Dave Portnoy has made serious allegations regarding the controversial exit of the Call Her Daddy hosts. The Barstool Sports founder claimed that Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn planned to fabricate sexual harassment allegations to exit their Barstool Sports contracts.
Cooper and Franklyn co-hosted the podcast, which was owned and distributed by Barstool Sports from 2018 to 2021.
Dave Portnoy claims Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn considered fake sexual harassment claims to exit Barstool contract
In his memoir Cancel Me If You Can, which came out June 30, Portnoy discussed Barstool Sports’ split from Call Her Daddy. He claimed in his book, as per DailyMail, “There was no indication that Alex and Sofia were unhappy with their situation, until they met Logan Paul.”
The 49-year-old alleged, “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.”
He further added, “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.”
According to Portnoy, the women “simply stopped putting out their podcast.” He said he met with them and put forward what he called “the most generous offer in Barstool history,” which would have made both of them instant millionaires.
Later, Portnoy claimed he received a phone call from Cooper asking to meet with him without Franklyn present. He reportedly warned her, “You guys realize I’ll sue you if you take the podcast to another network before your contract is out, right?” He then alleged that Cooper told him they had a plan to claim they were both sexually harassed at Barstool.
Further, he explained that this was their alleged plan to get out of their contractual obligations to Barstool Sports if he did not relinquish their IP and allow them to leave for a rival podcast network.
Call Her Daddy was launched in October 2018 by roommates Cooper and Franklyn. Franklyn left the podcast in 2020, saying contract negotiations had fallen apart, and later launched her own show, Sofia with an F, reports Page Six. On the other hand, Cooper went on to sign a three-year, $60 million deal with Spotify in 2021, followed by an agreement worth over $100 million in 2024.
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