Social media users have been waiting months for Alix Earle to address her feud with fellow podcaster and social media star Alex Cooper. The wait is officially over now that Earle has finally debuted her reality series "Earle Meets World," in which she talks about what happened with her former boss.
In an interview with USA TODAY ahead of the Sept. 4 release on Netflix, Earle, 25, was asked if she regretted not speaking out sooner or how she handled the situation. Her talking about the drama on camera was unplanned, she explained. “I can look back and think that maybe I could have done things differently,” Earle said. “But honestly, I’m happy that I didn’t speak out of emotions online at the time.”
The two were business partners while Cooper's
Unwell Podcast Network hosted Earle's "Hot Mess" podcast until March 2025. Earle abruptly left the network, took her show with her, and never explained exactly why. In April, Cooper issued a public statement regarding the feud speculation, and Earle said she would speak on it in the future.
In the first episode of “Earle Meets World,” Earle briefly discusses the need to address the conflict. “I just get scared because everyone tells me not to fight with her,” Earle says while talking with her dad, who's also her manager. “Because they always win and they always come out on top.”
The content creator plainly says: “I definitely feel betrayed by Alex Cooper.” She then goes on to explain when she was 22, she looked up to Cooper and was excited about being interviewed on Cooper's podcast “Call Her Daddy." But when Cooper hosted Earle's podcast, "she sold me on a dream that she was going to protect me and look out for me, and I feel like she took advantage of my admiration of her.”
Earle and her dad leave the conversation open-ended, regarding how, when and where Earle should address the feud publicly. It’s not until the last episode of the season that she divulges exactly what happened between her and Cooper. Earle explains that she stayed quiet for so long because she was not sure whether and how Cooper would twist the narrative to suit herself better.
When Earle decided to work with Unwell, her dad explains on the show, she felt unsupported, as she was left to run the podcast by herself and allegedly wasn’t given producers, camera people or a lighting crew. Earle interjects, adding that they did eventually let her hire her own crew, but she still didn't feel she had sufficient support. She goes on to say that the Unwell team had stopped inviting her to events and stopped showing up at meetings.
“I didn’t realize things were going wrong because I was obsessed with her,” Earle says of Cooper in the show. “Then I constantly felt taken advantage of, used, mistreated, and manipulated."
She brings up her experience filming her “Call Her Daddy” episode as an example, alleging that before they started filming, Cooper offered her drinks before asking her “really sexual questions” that she wasn’t comfortable with, but she answered them because she was drunk.
“Part of that was stuff I had asked to be taken out after the interview, and she was like, ‘Oh, it’s so funny.’ But that was stuff I didn’t necessarily want to live on the internet forever,” Earle explains during her confessional in the last episode. “I trusted her so much, and all she did was shit on it, and it sucks." The things she put out there, Earle explains, are statements she can “never take back,” and one of those topics is her dad’s relationship with Ashley Dupré, his now-wife, whom he cheated on Earle’s mother with.
USA TODAY reached out to Cooper's representative regarding the accusations, but did not immediately hear back.
After Earle left the network in March 2025, it wasn't until April 2026 that Cooper called out Earle directly on TikTok, saying Earle was fueling the rumors of their rift by spreading “fake drama” and creating a “fake narrative” about their falling out.
Earle responded to her in the video’s comment section and said, “Okay on it.” In her July Time Magazine cover interview, she said she was saving her official response for the reality television show. "That was one of the things in the beginning they wanted me to talk about, and I really wasn’t comfortable sharing," she told Time. "Then everything unfolded the way it did while we were filming. There was a serious struggle behind the scenes, emotionally, and my family showed up for me. Those moments that sometimes seem so fun for people online, but are hard behind the scenes — I am happy that we were able to capture that."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alix Earle finally addresses Alex Cooper feud in her Netflix reality show
