In the fall of 2018, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn aired the first episode of Call her daddy by introducing himself. “To be honest, I’m probably just here to follow in Alex’s footsteps,” Franklyn said. Cooper, more confident on the mic in sound and delivery, declares herself “a stay-at-home 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 contract with Barstool Sports that year.
Call her daddy was so popular that the duo attempted to renegotiate that contract in 2020, and their friendship quickly deteriorated and became a mess of tabloid headlines and legal threats. Franklyn claimed Cooper went behind her back and betrayed her. Cooper claimed that Franklyn was uncooperative in negotiations and deployed her boyfriend Peter Nelson (who was then an HBO Sports executive) to make things more difficult.
The podcast IP remained controlled by Barstool and Cooper took full reins in May 2020. If you watch the Call her daddy YouTube page is the beginning of the story. The episodes with Franklyn, the first two years of content, are gone. Cooper has evolved. 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 went 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 major celebrities. The podcast, as well as his character, is gentler, less raunchy and more adult.
Today, very few people think about the early years of Call her daddy. Franklyn, who has just released her book Daddy Issues: A Memoirhope to change that. Unfortunately, it’s less of a memoir than a 240-page amalgamation of contempt and resentment over a subject that no one really cares about anymore. But I owe him credit for doing something totally surprising: with Daddy issues, Franklyn actually led me to feel sympathy for 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 legal action. “For the first time, I have something Alex wants. Our story. My story,” Franklyn writes. But what does she have on Cooper?
After the beginning of the book covers Franklyn’s childhood and adolescence, presented more as a list of bad behaviors than any type of introspection, Cooper gets around 60 pages in. Here, Franklyn addresses 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 immediately feels familiar, like someone I’ve known forever, or even an extension of myself.” Additionally, “Cooper’s self-confidence is the disarming kind, balancing his undeniable good looks with doses of self-deprecation.” Of course, meeting someone who immediately feels like an extension of yourself might reveal something about their overwhelming charisma, or it might reveal something about your own deep desire for friendship. Franklyn doesn’t really explore either possibility, choosing instead to focus on the fact that no one was there to help her move into their shared apartment and the fact that Cooper instantly seems closer to Franklyn than to their other roommate, her longtime friend.
The first of Franklyn’s major claims in Daddy issues is that Cooper set up a meeting with then-Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard and asked Franklyn to come take photos that Cooper could leak to the press. “Even though I know she’s trying to play it cool, I know she really wants me to pop them,” Franklyn wrote. “Even with a micro Instagram account, Alex’s control over his image is fierce.” Certainly, being the kind of person who manages an image so tightly and is so desperate for fame that she asks a friend to leak photos of her to the paparazzi is embarrassing. But is it bad? He’s annoying and tries hard to be that kind of person, but everyone already knows Cooper is like that.
The next of his statements is even more confusing. In perhaps the book’s biggest revelation, Franklyn claims that the “Gluck Gluck 3000/9000,” a blowjob technique introduced by Cooper early in the series’ creation, wasn’t a Cooper joke at all. According to Franklyn, it came from Cooper’s high school friend, Muji Fricke. “(Muji) is white, but he tells me he wrote the ‘Gluck Gluck 9000’ joke for Alex and basically took it entirely from Black Twitter,” Franklyn wrote. “I realize this is one of many jokes – like saying his favorite porn star is Lisa Ann during an IG Q&A – that Alex has made that couldn’t have come from the mind of a white, blonde college athlete.”
According to Franklyn, Cooper’s character on the show is a construct based on Fricke’s ideas. “Off camera, Alex and I don’t even find Muji’s sexual humor funny. But we take his insights – the good, the bad and the ugly of sports and guys – and put them on Alex, a hardcore dabbing white girl in a push-up bra… Comedy gold.” It’s not quite the dig she thinks it is, since Cooper herself has firmly distanced herself from that kind of character today. On the contrary, the first torrid story 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, occurred at a Christmas party at Barstool in 2019, where she drinks herself into a stupor, takes numerous lines of cocaine, misses a recording, and then asks Cooper for forgiveness. This, she claims, led to the podcast’s renegotiations in 2020, which resulted in its removal. As his 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 an aquarium…I’m expecting Alex to make a joke about the palace, but she’s uncharacteristically awkward and says nothing. Something makes me feel like she’s been here before. Damn, did they fuck or something?“In the next paragraph, she continues, “(Portnoy) makes a comment to Alex as if she knows something, thus confirming my suspicions.”
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 constitute an even greater betrayal on Cooper’s part. Instead, it appears to be evidence that the close intimate relationship between them, which Franklyn claims to have had until she was betrayed, may not have been as close as she thought. If she were your best friend and you told each other everything, wouldn’t you know whether or not she slept with your mutual boss, a disgusting man with a long list of obnoxious behavior? The ethical violation here would not be the keeping of a secret.
In Daddy issuesFranklyn admits that Cooper never introduced her to her parents and never tried to bring her into his group of friends. Franklyn speaks of her close and intimate friendship with Cooper as one-sided. “It’s easy with Alex,” she wrote. “She doesn’t force intimacy or vulnerability and lets me tell my life through a continuous joke (…) She understands: what needs to be listened to but not responded to, how to continue the movement without any serious anchor.” It seems that after two years of living and working together, Franklyn didn’t really know her that well.
This memoir is not interested in introspection, or even in analyzing the heartbreak of a lost relationship and a derailed career. Instead, he seems to be banking on creating a big enough press cycle that the freshness of the revelations doesn’t even matter. It seems to be working somewhat: Alix Earle, who had her own public spat with Cooper, posted a video of her reading. Daddy issues to TikTok. Many publications aggregate the book’s revelations, and particularly focus on the ghostwriting of the Gluck Gluck 3000 joke.
But none of it showed a different Alex Cooper than the one we already knew existed: ruthless, power-hungry, and incredibly image-conscious. Cooper is, as she revealed on her own Hulu show Call her Alexone of the boys, for better or worse. She hasn’t said a word about the numerous credible allegations of sexual misconduct against Portnoy. Kaplan, her husband, was accused of berating people on televisions and in Unwell’s offices. In Call her Alexthe production manager of Cooper’s tour threatens to resign, which is later revealed to be due to Kaplan’s behavior. The working conditions and atmosphere in his company are so bad that, according to a report from Bloomberg, Since last year, 20 out of 100 people have stopped smoking. Cooper sent a letter through an attorney to the author of a Vanity Fair statement that included the threat: “If the story suggests any sexual impropriety on the part of Mr. Kaplan, I will make it my life’s mission to ensure that Vanity Fair’s days are numbered.” » This is the kind of boss who lets Alix Earle discover that her podcast had been removed from the network through the media. Despite all this, Sofia Franklyn wrote a book in which she fared even worse.
Gn tech
