Sofia Franklyn thought she was prepared for whatever reaction her memoir might provoke. Now she says she is worried that Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan could draw her husband and family into the fallout.
The 34-year-old raised those concerns during the November 9 episode of The Bossticks, hosted by Lauryn and Michael Bosstick. She was discussing Daddy Issues, which revisits the collapse of her friendship and business partnership with her former Call Her Daddy co-host.
The memoir was published November 10 by Simon & Schuster. The 256-page book is Franklyn’s first, arriving after she built a separate podcast career with Sofia with an F.
Franklyn legally married John Messamore on July 31, followed by a larger celebration at Villa Pizzo on Lake Como on August 2. The couple met through a matchmaking agency in 2024.
Franklyn Says She Heard Efforts to Discredit Her Book Were Underway
Franklyn said she had heard that people featured prominently in the memoir were working to undermine her account. She specifically named Cooper and Kaplan, according to PEOPLE. “How dirty are they gonna play it?” she asked.
Asked what an effort to discredit someone might involve, she described approaching former college roommates, coworkers or casual acquaintances for damaging stories. She offered those examples as possibilities, not as a documented account of anyone contacting her relatives.
Franklyn also said she believes audiences are more familiar with publicity tactics than they were during the original podcast controversy. She expects readers to question how competing stories reach them. PEOPLE said representatives for Cooper and Kaplan had not responded to its request for comment on the interview before publication.
Unwell Denies Kaplan Threatened Legal Action Over the Memoir
The book opens with Franklyn’s account of an alleged call to her literary agent. According to Page Six, which cited a November 2 New York Times profile, she claims Kaplan challenged the truth of her story and threatened that Cooper would sue.
An Unwell representative told the Times that Kaplan “never discussed the book’s claims or any intent to sue the author with Verve,” Franklyn’s agency. Franklyn said nothing further came of the alleged threat.
The Memoir Revisits the Contract Dispute That Ended Their Partnership
Franklyn and Cooper were roommates and friends when they launched Call Her Daddy in 2018. Their conversations about dating and life in New York attracted a large audience, and the show became a valuable property for distributor Barstool Sports. Contract negotiations in 2020 ended with Cooper continuing alone and Franklyn leaving.
In a prepublication excerpt covered by Rolling Stone, Franklyn writes that she learned through her lawyer that Cooper had been earning $20,000 more annually. She says the discovery came after months of discussions in which she believed they were negotiating together for fair compensation.
Franklyn also recounts contacting a former producer, who she says told her Cooper had previously tried to have her removed. Cooper offered her own explanation in the 2025 Hulu documentary Call Her Alex. She said Barstool founder Dave Portnoy offered them ownership of the podcast if they stayed for another year. “Sofia didn’t want to take the deal, but I did, so I stayed,” she said in remarks reported by PEOPLE.
Franklyn Says She Needed to Grow Up Before Writing the Book
When she announced the memoir in a February 26 video, Franklyn said she needed time to mature and reconsider what had happened before committing her account to print. She wanted to write with less ego and a clearer understanding of her own experiences. “I needed to self-reflect,” she said.
She had discussed the split publicly before, including in a 2023 Rolling Stone interview. But she did not want to squeeze the fuller story into a TikTok or an hour-long YouTube video. A book gave her room to examine a relationship that had shaped both her working life and her sense of herself.
The memoir also reaches back to her childhood, family relationships and move from Utah to New York. During the opening of her Bossticks interview, Franklyn said writing and revising it helped her recognize how much her biological father’s absence had affected her. Recording the audiobook brought her to tears over passages she had thought she had already worked through.