Truby’s Truth – How Murdoch Made Dan Wootton into a Monster

Alex Truby is the former partner of GB News’ biggest ratings-puller Dan Wootton – the New Zealand journalist who has made a career out of invading private lives and passing public judgement for big bucks.

From Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to Johnny Depp and Amber Heard; from Philip Schofield to pop star Duncan James and the late, tragic Caroline Flack, Wootton was Rupert Murdoch’s celebrity attack dog for more than a decade.

So, when instead of cleaning his clothes one fateful day in 2012, Mr Truby happened, he says, upon Wootton’s own dirty laundry, his conscience simply would not let him take the easy path of turning a blind eye – as many others have done since. 

In his first ever interview, Mr Truby – gently spoken and determined, with a pronounced sense of fair play – relates the events that led to Byline Times’ special three-year investigation being published last month. This newspaper’s reports have exposed Wootton as a serial sexual catfisher, blackmailer and prolific workplace bully – all of which the presenter denies.

Byline Times has asked his representatives on numerous occasions to confirm or deny whether Dan Wootton is, or is connected to, ‘Martin Branning’ but it has received no response.

But for Alex Truby, it all began behind the big double doors of the laundry cupboard in Dan Wootton’s former one-bedroom flat on Leman Street in London’s sought-after E1 postcode.

---

A Cat-Sitting Discovery

“I was cat-sitting for Dan while he was on holiday in New Zealand,” Mr Truby explains. “One day, I was doing some laundry – I was looking for the dosing ball for the washing up powder, and put my hand down the side of the washing machine. And there was a holdall, rammed down there.”

Intrigued and suspicious, Mr Truby says he pulled at the black nylon and found the bag zipped and secured.

“I could tell it had stuff in it,” he says. “It wasn’t just an unused sports bag or something – and my immediate reaction was that it was hiding something. So I pulled it out completely and found there was a little travel padlock where the holes in the zips met.

“And so I thought, ‘okay, this is weird’. And because it was a flexible bag, I crumpled it to get the zip open wide enough to get my hand fully inside. And I started pulling stuff out.”

Among other personal items, Mr Truby says he found computer storage drives.

“There were also two external hard drives,” he says. “And I was very interested in those. I plugged one in and there was one file I was drawn to because I recognised the name as someone who was a friend of Dan’s.

“I started to dig into this one folder and there was a video and a text file, which I opened first. It was the transcripts of an MSN Messenger conversation between two people. One was Martin Branning, whose name I’d never heard before, and the other was the boyfriend of the person whose name was on the file.

“The transcript was between the boyfriend and Martin Branning. Branning was introducing himself as someone who was interested in making some sexual content. The transcript was essentially persuading [the boyfriend] to make this video, without the consent of his partner, if necessary.”

He adds: “The video file was exactly what I expected based on the transcripts. It was a wide shot of a bed from a camera put up high in order, I immediately thought, for it not to be seen. It was of [the two people] having sex. And I took it from the video that [Wootton’s target] had no knowledge or consent of that being made at all.”