CANNES — The version of Alex Cooper that Vanity Fair’s forty-plus sources described was not the person who arrived at the Cannes Lions festival Thursday. That version berated staff until they cried, presided over a culture of fear, and stood alongside a co-CEO husband who allegedly made sexually inappropriate comments to employees. The woman who took the stage in the South of France was seven months pregnant, composed, and had a one-sentence message for anyone who had read the magazine’s June 12 exposé: don’t believe it.
“I am extremely proud of what we have built at Unwell,” Cooper told the audience at Cannes Lions, according to Deadline. “Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet.”
Those two sentences were her first public comments since Vanity Fair published its investigation into the internal culture at her podcast network, a 40-plus-source account that alleged a work environment of yelling, tears, and retaliation, and that named her husband and co-CEO Matt Kaplan as the source of what employees described as inappropriate sexual remarks made in workplace settings. Cooper’s representatives told The Hollywood Reporter that the article was full of “lies” and constituted a “smear campaign.” Vanity Fair stood by its reporting.
Two weeks of institutional silence. Then the stage at Cannes Lions.
The choice of venue was not coincidental. Cannes Lions is where the advertising industry meets to spend money, where CPM rates are negotiated and brand partnership budgets are committed. Cooper’s Spotify deal was valued at approximately $125 million when it was signed in 2021; she moved to SiriusXM in 2024 in a deal reported to be in a comparable range. The brands sponsoring Call Her Daddy, a portfolio that has historically included Bumble, Athletic Greens, and Honey, base renewal decisions partly on the public standing of the host they are attaching their names to. A major magazine investigation sourced from forty employees is not promotional material for that conversation.
“Being a woman in this industry is extremely difficult because you’re held to a complete different standard,” Cooper told the audience, per Deadline. She framed the Vanity Fair account as a manifestation of a broader pattern of outsized scrutiny directed at female executives, a framing that several observers noted bypasses the substance of what was alleged. The exposé’s account of inappropriate conduct centered significantly on Kaplan, and many of the sources cited as having experienced the most difficult working conditions were women.
Cooper’s representatives called the reporting “lies” and labeled it a “smear campaign” in statements to The Hollywood Reporter. The magazine has not issued a correction or retraction. As of publication, Kaplan had made no public comment of any kind.
Eastern Herald reported in May that Cooper and Kaplan were expecting their first child together, an announcement that reframed her public narrative around personal milestone rather than professional building. The Cannes Lions response arrives at the moment when those two arcs are most visibly in tension: she is approaching motherhood while simultaneously managing the first significant public crisis that Unwell Network has faced in its five-year existence. The network now encompasses more than a dozen shows, several of them hosted by talent who built their platforms directly off the Call Her Daddy audience.
None of that talent has commented publicly on the Vanity Fair report. The silence of the Unwell roster is its own form of data.
The workplace allegations illuminate something structural about the creator-economy transition that figures like Cooper have been navigating at scale. The personal brand that makes a podcaster attractive to advertisers and audiences is built on the premise of authenticity, directness, and relatability. The media company that personal brand eventually requires in order to expand demands the opposite: institutional hierarchy, management structures, and HR processes that operate at an impersonal distance from the founder’s public persona. When those institutional structures fail, the personal brand cannot indefinitely absorb the damage.
What Cooper said at Cannes was disciplined. What she left unaddressed was more significant. She did not speak to Kaplan’s alleged conduct specifically. She did not indicate whether Unwell has undertaken any internal review or retained outside counsel to investigate the conditions described in the article. She did not contest a single specific allegation by name. The strategy was reframing over rebuttal: position the story as evidence of gendered double standards in media, and leave the particulars uncontested.
Whether that approach holds depends on what emerges next. The forty-plus Vanity Fair sources have not been publicly identified, and the window for additional reporting remains open. Cooper has not signaled whether she plans to address the allegations directly in a Call Her Daddy episode, which has historically served as the platform through which she processes the largest developments in her public and private life.
The next episode will be its own answer.
