Presenter Dan Wootton has been suspended by GB News over comments Laurence Fox made about a female journalist on his show.
The broadcaster says it is conducting a “full investigation” after Wootton failed to condemn Fox for asking: “Who’d shag that?” about political corresponent Ava Evans.
Wootton, 40, is also currently suspended from MailOnline where he has a regular freelance column while his ex-employer The Sun investigates claims he used a pseudonym and offered colleagues money for sexual material.
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Wootton suspended by GB News
Moved to the UK at 21
Dan Wootton was born to British parents in New Zealand in 1983. His mother was born in Essex, while his father grew up on a British Army base in Malta.
He got a degree in media studies and political science before getting his first journalism job at the Wellington broadsheet The Dominion Post as an entertainment columnist.
While working for the paper he also got a TV reporter job on TVNZ 1’s Good Morning show.
A British passport holder, Wootton moved to the UK at the age of 21 where he worked for various trade publications before getting a job at Broadcast magazine – focused on UK TV and radio.
According to an interview with a New Zealand expat website, he spent his first few years in the UK sofa surfing and flat sharing in west London while trying to make moves into financial journalism.
But eventually he found himself drawn to showbiz and three years later secured a job with the now-defunct News of the World.
Before it was shut down amid phone hacking allegations in 2011, he had stints as both its TV and showbusiness editor.
Wootton later told the Leveson Inquiry he never hacked phones while at The News of the World, claiming he didn’t often write about celebrity complainants such as Hugh Grant because he “didn’t seem to enjoy his job and was pretty miserable”.
Read more:
Reaction and what Fox said – in full
Who is Laurence Fox?
Lord Justice Leveson questioned whether it was the media intrusion Grant resented – and not his celebrity status.
Without singling out individuals, he concluded that phone hacking was widespread across the UK’s tabloid press and that celebrities’ families had their lives “destroyed” by their attitude to privacy.
Having made a name for himself with Rupert Murdoch’s titles, he became a columnist for the Daily Mail, before returning to News Group Newspapers to work at The Sun in 2013.
When he joined the newspaper he also came out as gay, tweeting: “If the media hides gay relationships then how will they ever be normalised?”
The success of his Sun column saw him promoted to its showbiz ‘Bizarre’ section editor the following year and secure regular appearances on ITV’s Lorraine until 2019.
He also had his own show ‘Dan’s Dilemma’s on the Murdoch-owned TalkRadio until he left the group for the Mail and GB News at the start of 2021.
HIV criticism, Megxit and Depp ‘wife beater’ claims
Wootton’s provocative and self-proclaimed ‘anti-woke’ reporting style has seen him court controversy several times over the past decade.
In 2015 his Sun article “Hollywood HIV Panic”, which later transpired to be about the actor Charlie Sheen, attracted widespread criticism for perpetuating stigma against people with the condition.
The British Medical Journal and charity the Terrence Higgins Trust branded it “irresponsible”.
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In 2020 he was the first person to report Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s decision to step down from royal duties.
He claimed he had spoken to the Sussexes’ spokesperson and given them 10 days’ notice before breaking the story.
Sources close to them later claimed they were forced to go public with their plans prematurely due to pressure put on them by The Sun.
Though he did not name Wootton personally, in his 2023 biography, Spare, Prince Harry described the paper’s showbiz editor – which at the time was Wootton – behind the story as a “sad little man”.
“He [the unnamed editor] 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,” Prince Harry wrote in his book.
Arriving to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012
In 2020, Wootton also found himself at the centre of one of the biggest celebrity court cases in decades.
Actor Johnny Depp sued News Group Newspapers at the High Court in London over Wootton’s 2018 story that described him as a “wife beater” in relation to his role in the Fantastic Beasts film.
After details of his volatile relationship with US actress Amber Heard came out in court, the judge concluded that the description was “substantially accurate on the balance of probabilities”.
During the coronavirus pandemic, some raised alarm bells about Wootton’s alleged pedalling of conspiracy theories.
Labour MP Chris Bryant described him as “dangerous” over the use of his platform to express views on herd immunity and the anti-vax movement.
‘Used fake name to elicit sexual content from ex-colleagues’
This year the Byline Times published a series of articles about Wootton, claiming he had used fake identities to trick men, including former colleagues, into sending him sexual material.
The claims, which relate to a period between 2008 and 2018 – when Wootton worked for The News of the World and The Sun, saw Wootton’s MailOnline column paused.
He has written for the online news outlet since 2021. His last article was published on 29 June.
Wootton admitted he had made “errors of judgement” in the past when the claims came to light but vehemently denied criminal allegations as “simply untrue”.
News Group Newspapers is investigating.
A spokesperson for MailOnline’s publisher DMG Media said: “The allegations are obviously serious but also complex and historic and there is an independent investigation underway at the media group which employed him during the relevant period.
“In the meantime, his freelance column with MailOnline has been paused.”
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Ava Evans: ‘I didn’t ask to be put into this story’
GB News did not comment and continued to air his nightly show, but suspended him over Laurence Fox’s comments.
Wootton had previously said on Twitter: “I want to reiterate my regret over last night’s exchange with Laurence on GB News. Having looked at the footage, I can see how inappropriate my reaction to his totally unacceptable remarks appears to be and want to be clear that I was in no way amused by the comments.”
