Cancel him? I barely wanted to read about him

Before Alex Cooper became Gen-Z’s Oprah and head of the multimillion-dollar Unwell Network, she was hosting her then nascent Call Her Daddy podcast on Barstool Sports, the media platform founded by Dave Portnoy. Portnoy, a former salesman, had turned Barstool Sports from a self-published sports-and-gambling paper – “the only newspaper in Boston written by the common man, for the common man” – into an online empire, a founding pillar of today’s manosphere.

In 2018, Cooper and her then partner Sofia Franklyn debuted Call Her Daddy to immediate success, thanks to their unfiltered and polarising discussions about sex. Within weeks, it was the number one podcast on iTunes, making Portnoy’s initial contract with the women – $75,000 per year for three years – awkwardly lowball. In April 2020, as a contract dispute flared, Cooper and Franklyn went silent.

It’s here, 225 pages into his loathsome memoir, where Portnoy makes what’s surely the most egregious accusation in a book filled with wild claims: he alleges that Cooper told him she and Franklyn planned to falsely claim they were sexually harassed at Barstool Sports if he didn’t let them out of their contract.

“In April 2020, you may recall that the world was pretty furious with men and their workplace behaviour toward women,” Portnoy writes. “For years, Barstool and I had been pilloried for making sexist jokes, but we’d never been accused of inappropriate workplace conduct... Even though it was patently untrue, it would have been a tough fight for us to win in the court of public opinion.”

Cooper was willing to accept his new deal, Portnoy writes, while Franklyn – advised by her then-boyfriend Peter Nelson (“Suitman”) – stalled. Sensing discontent between the pair, Portnoy admits he fed information as an “insider” to the New York Post that Cooper and Franklyn hated each other to torpedo any plans they had of taking Call Her Daddy elsewhere.

Their partnership collapsed, Cooper finished her contract with Barstool and walked away with Call Her Daddy ’s IP, eventually spinning it into a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with Sirius XM. “I have no f—ing idea what Sofia is doing,” Portnoy gloats.

It’s a wild story, but you can see Portnoy’s reason for telling it. This is memoir as myth-making and score-settling. If we get a fascinating glimpse of the “inside baseball” of new tech along the way, it’s accidental.

In the foreword, Portnoy reveals that he only did the book because he was offered a seven-figure advance. To his followers, this kind of stuff reads as cool-guy bravado, another maverick sticking it to lamestream institutions. The rest of us might interpret it as contempt for the reader.

Portnoy puts the “tool” in Barstool. His dimwittery has been the secret to his success – the “Barstool Difference”, he calls it, which is about all the times he’s turned dumb mistakes into an asset, or something. Like during the Boston Marathon bombing, when Barstool’s lack of journalistic standards made it a prime source for breaking news.

”The Barstool logo was splashed across every major news outlet,” Portnoy recalls.