{"id":862854,"date":"2026-08-21T05:34:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T05:34:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/862854\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T05:34:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T05:34:15","slug":"dave-portnoy-memoir-review-cancel-me-if-you-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/862854\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave Portnoy memoir review: Cancel Me If You Can"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Robert<\/p>\n

August 21, 2026 \u2014 12:12pm<\/p>\n

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Before Alex Cooper became Gen-Z\u2019s Oprah and head of the multimillion-dollar Unwell Network, she was hosting her then nascent Call Her Daddy podcast on Barstool Sports, the media platform founded by Dave Portnoy. Portnoy, a former salesman, had turned Barstool Sports from a self-published sports-and-gambling paper \u2013 \u201cthe only newspaper in Boston written by the common man, for the common man\u201d \u2013 into an online empire, a founding pillar of today\u2019s manosphere.<\/p>\n

In 2018, Cooper and her then partner Sofia Franklyn debuted Call Her Daddy to immediate success, thanks to their unfiltered and polarising discussions about sex. Within weeks, it was the number one podcast on iTunes, making Portnoy\u2019s initial contract with the women \u2013 $75,000 per year for three years \u2013 awkwardly lowball. In April 2020, as a contract dispute flared, Cooper and Franklyn went silent.<\/p>\n

\"DaveDave Portnoy\u2019s memoir is an act of myth-making and score-settling.Getty Images<\/p>\n

It\u2019s here, 225 pages into his loathsome memoir, where Portnoy makes what\u2019s surely the most egregious accusation in a book filled with wild claims: he alleges that Cooper told him she and Franklyn planned to falsely claim they were sexually harassed at Barstool Sports if he didn\u2019t let them out of their contract.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn April 2020, you may recall that the world was pretty furious with men and their workplace behaviour toward women,\u201d Portnoy writes. \u201cFor years, Barstool and I had been pilloried for making sexist jokes, but we\u2019d never been accused of inappropriate workplace conduct… Even though it was patently untrue, it would have been a tough fight for us to win in the court of public opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooper was willing to accept his new deal, Portnoy writes, while Franklyn \u2013 advised by her then-boyfriend Peter Nelson (\u201cSuitman\u201d) \u2013 stalled. Sensing discontent between the pair, Portnoy admits he fed information as an \u201cinsider\u201d to the New York Post<\/a> that Cooper and Franklyn hated each other to torpedo any plans they had of taking Call Her Daddy elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Their partnership collapsed, Cooper finished her contract with Barstool and walked away with Call Her Daddy\u2019s IP, eventually spinning it into a $60 million deal with Spotify and then a $125 million deal with Sirius XM. \u201cI have no f\u2014ing idea what Sofia is doing,\u201d Portnoy gloats.<\/p>\n

\"AlexAlex Cooper, host of the Call Her Daddy podcast and founder of the Unwell Network, got her start on Portnoy\u2019s Barstool Sports.Getty Images<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a wild story, but you can see Portnoy\u2019s reason for telling it. This is memoir as myth-making and score-settling. If we get a fascinating glimpse of the \u201cinside baseball\u201d of new tech along the way, it\u2019s accidental.<\/p>\n

In the foreword, Portnoy reveals that he only did the book because he was offered a seven-figure advance. To his followers, this kind of stuff reads as cool-guy bravado, another maverick sticking it to lamestream institutions. The rest of us might interpret it as contempt for the reader.<\/p>\n

Portnoy puts the \u201ctool\u201d in Barstool. His dimwittery has been the secret to his success \u2013 the \u201cBarstool Difference\u201d, he calls it, which is about all the times he\u2019s turned dumb mistakes into an asset, or something. Like during the Boston Marathon bombing, when Barstool\u2019s lack of journalistic standards made it a prime source for breaking news.<\/p>\n

\u201dThe Barstool logo was splashed across every major news outlet,\u201d Portnoy recalls. \u201cNot only did we have better sources with boots on the ground than traditional media, we had no restrictions on posting stuff. We didn\u2019t have to vet our information like they did. As a result, the local news was at least thirty minutes behind everything we posted\u2026 Was it all accurate? No, I definitely had a few pieces of misinformation go out. At one point, I reported that some random kid who had died in the Charles River was a terrorist and was involved with the bombing. Turns out, he had absolutely nothing to do with it. No harm, no foul. He was already dead.\u201c<\/p>\n

\"TheThe \u201cBarstool Difference\u201d: Portnoy is among the most successful figures in the online manosphere.Bloomberg<\/p>\n

Portnoy is so up himself he should change his nickname from \u201cEl Presidente\u201d to \u201cEl Colonoscopy\u201d. In this book, he also claims he invented the word \u201csmokeshow\u201d and that the popular gossip site Deuxmoi only exists because of him. Who would even care to fact-check it?<\/p>\n

Most pages are filled with Portnoy\u2019s petty beefs \u2013 with ungrateful ex-employees like Sofia Franklyn and Pat McAfee; \u201cself-proclaimed feminists\u201d who protested Barstool\u2019s \u201cSmokeshow of the Day\u201d pinups and \u201cBlackout\u201d college parties; the journalists at Business Insider who reported on sexual misconduct and assault accusations against him; \u201cserial protesters\u201d like Occupy Wall Street, who \u201cjust hate their lives, hate this country, and want somebody to blame for their misery\u201d; woke elites like Zohran Mamdani and Gavin Newsom (\u201cI DESPISE him. And my disgust started during COVID\u201d); and the ex-girlfriend who cheated on him with a SoulCycle instructor.<\/p>\n

Besides his ex-wife Renee, one of the few people to get a sweet word is Donald Trump, who Portnoy interviewed in July 2020. \u201cAfter the interview was over, Trump told me to follow him into a room. No cameras, just the two of us. It was a little closet\/gift shop room and he told me, \u2018This is the Monica Lewinsky room.\u2019 We both shared a laugh,\u201d Portnoy writes. It\u2019s funny in the same way the \u201cThis is fine<\/a>\u201d meme is funny.<\/p>\n

\"BarstoolBarstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy spins myths and settles scores in his new memoir.Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n

Cancel Me If You Can is both the rantings of a little man and a peek into the psychotic entrepreneurial mindset that currently rules both culture and global politics. Beyond Barstool, whose relevancy has sustained through new online personalities like Brianna Chickenfry, Portnoy has 5.7 million followers on Instagram and 4.7 million followers on TikTok, where he posts reviews of pizza like someone gave a phone to the guy who sleeps on the beach.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s never enough. \u201cI swear we literally launched a cottage industry of lunatics whose entire career was just to follow what I said and then attack me for clicks,\u201d Portnoy writes of journalists at Deadspin, The Daily Beast, Business Insider, The New York Times and The Washington Post (the \u201cNo Fun Squad,\u201d he calls them).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last thing I was going to do was sit back and be lectured by these hypocritical, entitled douchebags about how awful Barstool Sports was. I was going to attack back, make fun of them, humiliate them. I would make them regret getting into the ring with me,\u201d Portnoy pouts, index fingers slamming down on the laptop keyboard as he lies shirtless on his poolside deck chair.<\/p>\n

Welcome to cultural power in 2026. One day we\u2019ll look back and laugh, surely?<\/p>\n

Cancel Me If You Can by Dave Portnoy is published by Gallery Books.<\/p>\n

What else is happening in the book world?<\/p>\n

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\"RobertRobert Moran<\/a> is Spectrum deputy editor at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"August 21, 2026 \u2014 12:12pm Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-862854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}