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. “Not only did we have better sources with boots on the ground than traditional media, we had no restrictions on posting stuff. We didn’t have to vet our information like they did. As a result, the local news was at least thirty minutes behind everything we posted… Was it all accurate? No, I definitely had a few pieces of misinformation go out. At one point, I reported that some random kid who had died in the Charles River was a terrorist and was involved with the bombing. Turns out, he had absolutely nothing to do with it. No harm, no foul. He was already dead.“
Portnoy is so up himself he should change his nickname from “El Presidente” to “El Colonoscopy”. In this book, he also claims he invented the word “smokeshow” and that the popular gossip site Deuxmoi only exists because of him. Who would even care to fact-check it?
Most pages are filled with Portnoy’s petty beefs – with ungrateful ex-employees like Sofia Franklyn and Pat McAfee; “self-proclaimed feminists” who protested Barstool’s “Smokeshow of the Day” pinups and “Blackout” college parties; the journalists at Business Insider who reported on sexual misconduct and assault accusations against him; “serial protesters” like Occupy Wall Street, who “just hate their lives, hate this country, and want somebody to blame for their misery”; woke elites like Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom (“I DESPISE him. And my disgust started during COVID”); and the ex-girlfriend who cheated on him with a SoulCycle instructor.
Besides his ex-wife Renee, one of the few people to get a sweet word is Donald Trump, who Portnoy interviewed in July 2020. “After the interview was over, Trump told me to follow him into a room. No cameras, just the two of us. It was a little closet/gift shop room and he told me, ‘This is the Monica Lewinsky room.’ We both shared a laugh,” Portnoy writes. It’s funny in the same way the “This is fine” meme is funny.
Cancel Me If You Can is both the rantings of a little man and a peek into the psychotic entrepreneurial mindset that currently rules both culture and global politics. Beyond Barstool, whose relevancy has sustained through new online personalities like Brianna Chickenfry, Portnoy has 5.7 million followers on Instagram and 4.7 million followers on TikTok, where he posts reviews of pizza like someone gave a phone to the guy who sleeps on the beach.
But it’s never enough. “I swear we literally launched a cottage industry of lunatics whose entire career was just to follow what I said and then attack me for clicks,” Portnoy writes of journalists at Deadspin, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, The New York Times and The Washington Post (the “No Fun Squad,” he calls them).
“The last thing I was going to do was sit back and be lectured by these hypocritical, entitled douchebags about how awful Barstool Sports was. I was going to attack back, make fun of them, humiliate them. I would make them regret getting into the ring with me,” Portnoy pouts, index fingers slamming down on the laptop keyboard as he lies shirtless on his poolside deck chair.
Welcome to cultural power in 2026. One day we’ll look back and laugh, surely?
Cancel Me If You Can by Dave Portnoy is published by Gallery Books.
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