Who is New Zealand journalist Dan Wootton?

Two UK tabloids are looking into allegations that prominent New Zealand journalist Dan Wootton sought to extract sexual images from his colleagues in exchange for money. So who is Dan Wootton? Stuff’s Steve Kilgallon explains.

Dan Wootton says he was always excited by the media and knew he wanted to be part of it.

At 15, he was already appearing on the youth pages of the Evening Post in Wellington alongside close friend, the singer Brooke Fraser, whom he grew up alongside in the suburb of Naenae, close to Avalon TV studios.

Fraser and Wootton then presented a show called The Mic on Saturn TV, before Wootton – whose uncle Derek was a police officer killed on duty in 2008 by a speeding car – got a gig writing events copy for Wellington Council.

His first break came when he contacted Evening Post editor Tim Pankhurst offering a column – Dan’s Diary. He later said that being commissioned was “one of the most exciting days of my life”.

Dan’s Diary began in June 2002 with this explanation: “Hi, I’m Dan and each day I’ll be bringing you the best (and at times the worst) Wellington has to offer. I’ve been living in this city for all my 19 years and think it’s a very happening place to be. If there’s something I don’t know about, drop me a line.”

It offered gallery and show reviews, eating out suggestions, and his own TV tips (“What is it with Tuesday night TV? There’s so much on the box you need three video recorders to catch everything.”)

Wootton then took a media studies and political science degree at Victoria University, with the university featuring him in an advertorial where he said the course had given him the skills to analyse news and “understand … the influence the media can have on shaping public perceptions”.

He got work as an agony aunt on Charlotte Dawson’s show How’s Life? When that was cut, he became a researcher and panellist on Good Morning, presented by Lisa Manning. Wootton was still only 21, Manning was 39, and they embarked on a six-month relationship which made the gossip pages amid claims TVNZ bosses were unhappy.

Manning then embarked on a relationship with 60-year-old Lord of the Rings actor John Rhys-Davies –which Wootton said prompted his immigration to the UK.

In a December 2004 piece for the Dominion Post, he wrote: “It’s time to leave the country when your failed relationship makes the front page of a Sunday tabloid newspaper, when you read in a women’s magazine that your ex-girlfriend is smitten with a 60-year-old dwarf, and when you take a slide down the ‘Eating Media Lunch’ celebrity sharemarket as a result of it all.”

He would later tell the Dominion Post: “I felt quite burned.”

Dan’s Diary became Dan’s OE Diary, and he wrote that his UK years wouldn’t be a “typical OE of pub work, residing with 20 mates in a two-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush and piling on the pounds after one too many Yorkshire puddings”.

Instead, he wanted to break into the British media and was soon writing of working for a “finance newspaper specialising in derivatives” and midnight-6am shifts for a big US broadcaster.

His last column for the newspaper appeared to be about the 2005 London Underground bombings. Soon after he got a job on the industry magazine Broadcast, and that gave him a leg up into a coveted role as the showbiz editor of News of the World – a job used as a stepping stone by Fleet Street editors Piers Morgan and Rebekah Wade.

“You have to live the celebrity lifestyle yourself,” he said on getting the appointment.

Within 18 months, he’d been named Showbusiness Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards for a scoop on the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately, described by judges as “an old-fashioned showbiz scoop of the highest order delivered straight out of his own contacts book”.

The News of the World was shut down in the wake of a phone-hacking scandal, with Wootton bemoaning its death after “we had turned News of the World into an award-winning, quality and ethical tabloid newspaper read by 7.5 million people a week”. Adding: “It’s unthinkable it could be closed with that level of public support and loyalty.”

But it didn’t dent his career, with a switch to NOW’s sister publication The Sun, where he picked up multiple TV gigs (including as a regular on the Paul Henry Show) and rose to the title’s associate and then executive editor.

That’s when he started to become a headline himself, first sued (as executive editor) by Johnny Depp for a story alleging he was a “wife beater”, then attacked by Prince Harry in his autobiography as a “sad little man” over a story he ran in The Sun in 2020 revealing Harry and his wife Meghan Markle would step back from royal duties (Wootton responded by describing the book as “pathetic, self-serving and tone-deaf”).

In 2021, he left The Sun to write a column for the Daily Mail and present a show on the upstart TV channel GB News. The politically right-leaning network was the first new TV channel to air in the UK since 1989, with hosts including political figures Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Wootton’s show, Dan Wootton Tonight, which airs in the prime-time evening slot four days a week, has become the most watched on the network.

He continued to attract controversy for his writing. Former reality TV contestant Andrew Brady was jailed last year for harassing Wootton in relation to the death of Caroline Flack, the former host of Love Island.

Brady – who had been Flack’s fiancé – held Wootton responsible for her death by suicide and sent numerous threatening online messages to him.

Wootton had regularly covered Flack in his role as a celebrity reporter for The Sun, and was purported to be her friend. “I only ever wrote stories about Caroline that she wanted to be published,” Wootton said in court.

Correction: A previous version of this story suggested that Stephen Gately had died by suicide. He died of natural causes.