We Read Sofia Franklyn’s Memoir So You Don’t Have To. Here Are the Most Shocking Details

Sofia Franklyn’s Daddy Issues reopens the biggest podcasting breakup and asks how far you’d go to get to the top. It’s just business, right? I’ve always had a little chip on my shoulder about Alex Cooper . I’ll be the first to admit it. Maybe it’s ego. Maybe it’s the frequent comparisons, a natural byproduct of being another blonde with a mic, despite being nothing alike. Maybe it’s watching said fellow blonde get the kind of deal you’d kill for. I never quite got or bought into the Call Her Daddy hype. I did, however, want its show slot. As Call Her Daddy was falling apart in 2020 , my co-host and I pitched our podcast to Dave Portnoy over Zoom. We were two red carpet reporters riffing on our Hollywood and celebrity stories with an irreverent bite about society and politics. While the whole internet was refreshing for updates on the breakup, I saw the Call Her Daddy account continuously pop up in our Instagram Story views. It was surreal. Behind the scenes, Barstool was considering picking up our show. They ultimately passed (more on that later). So when I got an advance copy of Sofia Franklyn’s tell-all memoir Daddy Issues , I had my popcorn ready. Sofia, the main co-star of this story, obviously has her own axe to grind. But reading her account only reinforced what I thought for some time. There’s a reason this story still has a chokehold on us six years later, and it goes deeper than petty Real Housewives drama. Let’s be real. We may never know exactly what happened between these women. I’ve read Dave’s tell-all , too. I found myself rooting for and against the same people within a few pages. Everyone has a side and it’s not clean. But if even half of Sofia’s account is true, the mental gymnastics are truly unhinged. The Alex-Sofia story starts with Sofia getting to New York desperate for a friend and finding a roommate in Alex. She describes their relationship as a hard-and-fast best friend kinship, yet according to Sofia, Alex was weirdly possessive when it came to work opportunities. Sofia recalls wondering why so few people from Alex’s past seemed to stick around. If even half of Sofia’s account is true, the mental gymnastics are truly unhinged. They came up with the show name together. By Sofia’s account, they were true co-architects in nearly every facet of the podcast. The premise was two hot twenty-somethings with exclusive access to parties and men, naming names and leaving in the raunchy details for “shock value.” Barstool was interested after three episodes. I already find it strange how Alex took a solo meeting with Dave Portnoy on a day Sofia couldn’t get out of her corporate job because “it couldn’t wait.” The more the show took off, she writes, the more people outside it were “treated as an inconvenience getting in the way of our ascension” by Alex. According to Sofia, Alex’s high school best friend, known as “Milf Hunter,” helped write jokes and brought in the “Gluck Gluck 9000” from Black Twitter. It was the line that put CHD on the map, which Sofia says Alex adamantly claimed on air as her own. Sometimes, she writes, he “ is Alex’s voice.” Then Alex wanted to fire him without warning after a few missteps, Sofia says, despite him being integral to the show. After Alex fires him, Sofia says he warned her through tears, “She’s gonna f*ck you.” Sofia writes that he later told her Alex had tried to get her fired and would cut jokes he’d written for her. Once the money and numbers skyrocketed, the women were said to be in agreement to start looking beyond their Barstool deal they’d rapidly outgrown. They even had a safe word to be on the same page if negotiations went sideways. In a text Sofia reproduces, Alex tells her, “I love you so much I wouldn’t want to go in the trenches with anybody else LESBIAN VIBES but ILY we got this.” At the infamous rooftop meeting, Sofia remembers Alex acting uncharacteristically awkward at Dave’s apartment. She wondered whether Alex had been there before and whether they’d slept together, a suspicion that deepened when Dave noted that Alex knew her way around. It’s the moment that has the internet talking. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. They’re grown adults, and that’s their business. Without getting into the hairy details of he said, she said, this is the part that nearly sent me to therapy on a secondhand account. Sofia says she ultimately told Alex she was committed to continuing the show and would stay if they held firm on a few terms like they both wanted, and Alex assured her, “We’re going to make sure we get everything we need.” Then their lawyer called. Alex wanted separate representation, Sofia says. She also learned Alex had been making more money behind her back for months. At this point, I’m scared Alex Cooper is hiding under my bed at night. At the start of COVID, Sofia says she came home to find Alex had packed up and gone. She says Alex pressed her “in a maniacal voice that sounds unnatural for any normal human being” on who did more work with “no remorse” and asked about keeping phrases like “unwell.” It strikes Sofia (and me) as bizarre, considering their whole friendship and empire are being blown to smithereens without answers. Sofia says “I’m unwell” came from an email she wrote at her Morgan Stanley job. And what did Alex call the media company she went on to build? Unwell. When she confronts Alex, asking if she makes more money, the response she gets is: “Yeah.” At this point, I’m scared Alex Cooper is hiding under my bed at night. Sofia says she texted her that this was “exactly the type of behavior that has cost you your best friends over the years” and “I don’t care about the money. I care about the lying. And that’s where you and I differ.” She recounts that Dave told her Alex had pitched doing the show alone. Sofia says she kept asking her to talk, and that after everything, they owed it to each other to at least have the conversation. She said she wanted to make it work and didn’t get any responses. Finally, she texted their safe word. She got silence. Alex kept the show and, by Sofia’s account, twisted the whole thing to millions of viewers, making it seem like Sofia was the one to walk away. Sofia recounts, “I have no sense of reality… all of my memories are violated.” She describes saving hundreds of old photos to reassure herself of the life she remembered. “Was she ever my friend?… What is real?” Sofia doesn’t just recall an abrupt solo venture, but an active, viral internet takedown campaign of vitriol. Alex reinforces the narrative with merch, episodes like “The Funeral,” and guest after guest painting her as the righteous victim and indulging a pile-on of Sofia as the immoral villain. “I can’t make sense of it. That my best friend is saying this, doing this, so publicly… so proudly? Why?” Sofia asks. She recalls “decomposing in the basement” when she learns of Alex’s historic $60 million Spotify deal . She also remembers drinking in her mother’s basement while Alex had her first major guest: Miley Cyrus. She details spiraling with alcohol, purposelessness, and so much self-hate that she begins to ask: “What if I am who Alex says I am? A submissive, lazy, greedy, loser girl who can’t get out of her shadow?” “Alex stops mentioning me in the show and won’t say my name in the press,” Sofia says. “It no longer serves her to mention me.” She tries to launch Sofia with an F from that same room, struggling to string five thoughts together and barely recognizing her own voice. As someone who talks into a microphone for a living, I felt that one. There’s a twisted irony here. “What goes up on the Internet, must come down,” Sofia writes. That it does. During the breakup, Sofia was mainly dragged for supposedly letting her then-boyfriend, HBO executive Peter Nelson, known as “Suitman,” call the shots in the Barstool negotiations. She insists that’s a distortion of what happened and that she wanted to work it out to continue the show. “What goes up on the Internet, must come down.” Six years later, people are asking who really calls the shots at Alex’s company. Unwell employees told Vanity Fair that Alex’s husband and co-CEO, Matt Kaplan, made many of the company’s executive decisions and had volatile workplace behavior. But this review isn’t meant to be an Alex Cooper Burn Book. In fact, when unflattering news around Alex’s husband and their business circulated a few months ago, I thought the pile-up from vindicated female podcasters was just a little too bloodthirsty. Even from my position as a small supporting role in this drama, biases and jealousy aside, everything has a weird way of coming full circle. And that’s what this book is about. At the time, I was so disappointed Barstool didn’t pick up our show. Given the way things played out, maybe it was for the best. A year later, I ended up interviewing Dave Portnoy amid the fallout from Business Insider ’s hit piece on him. I was a rare media ally and one of the only shows he went on to discuss it then. Sofia opens the book with her upbringing, writing about growing up with a single mom in a dysfunctional home life with a stepdad who struggled with addiction. Today, she’s in a stable relationship and says she’s the happiest she’s ever been. She still has daddy issues, she admits, and that chapter of her life still messes with her head. On page one, Sofia recounts a call from her agent about Alex’s husband. “Matt Kaplan called. He was screaming. He’s threatening to sue. What he actually said was Alex is going to sue you.” After six years of silence from Alex, Sofia says she heard from her through her husband, a man she’d never met, on a mission to destroy her because of this book. “On the scoreboard of Alex vs. Sofia, Alex won,” she says. “I cannot fathom her trying to do it again.” As for Alex Cooper, she has the media empire, the Forbes cover , the Skims campaign, the wedding documented in Vogue . Moguls like Bethenny Frankel have come to Alex’s defense, saying it’s just “business.” Which is ironic, since Sofia mentions idolizing Bethenny in the book. I get being ambitious, determined, even cutthroat at times. But I can’t imagine treating someone I once called my best friend, not to mention who helped me build all of it, that way. How far is one willing to go for fame and riches? I don’t know what really happened. We may never know. But what struck me about all of this was something bigger: How far is one willing to go for fame and riches? And how much are we willing to excuse when the person who does it comes out on top? At the end of the day, if this is what it took to win, is it worth it? Maybe for some people it is. You can step over people all the way to the top. You might even stay there. But is that really how you want to live?