Here’s one less thing Alex Cooper and Alix Earle have in common.

“Call Her Daddy” host, Cooper, has left her agency UTA and is headed to rival CAA, according to multiple sources.

UTA continues to rep Cooper’s rival Earle as well as Dave Portnoy, the Barstool Sports founder who has also frequently publicly butted heads with Cooper.

Cooper and Earle had an infamous business fallout in March 2025, at the time Cooper’s company dropped Earle’s “Hot Mess” podcast after two years. (Cooper also had a recent run of bad press — mostly stemming from her husband and business partner Matt Kaplan, and Cooper’s beverage brand is separately said to be shutting down.)
 
But an insider insisted to us over the weekend that Cooper’s imminent move to CAA is thanks to a major influx of recent capital into her successful Unwell brand that will bring new growth opportunities.

“Alex and Alix split up business-wise more than a year ago — and both have worked with UTA over that time,” an insider close to Cooper said, pointing out that Cooper’s biz is now valued at $500 million with over 100 employees.

The same insider insisted: “It’s very simple why Alex Cooper left UTA,” saying that while UTA focused on the podcasting, Unwell’s “partnerships, events, production — and the new creative agency as well as the WTSL investment — have all been done in-house.”

WTSL — WME co-founder Patrick Whitesell‘s investment firm that’s focused on media — made a substantial investment in Unwell this month.

Sources close to Unwell tell us that since finalizing the WTSL deal several months ago, the company has “spent the last 90 days aggressively building a strategy for its next phase of rapid growth, and part of that review involved rethinking traditional talent representation and exploring those options.”

The same source said that as Unwell “continues to accelerate its expansion across podcasts, TV and film, live events, consumer products, a foundation, and its creative agency, the company requires partners that match the speed, scale, and multi-vertical infrastructure it is building right now alongside WTSL.”

The insider said the Whitesell backing could lead to acquisition opportunities for Cooper’s company after it was valued at $500M.

Unwell has indeed made a string of deals since June, including adding podcasts to its network by Evelyn, Erica and Emily Ha and the duo behind “Girls, Disrupted,” as well as producing a series version of the Hannah Grace novel “Icebreaker” for Netflix and a movie adaptation of romance novel “Deep End” for the streamer. Unwell has made deals to partner with Google on a micro-drama series called “Moving On” and to produce a series adaptation of Aggie Blum Thompson’s 2025 mystery novel “You Deserve to Know” for Hulu.

But Cooper also exits UTA after a string of recent negative press — stemming from inside her company.

(UTA’s resident podcast guru Oren Rosenbaum brokered a $125 million deal with SiriusXM in 2024 for Cooper’s show to jump from Spotify, and repped Cooper when she launched Unwell in 2023.)

Away from the podcast and production, Unwell Beverages is going under less than two years after hitting shelves, Bloomberg reported, citing sources at Target, Unwell Beverages’ main distributor, that the brand will end this fall.

News of the drink biz going down the drain came after a wave of backlash against Cooper this year, mostly tied to Kaplan’s alleged treatment of Unwell Network staff.

In April, Kaplan, who co-founded Unwell with Cooper in 2023, faced allegations of yelling at staff and threatening their careers. A Vanity Fair expose quoted a freelancer as saying Kaplan, “creates the most toxic work environment that I’ve ever seen.”

Bloomberg then reported that Kaplan “has earned a reputation for frequently yelling at staff members” and said Unwell’s employees were “looking for the exit.”

Cooper then commented at the Cannes Lions to the Wall Street Journal: “I will just kind of leave it at ‘Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet’ — but I think everyone knows that at this point. I think that we have done a really incredible job at Unwell, and I think if you walk the halls, there are so many people that are so happy to work at this company. … I think, unfortunately, being a woman in this industry is extremely difficult because you’re held to a completely different standard. Whether it’s a smear campaign being created for someone’s narrative, whatever it be.”

And last month, Portnoy alleged in his memoir “Cancel Me If You Can” that Cooper and her former “Call Her Daddy” co-host Sofia Franklyn plotted to break their Barstool Sports contracts with “fake” sexual harassment claims. (“That’s not how I remember that at all,” Cooper said of the book in a subsequent interview.)

UTA, CAA and Cooper’s rep did not comment.

We also reported this week that comedian Nikki Glaser has left UTA and jumped to WME. Sources say there could be more defections… stay tuned.