Newsletter offer
Newsletter offerSubscribe to our newsletter for exclusive editorial emails from the Byline Times Team.
GB News presenter and MailOnline columnist Dan Wootton hid behind fake online identities to trick and bribe scores of men into revealing compromising sexual material, Byline Times can reveal in the first part of a three-year special investigation.
The 40-year-old broadcaster and self-styled voice against ‘woke’ culture – whose show Dan Wootton Tonight is the biggest ratings winner on the UK’s fourth-most watched news channel – targeted journalistic colleagues, friends and members of the public for at least 10 years.
Byline Times has extensive evidence to show that, between June 2008 and 2018, Wootton – who is gay – posed as a fictitious showbusiness agent called “Martin Branning” to offer sums of up to £30,000 “tax free” to his targets, many of whom were heterosexual men.
Among them are a very senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK alongside at least six other staff at The Sun newspaper – one with close links to News UK CEO Rebekah Brooks – friends, Facebook associates and users of the dating apps Grindr and Gaydar.
Two of the targets made criminal complaints to Scotland Yard without knowing the real identity of their tormentor with detectives aware of the activities of Branning – whose name is a portmanteau of EastEnders characters Martin Fowler and Max Branning – since 2019.
Our journalists handed a 28-page dossier of evidence to the Metropolitan Police for investigation on 20 June 2023, however last week criminal claims started to emerge on social media, with the posts rapidly attracting more than 18 million views, causing Wootton to trend on Twitter for several days.
As a result, this newspaper is today publishing some details of our findings. We have identified five co-conspirators, along with a representative group of around a dozen victims. However sources suggest the true figure extends to many, many more men.
Byline Times knows the names of those involved but, in order to protect the victims and the course of justice, it will not be revealing them publicly.
Wootton has been off-air at GB News, on which he hosts a week-nightly show, for two weeks taking leave to visit his family, who live near Wellington in his native New Zealand. He has been silent in the face of mass Twitter accusations except to retweet promotions of his broadcasting return due at 9pm tonight.
In his absence, the news channel has covered the money-for-sexual-images controversy surrounding the BBC and its lead presenter Huw Edwards, describing the story as a “nuclear bomb”.
Stand-in Mark Dolan told viewers on Dan Wootton Tonight: “It’s a bad day for Huw Edwards, as he battles for his health, and the future, of his career. But for the BBC, it’s even worse.” Dolan added on 14 July that “this Huw Edwards story is not going anywhere”.
