Have you ever learned about a new guy against your will? You’re minding your business, girding yourself against the media tides that present you with new names you have to learn every day: Brianna Chickenfry, Clavicular, Bunnie Xo, both Alex Cooper and Alix Earle. God, who are these people?? Sometimes you wake up and discover that a new famous person has dropped and you just have to live with their notoriety.
One of those celebrities is Dave Portnoy, the founder and owner of Barstool Sports, one of the most influential media companies in the English-speaking world. Launched in 2003 as a print sports newspaper in Boston, it’s now the TikTok account you keep seeing that reposts other people’s funny videos. Portnoy has been around for years, but in the past decade, he seems to have exploded and now is just one of those guys you know about. (He’s also a media figure responsible for other media figures, including the aforementioned Chickenfry and Al(i/e)xes.) You don’t have a choice when it comes to Portnoy. He’s here, he’s barely 5’10”, he’s threatening to run for office, and his lips look as if they’ve been permanently sunburned at Burning Man. Get used to it.
Publishing a book is a natural next step for a figure as basely detestable as Portnoy, so this week marks the release of his first book, Cancel Me if You Can, written with maximum disdain for its reader. “Barstool Sports was supposed to encompass anything that guys would discuss sitting around at a bar watching sports,” he writes in the first few pages of the memoir. It’s the last cogent thought he has; the rest of the book is decidedly about settling scores, reminding everyone how great he is, and defending himself against accusations that he’s sexist while he says a bunch of sexist things in print. It is a book for an idiot or, rather, someone who thinks they aren’t an idiot because they’ve built a $600 million business. But there are plenty of stupid rich men in the world. Why would Portnoy be immune?
I’m not even sure if this book is intended to be read. Maybe it’s destined to be published and sit on a shelf, never to be cracked open. Portnoy admits he got a seven-figure sum to write it—this might encourage anyone to type out a few thousand words. But what’s left, then, is 300 pages of “I’m not owned, I’m not owned,” a mortifyingly Trumpian ode to Portnoy’s own stupidity. He admits to how dumb he and his business are too, saying that when Barstool’s inanity was on full display, it “somehow ends up benefiting us.” Surely, this book will benefit Portnoy and his business; it’s nothing more than hagiography for a dumbass.
The book is, naturally, full of details about how stupid Portnoy was and is, ostensibly to show how success came slowly but organically. In the early days of the print edition of Barstool Sports, he published an ad for a business that never bought one, just to nudge one of its competitors into getting ad space itself. He committed copyright infringement by publishing a photo of Lindsay Lohan that the publication had no right to. He made a (pretty unfunny) rape joke on his blog and is still pretty mad that people keep bringing it up. After Tiger Woods’ many affairs were revealed in 2009, he printed shirts that read “Nailing Putts Banging Sluts.” The result is the kind of book Bart Simpson would write if he didn’t feel bad about stealing that video game and grew up fully evil.
It’s an exhausting, unamusing display. Portnoy spends most of the book trying to settle old scores or feuds he had, with YouTuber Jenna Marbles (didn’t give him enough credit for her early video success), Sofia Franklyn (formerly of Call Her Daddy, who seemingly dropped the ball on the podcast), Julia Black (a Business Insider journalist who wrote several stories about Portnoy’s sexual misconduct, which he was not able to sue over). Mina Kimes, then an ESPN journalist, is called “a true cancer to society” because she retweeted Black’s Business Insider reporting. He goes after journalist Marisa Ingemi, mostly making fun of her looks. (“Yeah, it’s mean, but it’s truthful and it’s my book, so I don’t give a fuck.”) When New York Times journalist Liz Day reaches him for an interview, he goes to her house and is accused of harassing her, an anecdote that even his (female) book editor suggests he cut. He doesn’t.
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I’m Not Sure the Dave Portnoy Memoir Is Meant to Be Read by Humans. I Did Anyway. Oof.
If you don’t know much about Portnoy, then this book does nothing more than introduce these scandals and his petulant responses to them. It’s the Streisand effect on full display. Did you forget that Portnoy once said the N-word on camera while rapping to a Ja Rule song? OK, well, good news, he spends several pages justifying it, poorly. “The people who hate us are just a loud vocal minority. They’re the same group of haters, left-wing publications, fake journalists, and woke losers crying about the same spilt milk over and over and over again,” he says, while rehashing things that happened to him a decade prior that even he admits haven’t affected his wealth, career, or personal life. The memoir isn’t a confident display. It reads more as if Portnoy has spent most of his career grinding his teeth about all the mean, sometimes-accurate things people have said about him.
Actual problems that Portnoy should have dealt with as a business owner—like an employee who created a pseudonym to harass his colleagues in the comments section—are handled with a giggle and a hair toss. The employee in question did not lose his job but instead had to wear a T-shirt for a few months that read “I Am an Internet Troll.” Portnoy readily admits to his own sloppy work as a nonjournalist occasionally engaging in journalism, as when Barstool covered the Boston Marathon bombing. “Not only did we have better sources, with boots on the ground than traditional media, we had no restrictions on posting stuff. We didn’t have to vet our information like they did,” he writes. “Was it all accurate? No, I definitely had a few pieces of misinformation go out.” Oops! Anyway, to hear Portnoy tell it, it’s all Gucci, because after that he sold “Boston Strong” T-shirts and gave the proceeds to the survivors.
Much of the early pages of Barstool Sports, and the beginning of its blogging days, was predicated on the labor of others; the site was either reprinting photos it didn’t have the rights to or getting submissions from female readers who wanted to be listed as “Smokeshow of the Day.” Nothing wrong with a little consensual admiration from strangers, but Portnoy’s entire business seems to hinge on a digital wet T-shirt contest. He’s lucky women are willing to exist around him; it was and is the lifeblood of his business, even though he seems to resent so many women so plainly.
Even when he offers up some admiration to a woman, it’s behind a sheen of surprise that a girl could do anything at all. About Alex Cooper, the co-creator of the Call Her Daddy podcast, which was briefly a Barstool Sports property, he waxes on about her looks before offering her a compliment. “Behind the facade of lip gloss and platinum blond highlights stood an ambitious, enterprising woman with a fierce belief in herself and a willingness to learn whatever skills necessary to become the absolute titan we now know her to be,” he writes. Blond? In makeup? Smart?? You can almost picture him needing to lie down at the sheer thought of it.
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By the end of the chapter, he says Cooper was planning on (falsely) accusing him of sexual harassment to get out of her Barstool contract. Who knows if this is true, or if Cooper was indeed being harassed, but it’s a remarkable detail to throw out there when you’ve been credibly and repeatedly accused of harassment. All Portnoy suggests is that people call his ex-wife to find out how great he is. He’s so great that even his ex still says it! The ex who still has his credit card!
Memoir, for these kinds of famous people, is all about effective hagiography. It’s a rare chance for a celebrity to be able to tell a story without interruption, and without interference from an audience or a journalist. Why else would all the Real Housewives be writing (or “writing”) their own memoirs? Portnoy did this for the money, sure, but also because he wanted to get his version of the story down. Everyone who likes him is a great person, an unsung hero; everyone who hates him is a bitch and a loser and a crying woke weirdo. It must be tiring to be this right and this misunderstood and this rich, all at the same time. If only he had a media company where he could publish his every thought, where he could settle every score. I guess he’ll just have to settle for publishing a book for morons.
