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.

[From Byline]

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.