In the fall of 2018, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn released the first episode of Call Her Daddy introducing themselves. “To be honest, I’m probably just here to ride Alex’s coattails,” Franklyn said. Cooper, who is more confident on the mic in terms of sound and delivery, calls herself a “stay-at-home, hard-working vlogger by day and an Insta-hoe by night.” The show, which at the time focused on his sex life, drug habits, and bad decisions, gained popularity. That year they signed a three-year contract with Barstool Sports. Call Her Daddy was so popular that the duo attempted to renegotiate that contract in 2020, and their friendship quickly deteriorated into a mess of sensational headlines and legal threats. Franklyn claimed that Cooper went behind her back and betrayed her. Cooper claimed that Franklyn was uncooperative in the negotiations and sent her boyfriend Peter Nelson (who was an HBO Sports executive at the time) to make things more difficult. The podcast’s intellectual property remained controlled by Barstool, with Cooper taking the reins completely in May 2020. If you look at the Call Her Daddy YouTube page, that’s the beginning of the story. The episodes with Franklyn, the first two years of content, disappeared. Cooper has moved on. In 2021, he left Barstool and signed a $60 million deal with Spotify. In 2024, he signed a $125 million contract with Sirius XM. Call Her Daddy has gone from a sex chat to one of the biggest podcasts in the world. Cooper has interviewed Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian and dozens of other top celebrities. The podcast, along with his personality, is softer, less raunchy, and more adult. At this point, very few people think about the early years of Call Her Daddy. Franklyn, who just published her book Daddy Issues: A Memoir, hopes to change that. Unfortunately, this is less a memoir than a 240-page amalgamation of contempt and resentment about a subject no one cares much about anymore. But I’ll give her credit for doing something totally surprising: with Daddy Issues, Franklyn has really made me warm to Alex Cooper. Daddy Issues begins with a prologue. Cooper’s husband, Matt Kaplan, called Sofia’s agent. Kaplan has read a draft of the book and is threatening to sue. “For the first time I have something Alex wants. Our story. My story,” Franklyn writes. But what does he have on Cooper? After the beginning of the book delves into Franklyn’s childhood and adolescence, presented more as a list of bad behaviors than any kind of self-reflection, Cooper reaches 60 pages. Here, Franklyn addresses an interesting observation, before ignoring it in favor of pettiness. She describes her encounter with Cooper, noting that “he laughs and I know I don’t have to explain myself. He immediately feels familiar, like someone I’ve known forever, or even an extension of myself.” Furthermore, Cooper’s “confidence is the disarming kind, balancing her undeniable beauty with doses of self-deprecation.” Of course, meeting someone who immediately feels like an extension of yourself might reveal something about that person’s overwhelming charisma, or it might reveal something about your deep longing for friendship. Franklyn doesn’t really explore any of the possibilities, choosing instead to focus on the fact that no one was there to help her move into their shared apartment, and how Cooper instantly seems closer to Franklyn than to his other roommate, his old friend. The first of Franklyn’s main claims in Daddy Issues is that Cooper set up a meeting with then-Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard and ordered Franklyn to come and take photos that Cooper could leak to the press. “While I know he’s trying to act cool, I know he’s dead serious about wanting me to beat him to a pulp,” Franklyn writes. “Even with a micro following on Instagram, Alex’s image control is fierce.” Certainly, being the type of person who selects an image so precisely and is so desperate for fame that you enlist a friend to leak photos of yourself from the paparazzi is embarrassing. But is he a villain? It’s boring and trying to be this kind of person, but everyone already knows that Cooper is like that. The next statement is even more puzzling. In perhaps the book’s biggest reveal, Franklyn claims that the “Gluck Gluck 3000/9000,” a blowjob technique Cooper introduced early in the show’s creation, wasn’t Cooper’s prank at all. It came, Franklyn claims, from Cooper’s high school friend Muji Fricke. “[Muji] “He’s white, but he tells me he wrote the ‘Gluck Gluck 9000’ joke for Alex and basically took him completely off of black Twitter,” Franklyn writes. “I realize it’s one of several jokes, like saying his favorite porn star is Lisa Ann in an IG Q&A, that Alex has made that couldn’t have come out of the mind of a white, blonde college jock.” Cooper’s personality on the show, Franklyn states, is a construct based on Fricke’s ideas. “Off-camera, Alex and I don’t even find much of Muji’s sexual humor funny. But we take her knowledge (the good, the bad and the ugly of sports and dudes) and put it on Alex, a tough white girl in a push-up bra… Comedy gold.” This is not the dig she thinks it is, as Cooper herself has firmly distanced herself from this type of person today. If anything, Call Her Daddy’s initial raunchy history as a messy shitshow, created by someone else, serves the current version better. The main source of conflict in their relationship, Franklyn says, occurred at a Barstool Christmas party in 2019, where she drinks herself into a stupor, does multiple lines of cocaine, misses a recording, and then apologizes to Cooper. This, he claims, led to renegotiations of the podcast in 2020 that culminated in its elimination. As her big reveal, Franklyn describes a meeting at Barstool founder Dave Portnoy’s apartment to discuss renegotiating her contract. She writes that it “looks exactly like the Barstool offices, with the addition of a fish tank […] I expect Alex to make a joke about the palace, but she is unusually awkward and doesn’t say anything. Something gives me the feeling that she’s been here before. Oh my god, did they fuck or something?” In the next paragraph, he continues: “[Portnoy] She makes a comment to Alex as if she knows how to move, confirming my suspicion.” This is a pretty irresponsible accusation, based solely on the author’s feelings in a very tense moment. Franklyn seems to think that if this were true, it would be an even bigger betrayal on Cooper’s part. Instead, it seems like proof that the couple’s close intimate relationship, which Franklyn claims they had until she was betrayed, may not have been as close as she thought. If this were her best friend and they told each other everything, wouldn’t they know if she Did she or didn’t sleep with her shared boss, a repulsive man with a long list of atrocious behaviors? Wouldn’t the ethical violation here be keeping a secret? In Daddy Issues, Franklyn admits that Cooper never introduced her to his parents and never tried to integrate her into his group of friends. Franklyn talks about her close, intimate friendship with Cooper as one-sided, she writes, “She doesn’t force intimacy or vulnerability and allows me to convey my life through a running joke. […] She gets it: what needs to be heard but not answered, how to hold the part without any serious anchors.” It seems that after two years of living and working together, Franklyn didn’t really know her that well. This memoir isn’t interested in self-reflection, or even in picking apart the angst of a lost relationship and a derailed career. Instead, it seems to rely on creating a press cycle big enough that the freshness of the revelations doesn’t even matter. It seems to be working somehow: Alix Earle, who has had her own public feud with Cooper, posted a video of her reading Daddy Issues on TikTok. Many publications are adding to the book’s revelations and especially latching onto the ghostwriting of the Gluck Gluck 3000 joke. But none of this has shown a different Alex Cooper than we already knew existed: ruthless, power-hungry and incredibly image-conscious. Cooper is, as he revealed on his own Hulu show, Call Her Alex, one of The Boys. or worse, hasn’t said a word about the numerous credible allegations of sexual misconduct against Portnoy, her husband has been accused of berating people on TVs and in the Unwell offices. In Call Her, Alex, Cooper’s tour production manager, threatens to resign, which was later revealed to be due to Kaplan’s behavior since last year, Cooper sent a letter through a lawyer to the writer of a Vanity Fair exposé that included the threat: “If the story suggests any.” sexual impropriety by Mr. Kaplan, my mission in life will be to ensure that Vanity Fair’s days are numbered.” She is the kind of boss who allowed Alix Earle to discover that her podcast had been removed from the network through the media. Despite all this, Sofia Franklyn has written a book in which she somehow comes off worse. Recommended
