I Walked So Alex Cooper Could Run

Celebs and their drama-filled love lives never saw us coming.

I will put some respect on Alex Cooper’s name—the former Barstool Sports podcaster negotiated and catapulted her way to owning and hosting Call Her Daddy, the most popular female podcast in the world, while also launching a media empire, Unwell, with her now-husband. She is a savvy businesswoman, great at what she does, and puts herself fully out there in a way that many of us wish we could. She is the Father of #nofilter and the current fan-favorite clincher when trying to secure women’s rights (if only her interview with Kamala gave the veep the last push she needed…).

However, Alex Cooper is not the first to grill celebrities about the intimate details of their personal lives. Plenty of other journalists have come before her, daring to ask the rich and famous about their romantic relationships and troubled pasts.

I happen to be one of them.

Actually, I sprinted for the opportunity at YourTango and Women’s Health.

“Are you dating anyone right now?”

At the time (ahem, 2010), celebrity coverage wasn’t a thing at YourTango, a love and relationship website launched five years prior. It mainly focused on licensed relationship therapists and couples counselors who wrote or contributed to our service columns. But, I made inroads with a celebrity publicist who had talent to push—and I had a juicy, love-focused platform—so a plot was born to bring YT and its original celeb reporting into the mainstream.

I conducted phone interviews with each celeb. My voice would be plugged into the celebrity’s ear so they could hear and answer my questions while being filmed on-camera from a studio in New York or LA. (In fact, throughout my entire career, I can count the number of in-person celebrity interviews I’ve done on one hand. They were very rare, which is a shame. It’s much harder to vibe with someone over the phone, and in many instances, I blamed the arrangement for blocking me from the raw and emotional soundbites I needed.)