Alex Cooper

In some ways Alex Cooper seems like the girl next door—a best friend who will trust you with her most personal secrets and with whom you want to share yours. But that may be where the similarity stops. Cooper has built a circle of roughly 10 million best friends, according to listener data for her hugely popular Call Her Daddy podcast, and a $125 million media empire. Guests on the podcast, which debuted in 2018, feature some of the decade’s most influential personalities—from former vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris to Disney Channel alum and musical artist Demi Lovato. The podcast’s success also led to the founding of a lifestyle media platform called the Unwell Network.

From the basement to Barstool

Cooper was born and raised in Newtown, Pennsylvania, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia. She is the youngest of three children born to Laurie Cooper, a psychologist, and Bryan Cooper, a television producer for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. Like her father, she found herself drawn to the screen. She chronicled much of her childhood on film, making home videos in the family’s basement.

Her creativity served as an escape from the harsh bullying that she experienced during middle school. Cooper was taunted by boys for having red hair and thin legs, and sometimes things got violent. Once, a group of students slammed her head into the ground, causing her to lose consciousness. Cooper detailed the experience on the Armchair Expert podcast:

“I remember just trying to play it off like I’m OK, but I completely blacked out,” said Cooper. “It was just because of the color of my hair and the way I looked that it was physical retaliation.”

Despite the trauma of that experience, Cooper maintained close friendships with the girls in her class, especially one: Laren (sometimes spelled Lauren) McMullen. McMullen remained an important figure in Cooper’s life and in the life of her business (more on that later).

In high school Cooper’s attention turned to a new hobby: soccer. But the sport quickly became more than an after-school activity; it became a huge part of Cooper’s identity. Cooper excelled and soon signed to play Division I soccer for Boston University, receiving a full athletic scholarship.

Cooper began college in 2013, majoring in film and television. Soccer continued to be a huge part of her life, and Cooper attracted the attention of her coach, Nancy Feldman, which she said she believed was for her skill on the field. But it quickly became clear to Cooper that something was wrong. In her 2025 documentary, Call Her Alex, Cooper recounted what she described as three years of sexual harassment from Feldman, starting during her freshman year and slowly escalating from there.

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“My sophomore year, everything really shifted. I started to notice her really starting to fixate on me way more than any other teammate of mine,” Cooper said in Call Her Alex. “And it was confusing because the focus wasn’t like, ‘You’re doing so well. Let’s get you on the field. You’re going to be a starter.’ It was all based in her wanting to know who I was dating, her making comments about my body, and her always wanting to be alone with me.”

The documentary features emotional conversations with her parents, who talk about the pain that they experienced watching Cooper deal with the alleged harassment. Eventually the family went to the school’s athletic director and relayed all that Cooper had been through and presented a journal chronicling her experiences with her coach. After being told that Feldman would not be fired, Cooper decided not to play her senior year, but she was allowed to keep her scholarship. Though Cooper alleged that there was no immediate investigation, the release of the documentary led the university to hire an external legal team to review the athletic department’s policies.

The documentary also led one former player to come forward publicly about alleged abuse. Still, nearly 100 other players and staff signed a letter supporting Feldman, according to a report obtained by TMZ Sports. Feldman retired from the program in 2022 and has not spoken publicly about the allegations.

After graduating in 2017 from Boston University’s College of Communication, Cooper moved to New York City. She worked in advertising and at Gotham magazine before a serendipitous introduction to Sofia Franklyn, who would go on to be her podcast cohost. Their first meeting was a sort of apartment tour–blind date combo set up by a mutual friend who knew they both needed housing. The pair signed a lease that day and went out for drinks. Then they noticed something:

“We were at this bar, bantering. By the end of the night, we had a group of 20, 30 people just watching us talk and listening to each other,” said Franklyn on the Money Buys Happiness podcast. “[Alex] was like, ‘Let’s start a YouTube.’ ”

Cooper already had a budding YouTube channel and was trying to increase viewership on her vlogs when a friend pointed her and Franklyn toward the podcast route. They decided to focus the show on their lives as two young, single women in Manhattan.

Though some sources say the name “Call Her Daddy” came from Franklyn during a conversation between the pair about female empowerment in the bedroom, Elle reported that the origin of the title was somewhat less calculated: a sweatshirt. Cooper purchased a top that said “Daddy” on it during college, and she found it hilarious—a play on the slang term daddy, which generally refers to a male partner with money or power. She liked the idea that women could be “daddies” too.

Either way, the name stuck and the podcast struck a chord. Soon, powerhouse media brand Barstool Sports called—and the pair answered.

Call Her Daddy

The podcast’s first episode, “Sext Me So I Know It’s Real,” premiered on October 3, 2018, inviting listeners to join “vlogger Alex Cooper and best friend Sofia Franklyn as the duo dives into the explicit details of their life in NYC,” according to the episode description. They spoke about relationships, social excursions, New York, and, as the title suggests, their sexuality. Audiences loved it.

The podcast quickly rose from 12,000 to 2,000,000 total downloads in just two months, becoming a viral phenomenon and placing them in the top 1 percent of podcasts. After the third episode, Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy reached out and offered the pair a three-year contract, Franklyn said on Money Buys Happiness. On a later episode, Cooper said that they were promised $75,000 the first year, $85,000 the second year, and $100,000 the third year, plus bonuses based on their success. Franklyn and Cooper capitalized on the taboo, unafraid to talk about sexuality in ways that were frank, personal, and either empowering or reductive, depending on whom you ask.

Some listeners appreciated that the podcast normalized “women’s locker-room” talk, as Cooper called it, and women asserting themselves sexually. But many op-eds and think pieces spanning both sides of the aisle begged to differ, with some critics stating that the podcast affirmed strict gender roles and reinforced a focus on male pleasure, power dynamics, and heteronormativity.

As the debate grew, so did the podcast’s listenership. Then suddenly the weekly releases halted in April 2020. Tension built over five weeks as fans grew worried about the fate of Call Her Daddy and its hosts. With more than a year remaining on their three-year deal with Barstool Sports, news broke that the pair wanted to renegotiate their contracts.

At first the hosts negotiated together. Including their bonuses, Alex, then 25, and Sofia, 27, were making an estimated $500,000 per year. They proposed an offer to Portnoy: $1 million salary, higher split from merchandise sales, and rights to the podcast’s name. Portnoy then responded with a counteroffer: $500,000 guaranteed salary with bonuses, ownership of the Call Her Daddy intellectual property rights at completion of their contract, which would be shortened by six months, and an increased share of revenue from merchandise and other products.

The complications grew when Cooper and Franklyn could not come to an agreement on what to do about the counteroffer. But things may have turned sour even before then:

“It was the classic, ‘You think you see something online and people genuinely believe you’re like sisters, but our relationship was so awful,’ ” Cooper said in her documentary.

Ultimately the pair could not reconcile. Cooper decided to take the counteroffer, which she called “the deal of a lifetime.” Franklyn left and later started her own podcast, Sofia with an F. The announcement about the split came from a YouTube video posted by Cooper as well as from Franklyn’s Instagram account and her subsequent first solo podcast episode, and it was clear the pair was not on good terms. This led to an Internet firestorm, with some fans directing anger toward Franklyn’s then-boyfriend Peter Nelson, an HBO executive referred to as “Suitman” on the podcast who was rumored to have influenced Franklyn’s decision. She has denied these claims.

Going solo and Spotify

Cooper’s solo Call Her Daddy show started in May 2020 and looked and sounded distinctly different. Her rebrand turned away from what she and Franklyn had described from the beginning as the exploitation of their personal lives. Though still proclaiming herself as the “founding father” in the intro and featuring frequent solo episodes, Cooper slowly transitioned the podcast to an interview-focused platform.

After her first episode, where she rehashed the drama with Franklyn, she began to book big guests, including pop star Olivia O’Brien and YouTube mogul Tana Mongeau. As Cooper transitioned from confessionals to conversations, one guest has continually returned: McMullen. Cooper’s childhood best friend had never been a cohost, but she became a key figure on the podcast. In 2025 it was revealed that McMullen had been the podcast’s head producer for years; she and Cooper recorded a nearly hour-long episode detailing the experience of working with a friend.

Cooper has since said that her move away from talking about the details of her personal life was partly because of her budding relationship with Matt Kaplan, film producer and CEO of Ace Entertainment. The couple met in 2020 and married in 2024. Despite the thematic transition, Call Her Daddy was more popular than ever. By leveraging the fan bases of those she interviewed, Cooper built a massive following. In 2021 digital recording platform Spotify offered her a $60 million, three-year deal.

At the time, it was the largest exclusive deal for a woman-led podcast and second only to Joe Rogan’s deal with the platform. Call Her Daddy continued to grow and clinched the ranking of second biggest podcast in the world, behind The Joe Rogan Experience in 2023. Still, Cooper proudly holds the title as owner of the most-listened-to podcast by a woman.

Call Her Daddy began to book even bigger guests, including comedian Chelsea Handler and actress and model Julia Fox, whose episode yielded a viral “Uncuh Jahmz” meme after she said she was the muse for the film Uncut Gems in a particularly notable tone. Cooper continued to do occasional solo episodes, which often featured advice segments. Even in the interview episodes, though, Cooper wove in unfettered talk about sexuality and relationships, continuing to carve out her niche in pop culture.

Sirius deal and career expansion

In August 2023 Cooper expanded her reach in the media sphere with the creation of her and Kaplan’s brand, Unwell, a podcast network launching new shows hosted by viral personalities, including Madeline Argy and Alix Earle. The announcement preceded her inaugural tour, the Unwell Tour, which began in November across the East Coast of the United States. Its success yielded a second leg on the West Coast in 2024. In December 2024 Cooper launched the Unwell hydration drink. The beverage became an official sponsor of the National Women’s Soccer League four months later.

That same year vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris came on the podcast, just weeks before Republican candidate Donald Trump went on Joe Rogan’s show. The parallel guest appearances sparked online conversations about a shift in popular stops along political press tours.

But 2024 had more in store for Cooper. In August she inked a $125 million deal with SiriusXM, giving the audio company the sales rights to not only Call Her Daddy but also to the slate of podcasts hosted on the Unwell Network.

In 2025 Cooper’s two-part documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It details her evolution, chronicling everything from her childhood in Pennsylvania to the Unwell Tour. She marked the premiere with a post on Instagram and a tribute to her fans:

And last and most importantly…to the Daddy Gang. Everything I do is for you. I hope you find a part of yourself in this documentary. Whether it’s through the pain and challenging moments or the celebration of the beautiful community we have built…thank you for everything.