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It’s a week before Sofia Franklyn’s memoir,“Daddy Issues,”officially releases, and for the most part, her nerves have settled.
“It depends on the day,” she says over Zoom from a hotel room in New York City, one of her
two home bases. Franklyn, who splits her time between New York and Italy with her husband, is back in town for a packed month of press. “I would say 90% of the time I’m incredibly excited.”
But the road to telling her side of the explosive “Call Her Daddy” breakup with Alex Cooper has hardly been smooth. When Franklyn first announced the book in February, her agent received a phone call from Matt Kaplan, Cooper’s husband and business partner, allegedly screaming on the other end, as Franklyn recounts in the book’s foreword.
Anticipating the backlash, Franklyn had already booked an island getaway to escape the noise. This time, though, she has no plans to disappear. “I don’t feel a need to,” she says. “I’m in such a different place than I was six years ago.”
The 240-page memoir, which hits shelves Nov. 10, is split into three parts: her childhood and upbringing in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her single mom, who had her at 20 years old after a one-night stand; her post-college move to New York City, where she met and moved in with Cooper and launched the “Call Her Daddy” podcast; and, perhaps the meatiest section, her side of their dramatic breakup and the experience of watching the podcast she helped create become a multimillion-dollar media empire — without her. She now has the Unwell Network, a name she says she came up with herself for merch years earlier, blocked on social media.
“I found myself sobbing at parts that I thought I was so completely healed over,” she says of revisiting these moments over the past year.
Many of the details she shares in the book are already out there (that Cooper was being paid more without Franklyn knowing; that Cooper secretly met with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy to negotiate a deal without Franklyn). But the memoir also reveals new details about the behind-the-scenes operations of “Call Her Daddy,” including the involvement of Cooper’s childhood friend Muji Fricke, who, according to Franklyn, was on the podcast’s payroll for a short time before Cooper fired him without warning.
“She’s gonna fuck you,” Franklyn remembers Muji telling her.
According to Franklyn, Muji was an integral part of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, even feeding Cooper some of her most memorable bits, including the viral “Gluck Gluck 3000” joke.
“I realize it’s one of several jokes – like saying her favorite porn star is Lisa Ann on an IG Q&A – Alex has made that could not have come from the mind of a white, blond college athlete,” Franklyn writes in the book.
She continues: “Muji’s ideas become central to the show, and especially to Alex’s persona: an overtly sexual, clout-chasing WAG wannabe. Off-camera, Alex and I don’t even find a lot of Muji’s sexual humor funny. But we take his knowledge – the good, the bad and the ugly of sports and dudes – and put it on Alex, a dabbing hardo white girl in a push-up bra…Comedy gold.”
His involvement was largely unknown until now. “This is how the show was put together,” Franklyn says, “and I don’t think people actually know.”
As a childhood friend of Cooper’s, Muji also had firsthand knowledge of her personality before the fame. “Cooper doesn’t have friends,” Franklyn remembers him telling her. “I’ve watched it happen since high school.”
He was also one of the few people Cooper confided in during the early stages of “Call Her Daddy” — and, according to Franklyn, warned her that even then, Cooper didn’t have her back. “Even at the beginning she would take the lines I wrote for you, or just cut all of yours,” he allegedly told Franklyn.
She remembers clocking those early warnings but still feeling an inherent sense of trust. She couldn’t imagine that her best friend and roommate, with whom she spent nearly every waking hour, could be capable of that level of betrayal. “I clocked it, but I think my knee-jerk reaction was to just run over to Alex. I was so close with her that I thought, there’s a reason that he’s saying that, and she’s gonna explain it to me.”
“But I did clock it,” she says. “And I did start to wonder about how she functions in her friendships.”
By now, the general story of their breakup is largely known. It dates back to 2020 when Cooper and Franklyn, then two years into their wildly successful podcast, sought to renegotiate their three-year contract with Barstool Sports, which owned the show’s IP. Portnoy offered the co-hosts a deal that included $500,000 annual salaries, a larger cut of merchandise revenue and full ownership of the podcast’s IP after one more year at Barstool. Cooper wanted to accept; Franklyn did not, maintaining that the terms were still unfavorable. Cooper eventually went behind Franklyn’s back to negotiate a separate deal with Portnoy, returning to the podcast as its sole host in May 2020. Cooper went on to secure a reported $60 million Spotify deal in 2021, followed by a $125 million deal with SiriusXM in 2024, while Franklyn launched her own podcast, “Sofia With an F.”
Unsurprisingly, this period felt like rock bottom for Franklyn. She turned to alcohol, drugs and nicotine, moved back in with her mom and experienced intense paranoia.
“I get fucked up to remove myself from the vortex of pain, of betrayal, and loss,” she writes. At one point, she snaps when her mom takes out her phone, paranoid that even she might be secretly recording her to sell the footage online.
With the power of Barstool behind Cooper, the public largely believed her side of the story and painted Franklyn as a villain. Over time, that narrative has shifted. “The audience is smarter now, they understand media a bit better,” Franklyn says, marveling that TikTok didn’t even exist when they first started “Call Her Daddy.” “Now they understand how things work.”
It helped when, earlier this year, influencer Alix Earle had her ownhighly publicized falling-out with Cooperafter parting ways with her Unwell Network in 2025. Earle, who launched her “Hot Mess” podcast under the network in 2023, later accused Cooper of being “manipulative and toxic,” claiming she received little production support and learned of her departure through the press. Cooper has disputed Earle’s account, with the feud drawing renewed scrutiny of her business dealings.
“Alix and I have obviously shown each other public support,” Franklyn says. “There was, and I hope this doesn’t come out the wrong way, some validation in seeing that.”
“I remember my mom and I were both kind of emotional about it because we had been put in this world where you didn’t know what was real and why that happened to me,” she continues. “And so to see it play out in a very different way, but in a very similar way…there was some validation in that. But I obviously felt terrible for Alix.”
Others have confided in Franklyn about their own experiences with Cooper. But sparingly, she says. “People are very scared.”
It’s a feeling she can empathize with. “I did spend the first few years very scared, and sometimes I will catch myself being a bit guarded or a bit paranoid, but it’s very rare,” she says. “Now I’m good. I’m back to normal, back to how I…” she trails off. “Even better than I was before “Call Her Daddy.'”
While she’s ready to put this phase of her life behind her, she’s also not totally done telling her side of the story. She’s hoping for a scripted adaptation of her memoir sometime down the line. “Nothing’s confirms,” she clarifies. “I’m just hoping to put that out in the universe.”
She’s learned many lessons over the past six years. The biggest takeaway? “Some people you meet don’t turn out to be what you thought.”
“But you can’t live your life keeping yourself protected,” she concludes. “If you’re doing that, you’re not living your life.”
