Sofia Franklyn’s book ‘Daddy Issues’ opens with alleged legal threat from Alex Cooper’s husband: sources

The first allegation in Sofia Franklyn’s memoir, “Daddy Issues,” is not about her famous friendship with Alex Cooper or the podcast that made them both. It is about a phone call that may have threatened to stop the book before it reached the public.

According to a New York Times profile cited by Page Six, Franklyn writes that Matt Kaplan, Cooper’s husband and the chief executive of her media company, learned she was working on a memoir, called her agent and claimed her story was false and Cooper would sue. Franklyn said nothing further came of the threat. Unwell, the company representing Cooper and Kaplan, told the Times that Kaplan never discussed the book’s claims or any intent to sue with Franklyn’s literary agency, Verve. A lawyer for the couple did not respond to Page Six’s request for comment.

That disagreement matters because the allegation is doing more than setting a dramatic tone. It frames the book’s release as a contest over narrative control: one woman is presenting herself as finally telling her own story, while the people she names are publicly declining to validate the version of events that includes them. The book arrives Tuesday, when readers can finally judge the opening claim against the pages that follow rather than against competing headlines.

Franklyn’s fear is not confined to her own reputation. Speaking Monday on Dear Media’s “The Bossticks” podcast, she addressed Cooper and Kaplan directly, saying she had heard that people featured in the book were working to discredit it. She described the prospect of her family or husband becoming collateral as the part that actually frightened her. Her concern was less that a lawsuit would follow than that the machinery of media and public relations could be turned against the people around her.

That is a more revealing concern than a generic celebrity feud. Franklyn has watched the machinery before. She and Cooper’s split became a years-long argument over contracts, ownership and competing accounts of what happened at Barstool Sports. Cooper kept the “Call Her Daddy” intellectual property after Franklyn left in 2020, while Franklyn’s new account is being published by Simon & Schuster as a story of power, friendship and betrayal rather than revenge. The publisher’s description frames Franklyn as the villain in an internet breakup who is now reclaiming her narrative. The book’s commercial value is inseparable from that dispute.

The memoir also reaches into the show’s most persistent rumor. Page Six reported that Franklyn questions whether Cooper had a fling with their former boss, Dave Portnoy, while noting that it is unclear whether one occurred and that representatives did not comment. Kirkus, summarizing the same reporting, said Franklyn was suspicious when she and Cooper visited Portnoy’s apartment and sensed Cooper had been there before. The publisher’s own description promises a candid account of sexuality and agency, but the specific allegation remains disputed and unproven.

Franklyn is betting that the audience has changed along with her. She said it should be harder to discredit her now because people are more aware of how media, public relations and headlines work. That confidence has a commercial dimension as well as a personal one. Verve is shopping the memoir as a possible film or television project, with one source describing significant industry interest. A story that can be adapted is a story whose participants have reason to contest its framing before the public has read it.

What happens next depends less on the private calls than on the public record. Cooper and Kaplan have not substantiated the allegation of a legal threat, and Franklyn has not produced the call itself in the evidence available so far. Her account is a firsthand claim in a book whose opening pages are now available to readers; their denial is a company statement. The sharper test is whether the people named in the memoir answer the substance of the book or leave Franklyn’s version as the only detailed account in circulation.