Online Hate and Offline Violence: What We Learnt from the Dan Wootton Saga

It took a dumb minute staring at the email for the penny to drop: we’d been hacked. It was a request for two-factor authenticated access to a confidential research document to do with Byline Times’ 2023 exposé of the GB News star presenter Dan Wootton as a serial sexual catfish.

Just two other people ought to have known the sensitive cloud-shared file – a small part of an exhaustive three-year investigation – even existed. And the name on the screen was neither of them.

I rang my colleague Tom Latchem for our usual (encrypted) morning catch-up: “Hello mate – erm, have you noticed anything strange going on?”

“Well, someone smeared blood on my car windscreen last night. But apart from that…”

Things had taken a turn for the unusual the day before. Wootton had given a six-minute prime-time live TV monologue in response to a Byline Times exclusive unmasking him as the fictitious showbiz agents Martin Branning and Maria Joseph – two online identities connected to more than 10 years of catfishing activities targeting a large number of men and women, many in the public eye, with attempts to obtain sexual images by deception.

Wootton addressed the story by admitting to unspecified “errors of judgement in the past” – but denied criminal behaviour. He said: “Who doesn’t have regrets? Should I be cancelled for them many years later, or do you accept I have learned and changed?”

Wootton then went an unexpected step further. He told the GB News viewers that our reporting was politically-motivated – a “smear campaign” by a “hard-left blog” and an affront to “free speech” orchestrated by “dark forces out to try and take this brilliant channel down”.

“We have all found ourselves under attack,” Wootton said. “And that’s because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades, and they will stop at nothing to destroy us.”

Now, there is no evidence Wootton could have foreseen – or was any part of – the events that followed this extraordinary broadcast, which propelled the story on to the ITV national news bulletins and turbocharged it on X. But things did get interesting afterwards.

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‘Blood Will Flow’

For the record, Byline Times is neither ‘dark force’ nor ‘establishment’. It is, however, a staunch defender of lawful free expression and a fan of good journalistic values.

Yet here was a billionaire-funded, Ofcom-regulated broadcaster with mainstream pretensions framing legitimate reporting on a public figure falsely as an act of Culture War.

The worrying episodes multiplied in the days after broadcast. Alongside the hack attack – ‘stealer’ malware masquerading as “information that you may find useful for your investigation” – and Tom’s bloody windscreen, a further anonymous email arrived to the newsroom headed: “Over Dan Wootton”.

“See you at your office and blood will flow,” it promised.

There was also a phone call to the personal mobile number of an executive editor. “You’re going to regret this,” said an anonymous northern British male voice; an alleged act of intimidation that remains a police matter today (and on which Byline Times will be reporting in due course).

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New Threat Landscape

Adapting to this rapidly-evolving threat landscape in real-time, while still rolling out a major piece of live journalism, was stressful. We went through the practical steps of defensive housekeeping – police reports, malware sweeps, counter-surveillance protocols for home and work – in a bubble of shock and disbelief.

We agreed that it was deeply disturbing that such sophisticated attempts were being made to shut down a three-year investigation into a powerful public figure with legitimate questions to answer.

For his part, Wootton says he took to his GB News platform simply to reply to our investigation into him, which – aggravated by a subsequent misogyny scandal – set the stage for his mainstream cancellation.

The saga continues today with one alleged catfishing victim pursuing civil action against Wootton, while the accuracy of Byline Times’ reporting has remained unchallenged in any court, despite many legal threats.

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Lone Wolf Activity?

Wootton’s aggressive prime-time amplification of the story – and the sinister events that followed – left us all wondering what might happen next. We were advised by the police to take precautions, and started running counter-surveillance measures at home and work.

Vehicle registration details, home addresses, phone numbers, and emails had already been compromised, which was pretty dark. But threats to kill journalists? In London, in July 2023. That was next level.

In more than 25 years in the job I’d never known such an onslaught of “black ops”. Writing as a past whistle-blower on the illegal newsgathering of Fleet Street in its wild west noughties, that says a lot.

The skulduggery put everyone involved on edge. I sent my kids away in case they became accidental targets and cut short a trip, fully expecting to find blood on my welcome mat. In that moment, it was a war footing.

Intel started to trickle back from sources plugged into the organised far-right in the UK. There was no obvious chatter about attacks on Byline Times over the Wootton exposé, they told us.

“The best guess is lone-wolf activity,” said one well-placed source, adding: “It’s almost impossible to track. We’re seeing it more and more. It’s not like in the days of Combat 18 or the BNP. It’s fragmented now – much more random. It’s people in social media echo chambers reacting directly of their own accord. It’s a nightmare to monitor.”

And it’s a nightmare with a name – ‘stochastic terrorism’.

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What is Stochastic Terrorism?

Forensic psychologist Dr J. Reid Meloy and former FBI profiler Molly Amman are real-life Mindhunters and global authorities on stochastic violence.

In their 2021 report, published in Perspectives on Terrorism, they define stochastic terrorism as “an interactive process between the originator of a message, its amplifiers, and one or more ultimate receivers”.

“A charismatic public figure, or perhaps an organisation, lobs hostile rhetoric against a targeted out-group or individual into the public discourse to further some political or social objective,” they explain.

“An unrelated consumer of the rhetoric absorbs and reacts with anger, contempt or disgust, often mirroring the speaker’s emotional state, and adding his own fear and anxiety to that cocktail of negative emotionality.”

The researchers identified how signals for violence are often hidden “in the noise of extremist rhetoric” but resonate loudly and clearly with “primed receivers”.

“Lone offenders and regressed groups, when reacting to threat discourse, want to act quickly given the seemingly urgent nature of the threat communi