The beef between Alex Cooper and Alix Earle seems far from over. Last week, Alex Cooper bemoaned her feud with fellow podcaster Alix Earle, saying she was tired of her former Unwell Network colleague creating “fake drama.”
Eight days later, the drama feels very real after Cooper and her Unwell Network became the subject of a Bloomberg exposé on Monday. And there’s more on the way. Sources tell Page Six Hollywood that Vanity Fair also has an investigative piece teed up as does either Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. The Vanity Fair piece, which is dropping imminently, is said to put additional heat on Cooper’s husband, Unwell chief Matt Kaplan, a producer who got his Hollywood start at CBS as Les Moonves’ intern in the aughts and who once told THR that he wanted to grow up to be Tupac (yikes!).
Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan on the red carpet at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony. CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON/POOL/EPA-EFE / Shutterstock Perhaps there’s plenty to plumb there, but the Vanity Fair investigative piece on Unwell is being written by Clara Molot, who profiled Earle in 2024 for Air Mail.
That piece is a far cry from Woodward and Bernstein, with the headline “Getting Into Bed with Alix Earle” and such cringeworthy questions as: “Take us through your nighttime skin-care routine.”
Who knows? Maybe Molot upped her journalism game over the past two years, but some on Team Cooper are skeptical, noting her not-that-long-ago Earle “fan piece” in Air Mail and that she has only been a reporter “for 5 minutes.” (Vanity Fair did not respond to a request for comment.)
Adding to the intrigue, another podcaster foreshadowed the looming onslaught of negative Cooper headlines last week. On April 14, popular TikTok-er Harry Daniels taped an episode of “Chronically Online” and warned that a “big hate piece” on Cooper and Unwell was looming in “Variety. Or The Hollywood Reporter.”
But when the episode aired on Sunday, the Cooper mention had been excised.
Luckily, an insider sent us the missing clip, when Daniels said the upcoming piece would paint Unwell as “this toxic work, very like Ellen DeGeneres exposé 2020 vibes. My friend got a call. Like, a reporter asking for a quote, like about an expose. So I tried to give a heads up [to Cooper’s team.]” A rep for Daniels declined comment on why the clip was removed from the episode.
Alix Earle shows off her outfit before heading to Coachella. Instagram/alixearle Either way there’s a whole lot of swirl surrounding Cooper (“Call Her Daddy”) and Earle (“Hot Mess”), both repped by UTA, at a time when they both have carved out major landscape in the bro-ish podcast space, so kudos to both. In 2024, I broke the story that Unwell had dropped Earle and still get asked about the beef to this day. UTA did not comment.
As for Kaplan, Hollywood colleagues say they are not surprised that he’s at the center of some Unwell shade. One industryite — who was close with Kaplan during his days married to his first wife, actress Claire Holt — calls Kaplan a “leech and starf–ker” who only dates “rich blondes” like Ashley Olsen and Erin Foster. (A rep for Kaplan declined comment.)
Even one person currently working with Kaplan who feels that the Unwell press onslaught is unfair is mystified that Kaplan landed Cooper as his wife. Says the source: “She’s amazing. He is … um … abrasive.”
