MailOnline, the website of British tabloid the Daily Mail, has terminated the contract of star columnist Dan Wootton, a spokesperson said Thursday.
“Following events this week, DMG Media can confirm that Dan Wootton’s freelance column with MailOnline—which had already been paused—has now been terminated, along with his contract,” the spokesperson for DMG Media, the parent company of MailOnline, said in a statement.
Wootton, best known for breaking the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle “Megxit” story, was suspended Wednesday from the right-leaning U.K. television channel GB News after a guest on his show was allowed to go on a wildly misogynistic rant.
ADVERTISEMENT
MailOnline had paused Wootton’s column in August while it investigated allegations that he used fake identities to trick and bribe men into sending him sexually compromising images. A former star reporter for Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, Wootton has been accused of targeting media colleagues and public figures for years by posing as a fictitious celebrity agent named “Martin Branning” and offering large sums of money to men to film themselves in sexual acts.
During a six-minute monologue on a July broadcast of Dan Wootton Tonight, Wootton denied any criminal wrongdoing but did acknowledge to “errors of judgment in the past.”
Wootton, who has looked to become Britain’s answer to Tucker Carlson, got himself into more hot water this week during a segment on his primetime GB News show featuring actor-turned-conservative activist Laurence Fox.
Taking aim at Ava Evans, a political correspondent for online news site Joe, Fox fumed that no “single self-respecting man would like to climb into bed with that woman, ever, ever.” While Wootton laughed and smiled, Fox called Evans a “little woman” and then asked: “Who’d wanna shag that?”
Fox’s sexist tirade was in response to comments the progressive journalist made during a Monday appearance on BBC’s Politics Live, accusing her of dismissing male suicide. Following the GB News segment, Evans shared a video clip on social media and said it made her “physically sick” after watching it.
In an attempt to tamp down the brewing controversy over the grossly misogynistic attack on his show, Wootton tweeted an apology to Evans. “I think you’re brilliant,” he wrote. “I apologise for what was said during the course of my show and should have done this immediately on air. This is not what our channel is about.”
GB News, which launched in 2021 as a wannabe Fox News, soon followed suit with its own public condemnation of the segment.
“Comments made tonight on GB News by Laurence Fox were totally unacceptable,” the network said. “What he said does not reflect our values and we apologise unreservedly for the comments and the offence they have caused. We have launched an investigation and will be apologising to the individual involved.”
The channel then followed up by announcing that both Fox and Wootton had been pulled off the air.
While Wootton attempted to distance himself from Fox’s remarks, claiming on social media that he was in “no way amused by the comments Fox made and was reacting out of ‘shock and surprise,’” Fox threw the tabloid star under the bus by revealing a text exchange between the two. A screenshot of the pair’s texts shows Wootton laughing about the segment.
“Honesty is the best policy,” Fox wrote.
Fox, who recently founded the hard-right Reclaim Party, also claimed that GB News was fully aware of what he was going to say during the segment. “I stand by every word of what I said,” he unapologetically tweeted.
Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s regulatory authority, has launched several investigations into GB News’ broadcast. Earlier this month, the agency found that the network breached its license at least four times. Ofcom has since said it is investigating the channel over Fox’s sexist rant, which garnered thousands of complaints from viewers.
