Sex, scandal and buckets of money: how Call Her Daddy transformed podcasting into high stakes drama

If its own mythology is to be believed, the cult American sex  podcast Call Her Daddy started innocently enough. Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, two attractive, gobby friends in their mid-twenties, were at a bar in 2018, talking about sex. They began to pull a crowd. “People came up to us and said, ‘You need a show,’” Cooper later remembered. They took the suggestion seriously.

Within months, Call Her Daddy was born, co-hosted by the two flatmates. As they admitted on the first episode, they were both “nobodies”, if startlingly extroverted. Cooper was trying to make it as a vlogger and Franklyn was working in finance. The show was snaffled up at once by the New York-based media company, Barstool Sports. It went supernova, reportedly soaring from 12,000 downloads to two million in two months. Now it is a regular in the podcast charts. Its latest episode was, for a time last week, among the most listened-to shows in America, according to Apple’s hallowed rankings.

Yet this year, the fairy tale came to an abrupt halt. Embedded in the DNA of Call Her Daddy from its earliest days was a raunchy kind of joie de vivre, percolated with nihilism. Until recently, the format was simple. Each week Franklyn and Cooper would sit down in a studio to caw about men, sex and love. They giggled, they heckled, they screamed and sang and twerked and generally had a great time.

Female listeners in particular seemed to enjoy the breeziness with which the “girls”, as they called themselves, talked about intimacy. They made no attempt to sound clever or to weigh in on the big political stories of the day, but seemed perpetually on the verge of laughable catastrophe. They were broke, they drank too much, they seemed both vulnerable and eerily hard-hearted: their shared life was a hot mess, and it made for great entertainment.

By the third episode Cooper was setting out in eye-watering detail how to perform an allegedly failsafe sex act (it's called the “Gluck Gluck 9000” - Google it, or perhaps don't). On later episodes, the hosts explained how to make exes suffer. They decreed, laughing, that cheating didn’t count if a condom was used. They described, literally blow by blow, their romantic entanglements, reminding listeners all the while that men were "animals" who considered women little more than "holes”.

From the moment the podcast took off, critics complained about its degeneracy and cynicism. Others hailed the hosts as icons of the sex positivity movement. But critics and fans are at least agreed that Call Her Daddy has become a significant cultural force that has propelled its hosts to stardom. For Franklyn and Cooper, who now have over two million Instagram followers between them, the show's success must have felt like a dream come true.

But dreams come to an end. Call Her Daddy has become snarled up in an ugly turf war over who owns the podcast and who should be making the most from it. Even those who have never tuned in are suddenly gripped by the drama, whose plot points say a good deal about how much the podcast industry has changed in recent years – and how even the strongest of female friendships can dissolve when serious money enters the equation.

When podcasts first emerged in the mid-noughties, they were lovably amateur, mostly made and heard by dorks in their bedrooms. No longer: in 2019, Ofcom found that 7.1 million people in the UK listen to podcasts each week, a figure that is growing and that has more than doubled in the past five years. While most podcasts are not cash cows, the most successful can be, and are making celebrities of their hosts.

As listener figures balloon, successful podcasts are increasingly being fought over by big media organisations. Last month, in a deal reported to be worth over $100 million, Spotify bought exclusive rights to the meandering interview podcast hosted by Joe Rogan. Podcasts have moved from the fringe to the thumping heart of the mainstream – even if players like Joe Rogan insist that podcasts only work because they offer an alternative to the mainstream, of which so many are bored and suspicious.

Part of the reason Call Her Daddy was a hit, as its hosts have acknowledged, is thanks to the investment that was pumped into it early on by Barstool. And the current travails of Call Her Daddy, while specific to its format and personalities, speak to larger developments within the industry as a whole.

The reasons for the Call Her Daddy fight are complex – so garbled, in fact, that even regular listeners (known as the "daddy gang") are battling to keep up. One fan on Twitter asked in desperation recently to be given the "Cliff Notes version" of the tale. But in essence, the drama boils down to a breakdown of trust between the two hosts.

Listeners of the podcast had been suspicious for some time that something was up. Episode titles were getting weirdly morbid and the hosts’ chatter seemed flat. Then, in early April, the podcast went silent. On Instagram, the hosts promised to explain more soon but said that they were legally obliged to keep schtum. Then in mid-May, Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool, explained what had gone wrong. Portnoy is an internet celebrity in his own right with the Instagram following of his two hosts combined. He accused Cooper and Franklyn of being “unprofessional, disloyal and greedy” and said they had sought to dishonour the contract they'd signed with Barstool before the show became so huge.

Franklyn quickly posted her own earnest account of the disagreement on Instagram. She insisted that she wanted to continue the show but said she’d been made to feel like an “employee” by her co-host. “I found out that Alex had gone behind my back and done something, and I found out that it wasn’t the first time,” she lamented. It all felt quite Mean Girls. Then Cooper herself waded into the brawl, posting a long piece to camera in which she set out her own side of the story.

According to Cooper, the beginning of the podcast's woes came about when the co-hosts began to suspect they were being underpaid. They approached Portnoy with a list of demands, including for a better base salary and for Call Her Daddy's intellectual property rights. This wish list was apparently drawn up with the help of Peter Nelson, Franklyn’s hotshot boyfriend. Nelson, 38, is an executive vice-president at HBO Sports, and had cropped up as conversational fodder on the podcast for months, under the moniker “Suitman” (rather as in Sex in the City, Carrie’s boyfriend is nicknamed “Big”).

Cooper recalled that when Portnoy received the hosts’ demands, he found them absurd and told them “to go f___ yourselves in every hole possible”. After that, Nelson, Franklyn's boyfriend, allegedly began to shop Call Her Daddy around, to see whether the hosts would be able to make more under the aegis of a different media company, despite the fact that both Cooper and Franklyn were legally obliged to stick with Barstool.

Finally, Portnoy summoned the girls to his New York rooftop to offer them a deal. He allegedly offered the hosts a base salary of $500,000 each, plus bonuses pegged to download figures, and IP rights. Cooper was over the moon, but Franklyn wasn’t satisfied. The crack between the two presenters widened to a chasm. Cooper, already earning more than Franklyn as she edits the show, approached Portnoy off her own bat and told him she was willing to do a deal alone. Franklyn found herself hung out to dry.

The upshot of all this messiness was an explosive episode released last week. Cooper hosted the podcast by herself, apologising for the “break up” and assuring listeners the show would go on. She also opened up about the pressures of the podcast, which she said made her feel the need to mine her own life for content. “I love giving a goddam blow job!” she cried. “But what if I haven’t sucked a d___ in two weeks? What do you want from me?” Fans were ecstatic at the podcast's return.

Yet the dust looks unlikely to settle on the controversy for long. Portnoy, Barstool's founder, has said that he expects Franklyn to sue, having been shouldered out of the show. Far from being weighed down by the drama, Portnoy seems to be having the time of his life. His 2.5 million Instagram followers have been treated to bizarre doctored videos of wrestling matches, in which Cooper and Franklyn’s heads are spliced onto fighting men.

Portnoy seems to be particularly relishing the opportunity to publicly shame Nelson’s boyfriend. He’s called Suitman variously a “dork”, “dead”, “a bad guy from a James Bond movie who thinks he’s better than he is”, a “Harvard idiot” and an “egotistical d___f___,” to the general delight of the internet.

Portnoy has also poured his particular brand of laddish scorn on Scooter Braun, Justin Bieber’s manager, after Nelson allegedly asked Braun to wade into the argument as well. Braun is said to have called up Barstool to persuade the company to give Franklyn a better deal. “We don’t give a f___ who you are, what suit you wear,” Portnoy said in a video on Twitter. “We do things our way, the fair way, the right way.”

All this mud-slinging seems to be good for business. The podcast is already capitalising on the increase in exposure. Like many of the big shows, Call Her Daddy only makes part of its money through advertising – merchandise is also a revenue stream. New items of clothing that poke fun at the feud are already on sale. One hoodie on Barstool's site bears the message "Cancel Suitman", in reference to Nelson’s meddling. Meanwhile clothes from before the fight, which refer to Franklyn and Cooper's friendship, have had their prices audaciously cut to $3.

This catfight has not been edifying for any involved. No one, particularly the hosts, has emerged looking particularly graceful. Yet what interests me most about the argument is how familiar it is. Similar battles over IP and contracts have long rocked more established industries. Taylor Swift, for instance, is in a feud with Scooter Braun over the rights to her own music, an irony that has not gone unnoticed by either Portnoy or the fabled “daddy gang” who are protective over the podcast, and wish it would return to the way it was.

What future for Call Her Daddy? Last week, Cooper asked herself the same question. "I feel [that] as much as I am alone, I am not f_____' alone at all," Cooper declared on her first solo episode. "The future of the show is whatever the f___ we want it to be."