Sofia Franklyn Opens Up About the 'Call Her Daddy' Fallout and Rebuilding Her Identity

Sofia Franklyn, who co-founded the massively popular 'Call Her Daddy' podcast in 2018, is breaking her long silence about the 2020 public falling-out with co-founder Alex Cooper — speaking out ahead of her upcoming memoir, 'Daddy Issues.' Franklyn traces her trajectory from a $38,000-a-year Morgan Stanley job in Utah to the financial freedom that podcasting brought, describing how the show allowed her to save money for the first time and stop agonizing over whether she could afford both drinks and dinner.

The collapse came fast. In 2020, contract negotiations between Franklyn, Cooper, and Barstool Sports broke down in a very public dispute that played out online in real time. Within days, Franklyn lost her income, her professional identity, and her friendship with Cooper simultaneously — a triple blow she describes as leaving her numb and deeply mistrustful, even of her own judgment. She deliberately chose to say very little publicly at the time, sensing the situation was too large and volatile to address quickly without making things worse.

Rather than retreating, Franklyn leaned on the scrappiness her family modeled during the 2008 financial crisis, when her mother's real estate business and her father's construction company both took serious hits. She pivoted quickly, launching her own podcast 'Sofia with an F' later in 2020, driven by gut instinct rather than the careful risk-assessment approach that had previously defined her decision-making. She describes negotiating her own worth at a moment when she personally felt worthless — a tension she credits with sharpening her sense of self.

Now engaged, Franklyn says she has been deliberately building an identity grounded in values rather than professional success, regularly asking herself how she'd feel if everything disappeared tomorrow. She's candid about money in her relationship and describes herself as a firm believer in prenuptial agreements, having seen firsthand how financial miscommunication can go catastrophically wrong.