Call Her Daddy podcasters threatened Barstool with ‘fake’ sexual harassment allegations to get out of contract, Dave Portnoy claims
“Alex claimed to me that they had a plan to say they were both sexually harassed at Barstool.”
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has alleged in his newly released memoir that Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, hosts of the popular podcast Call Her Daddy, had planned to break their contracts with Barstool using “fake” sexual harassment claims.
Call Her Daddy was owned and distributed by Barstool Sports between 2018 and 2021. The podcast is now hosted solely by Cooper. Portnoy said that Cooper and Franklyn had not expressed dissatisfaction with their pay and contracts until they met with YouTuber Logan Paul.
“There was no indication that Alex and Sofia were unhappy with their situation, until they met Logan Paul. In April 2019, Alex and Sofia flew to Los Angeles to appear on Logan Paul’s podcast, and he planted some rather poisonous seeds in their minds. They got into a discussion about their current contracts and pay, and Logan was unimpressed,” Portnoy wrote in his new book, Cancel Me If You Can, per the Daily Mail.
“Alex and Sofia slowly began to show their growing dissatisfaction with being tied to Barstool. First, they stopped coming into the office. Near the end of 2019 was really when the major trouble started brewing. Call Her Daddy had hired a lawyer and wanted to have a meeting with us. The lawyer brought a list of demands so preposterous that I couldn’t even make it through the meeting.”
He said the two hosts wanted “a million dollars a year, the right to sell their own ads, ownership over the intellectual property of Call Her Daddy, and 90 percent of their merch sales. Oh, and they no longer wanted to be qualified as employees of Barstool Sports.”
He said he believes that Peter Nelson, the then-boyfriend of Franklyn and a former HBO executive, was behind the negotiations. He called Nelson “quite possibly a human incarnation of Satan.” Franklyn has said that speculation about Nelson’s involvement was “false,” and that he “wasn’t that involved.”
He said that the Call Her Daddy hosts “simply stopped putting out their podcast” in an attempt to force their contract demands, with the back-and-forth leading to a secret meeting on the rooftop of Portnoy’s apartment building, where he said he proposed “the most generous offer in Barstool history” that he claimed would have made the hosts millionaires.
He said that he later received a call from Cooper “out of nowhere” asking to meet again with Portnoy without Franklyn. He recalled her saying, “I love the deal you proposed, and I want to take it. But Sofia is never going to take it.”
Portnoy wrote, “‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You guys realize I’ll sue you if you take the podcast to another network before your contract is out, right?’ Alex claimed to me that they had a plan to say they were both sexually harassed at Barstool.”
He added, “That was it. That was their game plan to get out of their contractual obligation to Barstool Sports in the event that I did not relinquish their IP to them and wish them well on their merry way as they jumped ship to a rival podcast network.”
He said that he and his company had been “pilloried for making sexist jokes” for years, “but we’d never been accused of inappropriate workplace conduct. But had they decided to go that route, even though it was patently untrue, it would have been a tough fight for us to win in the court of public opinion. Nobody would have believed my side of the story.”
“I realize that this is a heavy accusation I just made: how Call Her Daddy was allegedly planning to break their contract with us by lying about sexual harassment at Barstool.”