In the fall of 2018, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn released the first episode of Call Her Daddy by introducing themselves. “To be honest, I’m probably here just to ride Alex’s coattails,” Franklyn said. Cooper, more confident on mic in sound and delivery, declares herself a “stay-at-home, try-hard vlogger by day and an Insta-hoe by night.” The show, which at the time focused on their sex lives, drug habits, and bad decisions, exploded in popularity. They signed a three-year deal with Barstool Sports that year.
Call Her Daddy was so popular that the duo tried to renegotiate that contract in 2020, and their friendship quickly deteriorated and became a mess of tabloid headlines and legal threats. Franklyn claimed that Cooper went behind her back and betrayed her. Cooper claimed that Franklyn was uncooperative in negotiations and deployed her boyfriend Peter Nelson (who was an HBO Sports executive at the time) to make things more difficult.
The podcast’s IP remained controlled by Barstool, and Cooper took the reins fully in May of 2020. If you look at the Call Her Daddy YouTube page, that is the beginning of history. The episodes with Franklyn, the first two years of content, are gone. Cooper has moved on. In 2021, she left Barstool and signed a $60 million contract with Spotify. In 2024, she signed a $125 million contract with Sirius XM. Call Her Daddy has evolved from a sex chat romp to one of the biggest podcasts in the world. Cooper has interviewed Kamala Harris, Michelle Obama, Kim Kardashian, and dozens of other major celebrities. The podcast, along with her persona, is softer, less raunchy, and more grown-up.
At this point, very few people think about the early years of Call Her Daddy. Franklyn, who just released her book Daddy Issues: A Memoir, is hoping to change that. Unfortunately, this is less a memoir than a 240-page amalgamation of contempt and resentment about a topic nobody cares that much about anymore. But I’ll give her credit for doing something totally surprising: With Daddy Issues, Franklyn has actually caused me to feel sympathy for Alex Cooper.
Daddy Issues begins with a prologue. Cooper’s husband, Matt Kaplan, has 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 is it that she has on Cooper?
After the start of the book gets into Franklyn’s childhood and adolescence, presented as more of a list of misbehaviors than any kind of self-reflection, Cooper arrives about 60 pages in. Here, Franklyn approaches an interesting observation, before ignoring it in favor of pettiness. She describes meeting Cooper and notes that "she laughs and I know I don’t have to explain myself. She feels immediately familiar, like someone I’ve known forever, or even an extension of myself." Furthermore, Cooper's "confidence is the disarming type, balancing her undeniable prettiness with doses of self-depreciation." Of course, meeting someone who immediately feels like an extension of yourself could reveal something about that person’s overwhelming charisma, or it could reveal something about your own profound longing for friendship. Franklyn doesn’t really explore either possibility, opting instead to focus on the fact that no one was there to help her move in to their shared apartment, and how Cooper instantly seems closer to Franklyn than to their other roommate, her long-time friend.
The first of her Franklyn's major claims in Daddy Issues is that Cooper set up a date with then-Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard and instructed Franklyn to come and take photos which Cooper could leak to the press. “Even though I know she’s trying to play it cool, I know she’s dead serious about wanting me to pap them,” Franklyn writes. “Even with a micro Instagram following, Alex’s image control is ferocious.” Certainly, being the type of person who curates an image that tightly, and is so desperate for fame that she enlists a friend to leak paparazzi shots of her, is embarrassing. But is it villainous? It’s boring and striving to be this kind of person, but everyone already knows that Cooper is like that.
The next of her claims is even more baffling. In perhaps the book’s biggest reveal, Franklyn claims that the "Gluck Gluck 3000/9000," a blowjob technique which Cooper presented early in the show’s creation, was not Cooper’s joke at all. It came, Franklyn claims, from Cooper’s high-school friend Muji Fricke. "[Muji] is white, but tells me that he wrote the 'Gluck Gluck 9000' joke for Alex and basically pulled it fully from Black Twitter," Franklyn writes. "I realize it’s one of several jokes—like saying her favorite porn star is Lisa Ann on an IG Q&A—Alex has made that could not have come from the mind of a white, blond college athlete.”
Cooper’s on-show persona, Franklyn claims, is a construction based on Fricke's ideas. “Off-camera, Alex and I don’t even find a lot of Muji’s sexual humor funny. But we take his knowledge—the good, the bad and the ugly of sports and dudes—and put it on Alex, a dabbing hardo white girl in a push-up bra … Comedy gold.” This is not quite the dig that she thinks it is, since Cooper herself has firmly distanced herself from this kind of persona today. If anything, the early raunchy history of Call Her Daddy being a messy shitshow, created by someone else, serves the current version more.
The main source of conflict in their relationship, Franklyn says, happened at a 2019 Barstool holiday party where she drinks herself into a stupor, does many lines of cocaine, misses a recording, then begs Cooper for forgiveness. This, she claims, led into the renegotiations for the podcast in 2020 culminating in her removal. As her big reveal, Franklyn describes a meeting at Barstool founder Dave Portnoy’s apartment to discuss renegotiating their 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’s uncharacteristically awkward and doesn’t say a thing. Something gives me the vibe she’s been here before. Jesus Christ, did they fuck or something?" In the next paragraph, she continues, “[Portnoy] makes a comment to Alex like she knows her way around, confirming my suspicion.”
This is a pretty irresponsible accusation to make, based on only the author's feelings in a very tense moment. Franklyn seems to think that if this were true, it would prove an even greater betrayal on Cooper’s part. Instead it seems like evidence that the pair's close intimate relationship, which Franklyn claims they had until it was betrayed, may not have been as close as she thought. If this were your best friend and you told each other everything, wouldn’t you know whether or not she slept with your shared boss, a repulsive man with a long list of heinous behavior? The ethical breach here would not be secret keeping.
In Daddy Issues, Franklyn admits that Cooper never introduced her to her parents, and never attempted to integrate her into her group of friends. Franklyn talks about her close, intimate friendship with Cooper as one-sided. "It’s easy with Alex," she writes. "She doesn’t force intimacy or vulnerability and lets me stream my life through an ongoing joke [...] She gets it: what needs to be listened to but not responded to, how to keep the bit going without any serious anchors." It seems that after two years of living and working together, Franklyn didn’t really know her all that well.
This memoir is not interested in self-reflection, or even picking apart the heartbreak of a lost relationship and derailed career. Instead it seems to bank on creating a large enough press cycle that the freshness of the revelations won't even matter. It seems to be somewhat working: Alix Earle, who has had her own public falling-out with Cooper, posted a video of her reading Daddy Issues to TikTok. Plenty of publications are aggregating the revelations from the book, 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-aware. Cooper is, as she revealed in her own Hulu show Call Her Alex, one of the boys, for better or worse. She has not said a word about the many credible allegations of sexual misconduct against Portnoy. Kaplan, her husband, has been accused of berating people on television sets and within the Unwell offices. In Call Her Alex, Cooper's tour production manager threatens to quit, which was later revealed to be because of Kaplan's behavior. The working conditions and vibes at her company are so bad that, according to reporting by Bloomberg, 20 out of around 100 people have quit since last year. Cooper sent a letter through an attorney to the writer of a Vanity Fair exposé that included the threat, "If the Story so much as suggests any sexual impropriety on Mr. Kaplan’s part, I will make it my life’s mission to ensure Vanity Fair’s days are numbered.” She's the type of boss who let Alix Earle find out her podcast had been dropped from the network through the media. Despite all this, Sofia Franklyn has written a book in which she somehow comes off worse.
