The week Alex Cooper announced her pregnancy, Vanity Fair published an investigation into her company.
That is the kind of week that defines where someone’s career actually stands. Alexandra Cooper, born August 21, 1994, in Newtown, Pennsylvania, is 31 years old and by most metrics one of the most successful media entrepreneurs of her generation.
She hosts Call Her Daddy, the most-listened-to podcast by women on Spotify. She founded Unwell, a media network with roughly 100 employees. She is worth an estimated $25 million.
As of June 2026, she is pregnant with her first child, married to Hollywood producer Matt Kaplan, and watching a workplace misconduct story about her company dominate the conversation across every platform she built her career on. The timing is either terrible or clarifying, depending on how you look at it.
Newtown, Boston, and Division I Soccer
Cooper grew up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, a suburban community in Bucks County outside Philadelphia. Her father, Bryan Cooper, was the athletic director at Council Rock High School. Her mother, Laurie Cooper, has been referenced on Call Her Daddy episodes but maintains a low public profile.
The family was sports-oriented by default. Cooper was good enough to play Division I soccer at Boston University, where she studied communication and graduated in 2016. She has one sibling, a brother, whose name has not been widely confirmed publicly.
The soccer background matters more than it might seem. Cooper has talked about what competitive athletics gave her: tolerance for failure, ability to perform under pressure, and a comfort with physicality and body image that eventually fed directly into what Call Her Daddy became. She did not arrive at radical candor by accident. She was trained to be unsentimental about what her body could and could not do, and she applied that same unsentimental register to everything else.
After graduating from BU, she moved to New York and eventually connected with Sofia Franklyn, a fellow podcasting enthusiast. They launched Call Her Daddy in October 2018 on Barstool Sports.
Call Her Daddy, the Sofia Split, and Going Solo
The early Call Her Daddy episodes were raw, explicit, and deliberate. Cooper and Franklyn talked about sex, dating, STIs, and relationship dynamics in a register that most media outlets would not touch. The HPV disclosure came in that early era: Cooper revealed on the show that she had tested positive for HPV, turning a personal health moment into one of the most-shared episodes in the show’s first year.
The audience they built was loyal specifically because the show said things women were thinking but were not supposed to say out loud. By 2020 they had one of the fastest-growing podcasts in the country.
Then came what the Daddy Gang calls “The War.” In spring 2020, Cooper and Franklyn had an ugly, public falling out over contract negotiations with Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy. Franklyn, with the encouragement of her then-boyfriend (a senior executive at HBO), wanted to take the show to another network. Cooper chose to honor the Barstool deal.
The split was acrimonious and documented in real time across social media. Barstool sided with Alex. Sofia left mid-2020, launched her own podcast, and the two have not publicly reconciled since.
Cooper continued Call Her Daddy solo and the show did not just survive the split. It grew. By 2021 she had built enough leverage to negotiate one of the most significant podcast deals ever made.
The $60 Million Spotify Deal and What Came After
In June 2021, Cooper signed an exclusive three-year deal with Spotify worth $60 million. It was one of the largest podcast contracts in history at the time, sitting alongside deals Spotify had made with Joe Rogan and Barack Obama’s production company. For a 26-year-old who had started a podcast in a Barstool apartment three years earlier, it was a staggering outcome.
The Spotify years produced Call Her Daddy’s biggest cultural moments. Miley Cyrus gave one of her most candid interviews on the show. Morgan Wallen made a rare public appearance after his controversies. Simone Biles, Hailey Bieber, Glenn Powell, and John Legend and Chrissy Teigen all appeared.
Every major booking reinforced the same message: Call Her Daddy had become the kind of show where high-profile guests would say things they would not say anywhere else.
After the Spotify deal ended in 2024, Cooper transitioned to a broader multi-platform strategy through Unwell. In May 2026, YouTube announced exclusive shows from Cooper at their annual Upfront event, confirming she had secured programming commitments from the platform. She is also producing (not hosting) a Hulu dating show called “Overboard for Love,” with no confirmed premiere date yet. A two-part Hulu and Disney+ documentary with a June 2026 premiere was referenced in her Instagram bio, likely tied to her pregnancy announcement.
Unwell: The Network, the Numbers, and the Problem
Cooper founded Unwell in 2023 as a creator-led media network, positioning it as the infrastructure for a new generation of personality-driven podcasts and shows. The model was straightforward: sign talent with existing audiences, give them production resources and distribution, and build a portfolio of shows under one brand.
At its height, the network housed Hannah Berner, Alix Earle, Madeline Argy, and others. But two of those names are already past tense. Alix Earle departed Unwell in February 2025. Hannah Berner left the same month, relaunching her podcast independently.
The departures were notable enough to generate press on their own. The Vanity Fair investigation has now provided a potential framework for understanding why talent was leaving.
The June 2026 Vanity Fair exposé detailed significant allegations against Matt Kaplan, who runs Unwell alongside Cooper. Former employees described him as frequently yelling at staff and asking inappropriate personal questions, including about their sex lives. At least 20 employees out of roughly 100 had departed, with named executive exits including the head of brand marketing, head of network, and chief growth officer. One former employee was quoted saying: “We’re all mean girls at this company.”
The most specific allegation, which originally surfaced on the Deux/U podcast in March 2025, claimed an employee was asked to change her name because it matched one of Kaplan’s ex-girlfriends. Cooper publicly denied this claim. She has not addressed the broader allegations in detail as of this writing.
Reports have also surfaced on Reddit that Cooper and Kaplan retained legal representation to pursue the Vanity Fair writer, though no attorney has been publicly named and those claims remain unconfirmed beyond snark community posts.
The Alix Earle Situation
The tension between Cooper and Earle became public after Earle’s departure from Unwell. Cooper reportedly called Earle out by name or implication on social media, characterizing Earle’s posts as “passive-aggressive shade” directed at the network. Earle did not respond in kind publicly.
The optics were complicated. Earle departed Unwell and then launched Reale Actives, a skincare brand that generated $5 million on its first day. From the outside, the post-Unwell story looked like a success. Cooper’s public callout came across to many observers as punching at someone who had quietly moved on and was winning elsewhere.
The Vanity Fair piece did not name Earle as a central figure, but the context it provided gave the earlier professional split new texture.
Matt Kaplan, the Wedding, and the Marriage Scrutiny
Cooper and Kaplan married in October 2024 in a ceremony that was kept largely private. Kaplan founded Ace Entertainment and built his reputation producing YA and rom-com content for streaming: “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” (Netflix), “The Kissing Booth” series (Netflix), and “Along for the Ride” (Netflix) are among his best-known projects.
The pairing of a podcaster who built her brand on unfiltered honesty with a Hollywood producer known for polished rom-coms is a detail that has not been lost on her audience. Speculation about the marriage emerged on social media earlier in 2026, with some users and snark communities describing the relationship as troubled based on public appearances. Cooper addressed it directly, calling the rumors false and describing herself as happy.
The pregnancy announcement in June 2026 landed in that context. She posted on Instagram about first trimester symptoms and referenced Jolly Ranchers as a nausea remedy. No due date has been confirmed publicly.
How Alex Cooper Makes Money
Cooper’s estimated net worth is $25 million as of 2025, according to Celebrity Net Worth. The actual figure may be higher depending on equity in Unwell and her product ventures.
Her income sources are genuinely diverse. Call Her Daddy generates advertising revenue on a per-episode basis at rates that reflect its position as the most-listened-to podcast by women. The Spotify deal guaranteed $60 million over three years.
New platform deals with YouTube and Hulu represent additional streams. The Unwell network, to the extent that it functions as a going concern, generates revenue through the shows it houses.
She also co-founded Unwell Hydration, an electrolyte drink brand. The product sits in the wellness and hydration category, which is exactly where her audience shops. It is the same logic that drove Alix Earle’s Reale Actives skincare launch: build an audience on authenticity, then sell them something they actually use. Cooper got there first.
Forbes 30 Under 30 recognized her, and TIME named her among the most influential people during the peak Spotify years. The recognition reflects a real commercial footprint, not just a social following.
Where Alex Cooper Stands in June 2026
The pregnancy is real. The Vanity Fair story is real. The YouTube deal is real. The Hulu projects are real.
What the next several months look like depends on variables that are genuinely unpredictable. The workplace allegations have not produced legal action, regulatory response, or advertiser pullback yet. Whether they do will shape how the Unwell story develops. The talent departures (Earle, Berner, possibly others) have not visibly hurt the network’s output, but the pipeline of future signings may be affected by the coverage.
Cooper’s personal brand has always been built on the premise that she is more honest than her competitors. The current challenge is that honesty is being tested from a direction she did not script: not her own disclosures, but allegations about the environment she built.
She is 31 years old, worth $25 million, pregnant with her first child, and running one of the more scrutinized media companies in the creator space. Whatever she does next will be, in true Call Her Daddy fashion, watched very closely.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Alex Cooper and why is she so popular?
Alex Cooper is the creator and host of Call Her Daddy, which Spotify has identified as the most-listened-to podcast by women on the platform. She launched the show in October 2018 with co-host Sofia Franklyn on Barstool Sports, went solo after a public contract dispute in 2020, and signed a $60 million exclusive deal with Spotify in 2021. Her willingness to discuss sex, relationships, STIs, and personal health with a candor that mainstream media avoided built one of the most loyal podcast audiences in the country.
How did Alex Cooper get HPV?
Alex Cooper disclosed on an early Call Her Daddy episode that she had tested positive for HPV, discussing it openly as part of the show’s founding commitment to radical honesty about women’s health. The disclosure was one of the defining moments of the show’s early identity and helped establish Call Her Daddy as a platform where taboo topics were discussed without shame. HPV is extremely common and she framed the conversation around destigmatization rather than personal crisis.
What does Alex Cooper’s husband do?
Matt Kaplan is a film and television producer who founded Ace Entertainment. He is best known for producing the Netflix rom-com franchises “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Kissing Booth,” as well as “Along for the Ride” on Netflix. He and Cooper married in October 2024. In June 2026, Kaplan faced workplace misconduct allegations in a Vanity Fair investigation into Unwell, the media company he runs alongside Cooper.
Does Alex Cooper still have HPV?
Cooper has not publicly provided updates on her HPV status beyond the original disclosure. HPV frequently clears without treatment and she has not referenced it as an ongoing health concern in recent episodes. The question remains one of the most-searched about her because the original disclosure was so central to Call Her Daddy’s early viral identity.
Is Alex Cooper pregnant?
Yes. Alex Cooper confirmed her pregnancy in June 2026 via Instagram, posting about first trimester experiences including Jolly Rancher cravings as a nausea remedy. She and Matt Kaplan married in October 2024. No due date has been publicly confirmed as of this writing.
