It was the “Just say it! There’s no NDA!” heard around the world, or at the very least, the Saturday Night Live writers’ room. The Alix/Alex drama has been ongoing for nearly six months, and now Alix Earle is telling her side of the story. Earle (blonde, influencer, star of Netflix’s new reality series Earle Meets World) and Alex Cooper (creator of the Unwell Network, Call Her Daddy host, and general mover and shaker for millennial women) had a semi-public falling-out, but neither has revealed why until now. In the show, out now, Earle calls Cooper “manipulative” and a “disgusting” businesswoman, which sounds like a declaration of war.
In episode one, Earle shows her father, TJ, who is also her manager, a TikTok of Cooper calling Earle out. In the viral video, Cooper calls Earle petty for not being direct about why there’s tension between them as former business partners and, presumably, friends. Remember, Earle had a podcast with Cooper, so when Cooper “dropped” her Hot Mess podcast, fans smelled drama. “I just get scared because everyone tells me not to fight with her. Because they always win and that they always come out on top,” Earle says to the camera in a confessional in the same episode. “She even said to me, ‘You don’t want to go to war with me.’ I definitely feel betrayed by Alex Cooper.” So the beef is confirmed, but what happened?
We finally found out in episode seven — after we heard about Earle’s fling with Tom Brady — that Earle felt like she embarrassed her family by spilling their private tea with Cooper during a Call Her Daddy interview. Initially, Earle thought talking about how her father’s affair hurt her would be a freeing experience, but it ended up just reintroducing the drama to a whole new audience. TJ Earle had an affair with Ashley Dupré (now his wife), a well-known escort hired by former New York governor Eliot Spitzer in 2008, making his affair national news. Alix felt betrayed by Cooper because she didn’t realize talking about the trauma would reopen the wound in her family — her stepmother, Dupré, didn’t talk to Alix for months after the interview.
“I didn’t realize things were going wrong because I was obsessed with her,” she says of their initial working relationship. Earle later shares in a confessional that she’s “scared” of Cooper because she’s worried that she’ll twist her words. “The things she put out there is stuff I can never take back. My kids are going to see that,” Earle says while thinking about the affair. “After the interview, when I talked about our family experience, I cried to her … I thought I was doing something so good, but I did something so hurtful.” Earle doesn’t say if she asked Cooper to take the interview down, but the backlash from the interview still haunts their family dynamic today.
Alix then meets with TJ and Ashley to read them the text message she initially wanted to send to Cooper. She calls her “manipulative” and “toxic” for how she treated her. She says that the Call Her Daddy host chose “money over morals” and conducts “disgusting” business. Ultimately, the family decides as a group that they missed the initial opportunity to speak out before the news snowballed into SNL parodies, making this episode their official statement on the matter. Cooper hasn’t spoken out about the drama since her initial TikTok; she’s brushed off Dave Portnoy/Barstool rumors, saying she’s “no drama right now.” That must also apply to their drama, too. But with Earle coming into the ring with fighting words, who says a mama bear can’t bite back?