Alex Cooper is trying to learn what Sofia Franklyn’s memoir says about Dave Portnoy before its release, Page Six reports.
The report says the concern has nothing to do with Alix Earle. Instead, it centers on Daddy Issues, a book by Cooper’s former Call Her Daddy co-host that reportedly implies Cooper may have had a fling with Portnoy. The account does not identify when that might have happened or confirm that it did.
People working for Cooper have reportedly contacted those with advance copies to find out what the memoir contains. Simon & Schuster has kept the book under unusually tight control. Only a few copies were sent out, and each one carries a watermark linked to its recipient.
Page Six says the publisher guarded this manuscript more closely than Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which the report describes as exposing national-security secrets. That secrecy has made early details scarce, while one person with a copy told Page Six Cooper was panicking.
Franklyn and Cooper built Call Her Daddy together before their friendship and working relationship collapsed around 2020. Franklyn left Portnoy’s Barstool Sports operation after contentious contract negotiations, while Cooper walked away with full ownership of the show’s intellectual property.
That ownership helped Cooper launch Unwell, the media business that the report says has recently shown signs of strain. Its hydration and beverage brand, started last year with Nestlé, is now ending production.
The memoir is arriving with another potential pressure point. Franklyn is due on The Adam Friedland Show the same Tuesday the book is published. The interview was recorded about three weeks earlier, and a source familiar with it described the conversation as explosive.
The show’s Instagram account promoted the appearance with a photo of Franklyn and Friedland, who was making an obscene hand gesture, along with a message aimed at the program’s audience. The caption greeted fans and pointed them toward Tuesday.
The most specific detail comes from the reported apartment scene. According to the source who read the memoir, Franklyn writes about visiting Portnoy’s apartment with Cooper and realizing Cooper seemed to know the place. The passage then raises the possibility that Cooper and Portnoy slept together, though Page Six does not report that the memoir confirms the claim.
Page Six says it contacted Cooper and Portnoy for comment, but the report contains no response from either one.
Why It Matters
This story matters because it places a potentially personal allegation inside the origin story of a widely known podcast. The Cooper-Franklyn split was already tied to ownership, contract conflict, and the direction of a media business. A memoir can bring those old tensions back into public view while also changing how readers interpret the choices that followed. It also arrives while Unwell is dealing with the reported end of a beverage product, so the story touches Cooper’s public image and business position at once. None of that proves the memoir’s implication, but it explains why advance access is being treated as valuable.
The unanswered questions are what make the situation unsettled. The passage described by Page Six does not establish when an alleged encounter occurred, and it does not independently prove that Cooper and Portnoy had a relationship. The interview could provide Franklyn another setting to discuss her account, but its contents are still unknown. Until the people involved respond, readers have a guarded book, a heavily promoted appearance, and an implication that remains unverified. The important distinction is between what the memoir may suggest and what the available reporting can actually confirm.
Source: pagesix.com
