Sofia Franklyn Fears Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan Will Try to Discredit Her New Memoir — ‘That Actually Scares Me’

Sofia Franklyn has waited years to tell her side of the story. Now that the moment is finally here, she’s admitting something she didn’t expect to feel: fear.

The 34-year-old podcaster, who co-created Call Her Daddy before walking away from the show in 2020, is releasing her memoir Daddy Issues on Tuesday, November 10. And in the run-up to publication day, she’s been blunt about what she thinks is coming next — a coordinated effort to tear the book down before anyone’s even had a chance to read it.

Franklyn laid it all out during a new episode of The Bossticks, the podcast hosted by Michael and Lauryn Bosstick, where she didn’t mince words about who she believes is behind it.

“I have heard that some people mentioned in the book, some main characters in my book, are working very hard to discredit this story,” she said. “I heard as soon as, literally, as early as, like, yesterday.”

Then she named names.

“I’m talking about Alex and Matt. Hi. If you’re listening, hi,” she continued, confirming she meant her former co-host Alex Cooper and Cooper’s husband, Matt Kaplan. “How dirty are they gonna play it? Are they gonna, like, go after people I love? That I do not like.”

It’s a striking thing to hear from someone who, by her own admission, thought she’d be striding into publication week with both middle fingers in the air. Instead, she’s nervous — and she’s not pretending otherwise.

What scares her most isn’t the criticism — it’s the collateral

Franklyn was candid about the part of this whole mess that actually keeps her up at night, and it isn’t bad reviews or messy headlines. It’s the people around her.

“If my family, if my husband, becomes collateral, that actually scares me, and I thought I was gonna go into this process being like two middle fingers in the air,” she admitted. “That surprised me.”

That’s the bit that sticks. For years, Franklyn has built her brand on being unbothered — the funny one, the sharp one, the one who says the thing everyone else is thinking and then laughs about it. The idea that she’s walking into launch week genuinely rattled is a different look, and she knows it. She didn’t try to spin it into a power move. She just said it out loud.

There’s something kind of refreshing about that, honestly. Celebrity memoirs usually arrive wrapped in a thick layer of PR polish, with every interview answer rehearsed to within an inch of its life. Franklyn, true to form, is doing the opposite — telling a podcast audience, days before her book hits shelves, that she’s scared of what the people in it might do to the people she loves.

How she thinks the takedown would work

Franklyn also broke down what she believes a discrediting campaign actually looks like in practice, and her description was oddly specific — the kind of specific that makes you think she’s either seen it happen to someone else or been warned about it in detail.

“If someone’s playing like really gnarly, they are reaching out to your college roommates, people you worked with, people that you’ve had two, maybe one experience with, and they’re asking them, you know, what can you tell me about this person?” she said. “And then, I don’t know exactly, how they’ll try to flip it.”

It’s the classic playbook, and anyone who’s watched a celebrity feud play out online will recognize it instantly: find the peripheral people, collect the stray anecdotes, and stitch together a counter-narrative before the book itself has had time to breathe. One shaky story from a former coworker becomes a headline. A headline becomes a thread. A thread becomes the “real” story, and suddenly the memoir is old news before publication week is even over.

Franklyn, for her part, thinks that playbook is getting harder to run. “People are slightly more aware of how media, PR, and headlines work,” she said, arguing that audiences have gotten “smarter” about spotting a coordinated hit job when they see one. She’s betting that readers in 2026 are savvier than they were even a few years ago — that they can tell the difference between a genuine scandal and a smear campaign dressed up as one.

She might be right. The internet has spent the last few years getting a crash course in how celebrity PR actually works, and the audience isn’t as easily herded as it used to be. Then again, a good smear doesn’t need to convince everyone. It just needs to muddy the water enough that the book becomes a “he said, she said” instead of a story on its own terms.

A feud six years in the making

For anyone who needs a refresher, the Franklyn-Cooper fallout is one of the messiest splits in podcast history — the kind of breakup that spawned a thousand explainers and still gets argued about in comment sections to this day.

The two women launched Call Her Daddy together in 2018, when they were close friends and roommates. The show, which started at Barstool Sports, became a phenomenon almost overnight — raunchy, funny, unfiltered, and unlike anything else in the podcast world at the time. Franklyn and Cooper were the whole engine: two best friends talking about sex, dating, and life in New York with zero filter and a chemistry you can’t fake.

Then, in 2020, it all fell apart. A contract dispute blew up in spectacularly public fashion, with both sides airing their grievances for the world to see. Franklyn left the show. Cooper stayed on as sole host — and went on to sign a massive $60 million deal with Spotify to take the podcast there, a move that turned her into one of the most powerful figures in the medium.

Cooper later signed another blockbuster deal, moving the show to SiriusXM in 2024 in an agreement reportedly worth $125 million. Call Her Daddy is now a full-blown empire, and Cooper is its undisputed queen.

Franklyn, meanwhile, rebuilt on her own terms with her podcast Sofia with an F, also at SiriusXM — a twist that means the two former best friends now work under the same corporate roof while reportedly not speaking at all. The tension between them has never really gone away; it just went quiet for long stretches, flaring up whenever one of them says something that the other side reads as a shot.

This past summer, Barstool founder Dave Portnoy weighed in with an explosive accusation about Franklyn and Cooper, dragging the old feud back into the spotlight and reminding everyone that the bad blood never actually healed. The details of that particular flare-up were messy and disputed, but the message was clear: whatever happened between these two in 2020, nobody involved has moved on.

Which is exactly why a memoir feels, in a way, inevitable. Franklyn has been sitting on her version of events for six years. The question was never really whether she’d tell it — it was when, and how much she’d say.

Why this book matters — and why the timing is everything

Memoirs from podcasters and influencers are a dime a dozen these days, but Daddy Issues lands differently because of who’s in it and what it represents. This isn’t a celebrity cashing in on fame with a few cute anecdotes. It’s a woman who helped build one of the biggest podcasts on the planet, walked away from it at the height of its powers, and has spent six years watching her former best friend turn their shared creation into a nine-figure empire — while she started over from scratch.

That story, told honestly, is a genuinely compelling one. It’s about friendship and business and betrayal and the particular weirdness of building something huge with someone and then losing both the thing and the person in the same breath. It’s also, inevitably, about the money — the $60 million deal, the power imbalance, and what it feels like to watch someone else cash in on something you helped create.

Franklyn’s fear, then, makes a certain kind of sense. A memoir like this doesn’t just revisit old wounds. It reopens them in public, with receipts, in a format that can’t be scrolled past or ratioed into oblivion. And the people named in it — the “main characters,” as she put it — have every incentive to get ahead of the narrative.

The gamble she’s making is that the audience is ready to hear her out, and that the internet of 2026 is better at spotting a hit job than the internet of 2020 was. It’s a bet on the reader, basically: that people will judge the book on its own merits instead of on whatever counter-story shows up in their feeds first.

She’s also betting on herself — on the idea that six years of waiting, and one very public rebuilding, have earned her the right to be believed. That’s a lot to put on a book launch, but then again, Franklyn has never been one to play it safe.

What happens next

Daddy Issues hits shelves on Tuesday, November 10, and the next few days will tell us a lot about how this plays out. If Franklyn’s right about the pushback coming, it’ll arrive fast — a stray quote here, a “source close to” story there, a former acquaintance with a conveniently timed anecdote. If she’s wrong, the book will have to stand or fall on its own, which is its own kind of pressure.

Either way, the dynamic is fascinating: one of the most famous friendship breakups in podcast history, now playing out in book form, with the author openly warning the audience that the other side is coming for her. It’s a preemptive strike and a plea for a fair hearing, all at once.

Franklyn went into this process thinking she’d be defiant. She came out of it admitting she’s scared. That honesty might be the smartest move she’s made yet — because the hardest thing to discredit is someone who’s already told you the truth about how she feels.

Now we just have to read the book.

Source: Just Jared