Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper dismissed Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy's memoir allegation that she and her former co-host once planned to fabricate a sexual harassment claim, but offered no alternative account of what actually happened.
Cooper, 31, appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box on Wednesday and fielded questions about the explosive passage in Portnoy's book Cancel Me If You Can, published earlier this year by Gallery Books. She acknowledged she had seen the claims circulating online but said she had not read the memoir itself. Her response amounted to a flat denial with no details attached.
Portnoy, 49, wrote that during heated 2020 contract negotiations, Cooper told him she and co-host Sofia Franklyn had "a plan to say they were both sexually harassed at Barstool", a threat he characterized as leverage to walk away from their deal. Cooper now says she remembers the events differently but will not say how. The gap between an accusation that specific and a rebuttal that vague leaves the most serious question in this dispute completely unresolved.
In his memoir, Portnoy laid out a detailed narrative. He wrote that Cooper and Franklyn stopped producing their Call Her Daddy podcast during 2020 as a pressure tactic. He said he responded by proposing what he called "the most generous offer in Barstool history" at a meeting on the rooftop of his apartment building, a deal he claimed would have made the two hosts "instant millionaires."
Then, Portnoy wrote, Cooper called him and asked for a second meeting, this time without Franklyn present. At that rooftop sit-down, Cooper allegedly told him she wanted the deal but that Franklyn would never accept it. When Portnoy warned he would sue if they took the podcast to another network before their contract expired, the conversation took a darker turn.
Portnoy wrote in the memoir:
"Alex claimed to me that they had a plan to say they were both sexually harassed at Barstool."
He did not flinch from the weight of what he was putting on paper. In the same passage, he acknowledged the gravity directly:
"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."
Portnoy added that while Barstool had long faced criticism for sexist jokes, the company had "never been accused of inappropriate workplace conduct." A fabricated harassment claim, he wrote, would have been devastating regardless of its truth because "nobody would have believed my side of the story."
On Squawk Box, Cooper did not engage with any of Portnoy's specific claims, not the rooftop meetings, not the alleged private conversation, not the purported harassment threat. She kept her answers short and personal.
Cooper told the hosts:
"I haven't read the book, but I remember seeing, obviously getting tagged in those things, and that's not how I remember that at all. But I also am like, Dave's got his version, and I've got my version, and we're all good."
"That's not how I remember that at all" is a denial. But it is a denial without a single counter-fact. She did not say which part Portnoy got wrong. She did not offer her own timeline. She did not explain what she believes actually happened during those 2020 negotiations.
Instead, Cooper pivoted to warmth. She called Portnoy "a very entertaining person" and said she has "a very great and complicated relationship with Dave." She credited him with giving her a start in the industry and said she would "never not be grateful to him."
She closed the topic with a line that felt designed to end further questions: "I'm in my mother era. I have no drama right now." Cooper is pregnant with her first child with husband Matt Kaplan.
Sofia Franklyn, the other half of the original Call Her Daddy duo and the person Portnoy also implicated in the alleged scheme, has not responded publicly. The Daily Mail reported that requests for comment sent to Franklyn went unanswered at the time of its original reporting on the memoir's claims.
Cooper and Franklyn split from Barstool Sports in 2021. The breakup was one of the messiest public divorces in podcast history, playing out in real time across social media. Cooper went on to build Call Her Daddy into one of the most-listened-to podcasts in the country. Franklyn launched her own show but never matched that trajectory.
The Portnoy memoir claim is not the only sexual harassment allegation in Cooper's recent public history, though the other one runs in the opposite direction. In a 2025 Hulu documentary, Cooper alleged that she herself was sexually harassed by her soccer coach while attending Boston University. The coach was not named in the source reporting.
Boston University responded to those allegations with a written statement affirming a "zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment" and encouraging community members to report concerns through its Equal Opportunity Office. The university did not confirm or deny any investigation.
The juxtaposition matters. Cooper has publicly described herself as a victim of sexual harassment. Portnoy's memoir alleges she was once willing to weaponize a false version of that same accusation for business leverage. Cooper's blanket denial, without specifics, does not resolve the tension between those two positions.
Several critical questions hang in the air. Cooper says she remembers events differently, but she has not said what her version is. Franklyn has said nothing at all. No one has produced contemporaneous records, texts, emails, recordings, that would corroborate or contradict Portnoy's account of the rooftop conversations.
The specific terms of the contract offer Portnoy described as the most generous in Barstool history remain undisclosed. So do the terms Cooper and Franklyn were seeking. And no one has explained what ultimately resolved the standoff before the 2021 split.
Portnoy put his version in a published book, under his own name, with a major publisher. That does not make it true. But it does mean he attached his credibility and legal exposure to a specific, falsifiable set of claims. Cooper, so far, has attached hers to the word "version" and left it at that.
In any dispute, the person who gives details invites scrutiny. The person who gives none avoids it. But avoiding scrutiny is not the same thing as answering the charge.
