Maureen Callahan says Alex Cooper is complicit in Unwell’s alleged toxic workplace, not a bystander

Maureen Callahan’s claim is brutal and very Googleable, Alex Cooper is not the innocent spouse in the Unwell mess, she is the boss who should have known. In Callahan’s reading of the Vanity Fair exposé on Cooper and Matt Kaplan, the attempt to make Kaplan the whole villain lets the more valuable brand name walk away too clean.

That is the real fight here. Not whether Kaplan sounds, from the reported accounts, like the kind of producer who turns a balloon placement error into Normandy. It is whether Cooper gets to remain the smooth, sex positive, girls supporting girls CEO of Call Her Daddy while the allegations orbit around her husband like he wandered in from a different company.

you can’t be smart and stupid at the same time. You can’t be running an empire that’s worth over $100 million and not and not know that your husband is a problem and is is causing young women to leave your employ in droves crying and feeling like they’ve been beaten down. It doesn’t work that way.

That line is doing the work of a whole op ed. Cooper’s modern media persona depends on competence. She is not famous because she stumbled into a mic booth and accidentally monetized chaos. She is famous because she turned a raunchy podcast into a major business, survived the Barstool Sports drama, and became the face of a media empire built on intimacy, confession, and female fandom. You do not get to be a mastermind on payday and a houseplant when the HR story arrives.

The Kaplan problem is now the Cooper problem

Callahan is riffing off Vanity Fair’s June 12 piece, “Daddy Issues, Trouble Behind the Scenes of Alex Cooper’s Unwell Media Empire,” which, according to the transcript, quotes people who worked with Unwell describing Kaplan as explosive and demeaning. The allegations are nasty in a very specific media start up way, tears over minor mistakes, threats over production logistics, career doom handed out like parking validation.

Alex is not an innocent bystander here. She is witnessing this stuff, and she’s doing nothing about it if these accounts are true.

That “if” matters legally. Callahan is not producing new reporting here, she is prosecuting the meaning of reporting already on the table. But as media criticism, the point is clean. If former employees say Cooper was nearby while Kaplan lost his temper, then the story is not only about one allegedly volatile executive. It is about workplace culture under a founder whose public pitch is unusually bound up with empowerment.

Callahan also takes a swing at Dave Portnoy’s reported reaction to Cooper’s pregnancy announcement, saying Portnoy framed it as a kind of reputational shield. Her answer is basically, please, nobody gets maternity leave from accountability.

Being a pregnant woman does not mean that you’re immune from criticism, that you get the next 9 months off, that you can just be an and and and everybody has to excuse it because you’re pregnant.

The brand math is ugly

The most persuasive part of Callahan’s case is the brand contradiction. Cooper built an audience by sounding like the cool older sister who tells you what men are really doing and how power really works. That persona does not pair neatly with allegations that young women went to work at her company, expecting the fantasy version of the brand, and left crying.

Callahan’s weaker move is the legal leap. She says Cooper is opening herself up to class action lawsuits, which is a spicy sentence and maybe catnip for a segment producer, but the transcript does not give enough to judge that. A hostile workplace allegation is one thing. A viable class action is a different beast, with legal standards, common claims, named plaintiffs, and all the unglamorous machinery that does not fit inside a podcast monologue.

Still, you do not need a filed complaint to see the problem for Cooper. The audience that made her rich is fluent in receipts, group chats, and workplace horror stories. If more former employees talk, the Unwell name goes from cheeky to cursed.

You know what she’s opening herself up to? Class-action lawsuits. She should watch herself, and she should get this under control if she wants to have real longevity in this in this space.