Dave Portnoy has made a series of bombshell allegations around the fallout between his company Barstool Sports and its former podcast Call Her Daddy, including that hosts Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn threatened to concoct a bogus sexual harassment claim to get out of their contracts.
In his explosive new memoir released on Tuesday, Portnoy spills all on the reasons for Barstool’s split from Call Her Daddy, and what he claims really happened behind the scenes on one of the world’s most-downloaded podcasts.
Back in 2020, talks over a new contract sparked a series of remarkable moments, that until now have been kept closely under wraps.
Perhaps the most serious, Portnoy alleges, surrounds a threat made by the two female hosts in the weeks before they split – both from Barstool and each other.
‘There was no indication that Alex and Sofia were unhappy with their situation, until they met Logan Paul,’ Portnoy claims in his memoir, Cancel Me If You Can. ‘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.
‘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.
Call Her Daddy rose to prominence as a Barstool podcast before an ugly split in 2020
Portnoy has now lifted the lid on what really happened when Call Her Daddy headed to Spotify
‘Both girls 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.’
Portnoy goes on to explain that he believes Peter Nelson – a former executive at HBO and then-boyfriend of host Franklyn – was behind the negotiations, labeling him ‘quite possibly a human incarnation of Satan’.
Franklyn later claimed that speculation about Nelson’s role in her podcast negotiations was ‘false’ and he ‘wasn’t that involved’.
In a bid to force through their contract demands, Portnoy claims the Call Her Daddy hosts ‘simply stopped putting out their podcast’, sparking the possibility of the Barstool supremo suing them for breach of contract.
The angry back-and-forth led to a secret meeting on the rooftop of Portnoy’s apartment building, in which he proposed ‘the most generous offer in Barstool history’, claiming it would have made them instant millionaires.
Nowadays, the podcast is still one of the biggest in the world, but it is solely Alex Cooper’s
Sofia Franklyn went her own way before Cooper sealed a $60 million deal to move to Spotify
Cooper is now going it alone at Spotify but the show remains a huge global sensation
Portnoy’s memoir is published via Gallery Books
The girls went away and what Portnoy alleges happened next could have brought Barstool to its knees.
‘Out of nowhere, I got a call from Alex asking if she could meet with me again… without Sofia,’ he writes. ‘I said yes and we once again trekked up to my rooftop. “I love the deal you proposed, and I want to take it. But Sofia is never going to take it.”
‘”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.
‘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.
‘For years, Barstool and I had been pilloried for making sexist jokes, 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.’
The Daily Mail has contacted Cooper, Franklyn, Paul and Nelson for comment on Portnoy’s claims.
Franklyn now presents a podcast of her own, but has no association with Call Her Daddy
Portnoy accuses Franklyn’s ex Peter Nelson of being the ‘puppetmaster pulling the strings’
Under the Barstool umbrella, Cooper and Franklyn turned their show into one of the biggest
As Portnoy publishes his memoir, former Call Her Daddy host Franklyn is also writing a book of her own, which the Barstool founder admits he doesn’t know the contents of.
‘Listen, I have no idea what she’ll write in her book,’ he adds. ‘Maybe it will be 100 percent accurate. But I do know this: In my book, Sofia Franklyn is a f***ing liar.
‘Women are going to believe her just because she’s a woman, because they feel bad for her or they don’t like Alex or they hate my guts or whatever. That’s fine. You can say whatever you want about me, but literally nobody has ever said I don’t tell the truth 100 percent of the time.
‘So to all these women who think Sofia is some feminist icon, just remember you are propping up a woman who I believe was willing to lie at the drop of a hat about sexual harassment, which sets all women back.’
