewhat low-tech. They usually involved Wootton talking some adult actor, escort or down-on-his-luck hustler into having sex with a target and trusting the actor/escort to film it themselves on Wootton’s iPad or cameras connected to Wootton’s Cloud. The catfishing operation was stupidly elaborate and yet ridiculously easy for Wootton to pull off, time and time again. But yeah, there’s evidence and testimony of dozens of crimes here.
Photos courtesy of GB News.
I thought the part where he used a room at the Savoy paid for by BAFTA sponsor Orange during BAFTA night was interesting. Who allowed him to use the room? Prince William was president of BAFTA at that time already….
Just makes you wonder what dirt he has on Peg. If he does when will it come out.
@Susan Collins … Well, Wootton ‘did’ write an open letter to William, after being fired by the Sun published in the Daily Mail that seemed, at least to me, rather shady and threatening. I’m just saying.
My question is, where was he getting all this money to pay for this. Did he charge it to his Sun employer? How did accounting not pick up this? There had to have been ENDLESS red flags.
The Byline article does have a paper trail of him charging at least one of these guys to the sun as a “source”, looks like the sun booked the hotel. So clearly this was a pattern. I have the same question as you – how was this not picked up? Unless it was, top brass at News UK knew, this is actually what he was hired to do…? Be Murdoch’s henchman?! There is definitely more to the story and hopefully Byline keep digging.
*gently puts on my tinfoil tiara*
This is what I keep thinking: Wootton didn’t do this by himself. He had to have had help or support of some kind. These kinds of things always have a nest of predators, not just one guy. At the least, he was sharing the videos for a large fee to keep funding this heinousness.
Wootton is the fall guy. What will be interesting is will he cave and start talking or will he take the punishment for some undisclosed reward from his cohorts.
*keeps tinfoil tiara on because it’s shiny and pretty*
@ BlueNailsBetty, as much as I would love to support your theory that Wooten is failing in the knife for someone, I highly doubt that this is the case. DW wouldn’t take the knife for anyone, including himself!!
Wooton has maintained and created these criminal acts all on his own, though he may have shared with Murdoch his criminal actions which allowed him access to the kind of money that he didn’t have. I would fully support the theory that Murdoch knew and supported Wootens criminality. It’s right up there with how Murdoch operates as we have seen for decades upon decades!!
If his meteoric rise was due to his having blackmail material on his bosses, that would also give him the leverage he needed to have his illegitimate expenses approved.
@Snuffles he charged one of these payments to their Johnny Depp reporting account. According to the email Byline attached, Wooten made it seem that it was an urgent payment to a source for a breaking story.
Right, that’s ONE example. He clearly did this dozens of not hundreds of times. My only guess is the first person he catfished was the head of the accounting department so he could blackmail into looking the other way. Because I don’t get how he got away with charging The Sun for his blackmailing.
In another article the victim mentions being paid with sweaty wads of twenties. Where did those come from?
Excellent question @Snuffles. One of Byline’s articles did mention there were five other co-conspirators. The money men? Wealthy media men who wanted to have something to hold over other people’s heads. I’m thinking there were some high ranking men targeted in this whole thing. High ranking men who may not want people to know they’ve had sex with other men. A known gay male having sex with another male just isn’t shocking and shouldn’t be career ending as long as both parties consent and other factors.
It is fascinating that News Corp, ANL(DM) and Reach PLC especially are not giving the Wootton story any real estate. Apparently wearing black nail polish (and other nonsense stories) is worth more real estate than a blackmailing, abusive, bullying, creepy shit of a human.
@Inge, it’s a tactic the Mafia used. No crisp hundreds. Smaller bills. DW probably spent weeks changing out money at different places. Smaller bills make it appear as less wealthy and less obvious. There may have been some people who threw a 20 to watch. All so ickly.
He’s a legit psychopath! It’s about time exposing this SOB.
It’s also about time someone does an audit of all The Sun’s and other tabloid newspapers’ financial records.
I need a sick bag after reading this; and I think Byline will drop part 5.
Never forget that this pervert blackmailer somehow got the biggest royal scoop (Harry and Meghan stepping back) handed to him by the palace. This is the pervert/blackmailer either William or Charles was working with. This is the pervert/blackmailer who then threatened Harry, prompting him to announce their exit plans prematurely. But …. crickets from the powers that be there.
@ Harper, it’s actually quite telling that no one on Salty Island is reporting on Wootons misdeeds. It certainly tells us that they have all been acting in the same or equal types of misdeeds.
It’s the summer of nothing news and yet crickets……
Could be they don’t want any attention into their own “niche” process of reporting.
I won’t forget @Harper. As Harry said in SPARE, “Why him? Why, of all people, the showbiz guy?” Because lately he’d refashioned himself into some sort of quasi royal correspondent, largely on the strength of his secret relationship with one particularly close friend of Willy’s comms secretary-who fed him trivial(and mostly fake) gossip.”. pg. 378
I am highly suspicious about the links in Dan’s actions to the £1m payout from Murdoch to William. I think William was caught up in Dan’s sting and for some reason Murdoch’s executives paid him £1m to keep quiet about Dan’s inappropriate behavior while Dan was employed at the Sun.
Those private members clubs that these aristocrats and royals frequent might have been ripe for the picking. Dan probably identified some his targets at those clubs and hired the porn stars to get them performing sexual acts on film with the targets. 🧐
The more Byline Times reveals from its investigation, the more insidious a profile they print of Dan Wootton. The guy is a psychopath IMO. It seems he gets off on dominance and control of people’s lives. He seems to relish his victims’ pain and the control he has over them. 🥶
If I had a conspiracy board like Sherlock, I would be piecing together where these victims worked and what potentially powerful people they were adjacent to.
Remember that episode of Sherlock about Watson’s wedding, how the killer wanted to murder Watson’s old commander but his security was to heavy to get to him directly so he started wooing women that worked adjacent to his target so he could gather intel on his whereabouts. That’s how he learned that the commander was coming to Watson’s wedding and that would be his opportunity.
Excellent points. Harry requested less than £500,000 in damages in his phone hacking suit against the Mirror. What if William was quietly offered £1 million for violations other than phone hacking? And I think most or all of those clubs have rooms for members & their guests. It wouldn’t be a stretch to think Dan’s scheme extended there.
I wonder if William was one of Wootton’s targeted males? Kompromat. William is blackmailed.
He clearly has A LOT of serious kompromat on some Major people.He has not gotten even a quarter of the coverage Schofield and Huw just received.
+1000
It’s time to start boycotting GB News advertisers again, or did that not work? DW should be taken off the air immediately. Hopefully this slime will be arrested soon.
I apologize if this has been discussed before and I happened to have missed it, but do we know who the the pegging rumors came from? Because, well…
Nobody knows, it was a blind item from DeuxMoix, which isn’t the most trustworthy site, but it certainly leads one to believe that Wootton has serious kompromat on Wm and other royals. That’s why none of the big media (BBC et al) are touching this story, only the independents like Byline. However it hasn’t stopped MPs asking Sun editor Victoria Newton about the Wootton allegations. This is not going to go away, and my guess is Danny boy will take a number of people down with him before justice is served. The million pound payment to Wm is covering up some really shady stuff.
And yet when you search “Dan Wootten” l on the BBC page NO ARTICLES come up. NONE.
@Soapboxpudding, you’re misspelling his surname. It is “Wootton”.
Just googled, @Soapboxpudding is right, though. The only reporting they’ve done on this Wootton scandal is their original story after Wootton’s ‘they’re picking on me’ little speech on GB. They ended with, we asked for a comment, didn’t get one. And that’s been it! No actual investigation or reporting by the BBC since.
Wow, I have read the full article. Byline is really like a fresh air in british press. The tactics Dan has used reminds me of those used by intelligence agencies, like honeypotting. There is no way his employers didn’t know what he was doing.
Agreed. Whoever OKd his expenses wasn’t doing their job, wasn’t doing it well, or knew exactly what he was doing.
I don’t know about the UK, but falsifying a corporate expense report in the US can lead to tax fraud charges.
Please let there be criminal charges at some point. That’s all I care about really. This is the kind of sick story that the BM loves. Jeremy Vine loves to talk about current topics and Meghan markle and yet has he said a thing? Nope? GMB?
@Jais, yep, still radio silence, there are some very powerful people SWEATING about this, and those very powerful people are busy on the PHONE trying to keep this quiet. Keep on it Byline, wash him back into the sewer he crawled out of
I didn’t know Wootton is so powerful. He can shut up the British media. But karma will find its way. Very soon the US media will pick this up and publish and broadcast this Wootton scandal. He will get his comeuppance.
And the Guardian has been beautifully involved with the Byline Times reporting as well!!!
May Byline Times and the Guardian take out ALL of the trash of these “niche” news outlets!!!
My guess on the paying for it is that he was “paying it forward.” He was getting compromat on people he thought would
make good future sources, then claiming as expenses money he wasn’t paying to current sources, because he was blackmailing them.
He’s telling the papers he spent £X,000 on a source, but the reality is there was no money changing hands because of blackmail. He may have gotten lazy and charged his actual blackmailing costs in this way, which is why he’s getting nabbed for it.
WTF is wrong with that man? It honestly seems like the news corporation wants to be seen as complicit because why haven’t they fired him by now? If this happened in America, that journalist would have been fired as soon as the first part of the Byline expose came out.
Wootton’s done. The Murdochs just got outed and William better hurry up and announce his trial separation from Kate bc Wootton isn’t going down by himself. The Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are in shambles. That’s what happens when you let one family control a large segment of the media market around the world. It only takes one scandal. This story reveals the Murdochs are complicit in not one instance of blackmail but a running scheme akin to criminal racketeering in the US. I think we are seeing the beginning of the end. William will need to be fleet-footed and get ahead of this if he wants to come out unscathed. Things are quiet bc people are trying to make deals to limit the damage but this could blow up in everyones face. Wootton better hide in NZ bc he looks more and more like a dead man walking. Meanwhile Harry’s won the right to go to trial against the Murdochs. Hurray for Mister Justice, Mannnn.
I wrote it before but it bears repeating. Wootton whole operation hinges on weak people.
In this case. All it took was maybe 2000 grand to give people to film scenes. That’s suppose to be their regular filming rate! Basically they helped blackmail people for free. English society is tier based. They have to stop crushing people and be more fair.
In the usa, africa, and South east asia sexual Blackmailers get paid WAY more. You talking months and years worth of rent. Dan wootton found professionals and paid their filming rate, which is 1 month if rent! And in London that’s not even a week of rent.
Everyone needs to go to jail. Included the people who hid the cameras.
$2000.00 is what I was going for. I proofread/edited it before hitting submit but it looks like autocorrect got me. And I know some stars will film for $500 but typically a low-end is $1500. So yeah these prices are low. To cause so much damage to another person.
In the meantime all they can do is deflect to lies about HM divorcing or their trolls in Twitter trying to spread a hashtag that Meghan has no class. Talk about Stupid idiots as they think it’s going to permanently fix their disgusting and evil behavior through the years. Majority of people know it’s just a fake distraction from the real story and they know it. Karmas out to get these jerks big time.
With many of the news outlets flat out ignoring this story, I have to wonder who is protecting DW? It gives like he will walk away, scot free, despite the evidence.
Why are the Met police silent on this?
Crickets. Total silence and a jumble of three to five day old gobbledygook if one Googles his name.
You have to wonder who the various targets were in these blackmail schemes when a story this outrageous is sat upon to this degree in that country’s media.
IMO, Those media outlets ignoring the story are guilty themselves for covering it. Eventually when it comes to the worst they’ll backstab one another. Just like what happened with Matt Lauer and Tucker Carlson. The British media needs a deep cleansing and it’s eventually happening. First that guy from GMB, then Clarkson, etc. Its a domino effect of karma for all their disgusting behaviors.
Sad little man is rotten to the core. Throw his entire rotten vile self into a cell and never open the doors again . He Doesn’t deserve humanity.
What does #PsychopathLittleMan Dan have on William?