“Are you fucking with me? Are you intentionally trying to fuck with me?” the former contractor says Kaplan asked on more than one occasion, telling people on set, “You’re wasting my money. I can replace you at any point.”
Cooper, this person says, “was within earshot” when Kaplan “burst out of the video-village area during the production, saying, ‘I really want to yell at somebody right now.’ ” Other women who have spoken to Vanity Fair say they also witnessed Kaplan lose his temper in front of Cooper.
The contractor notes that, despite the public image of Unwell, “what I found is, behind the scenes, there’s this man, her husband, running around wreaking havoc and making people cry, cower [in] fear.”
Several women say that, in addition to experiencing Kaplan’s yelling, they struggled to make sense of what appeared to be playful flirtation from their boss’s husband—who was also their boss—in a workplace where talking openly about sex had always been part of the founding vision. Multiple women recall Kaplan asking about their sex lives. “I’ve heard him in the office be like to employees, ‘Who did you have sex with this weekend?’ ” says one former employee. “He’d be like, ‘What did you do this weekend? Who did you fuck?’ ” another recalls. Several describe him commenting on their physical appearance—remarking on whom he found “hot” or overweight and noting how their clothing looked and fit. Others describe instances when they felt Kaplan stared at them too long, or when a hand on a thigh or the back of the neck lingered.
One employee says Kaplan “was definitely a flirty guy, but [I] can’t say that I felt uncomfortable.” Rather, it was Marchetti who gave her and other colleagues discomfort. “I would cry every day, and I’m tough. You can say crazy shit to me. I would cry every day,” says one, who claims he often yelled at her. “He would call me for hours,” she added.
Kaplan’s interactions with employees, according to several former staffers, could similarly veer into the unprofessional. One of his prior employees recalls coming to Kaplan about a work question when “he just kind of cut me off,” probing about her dating life. The woman felt unable to steer him away from a line of inquiry into her personal life. “He touched my arm at one point,” she says, recalling thinking, “Don’t do this. Alex is standing right there.”
The way Kaplan was running the company, according to several sources who have spoken to Vanity Fair, was in direct opposition to the uplifting feminist workplace Cooper claimed it to be.
Mean Girls
“This girl on girl shit needs to stop,” Cooper wrote on her Instagram story amid the fallout of her public feud with Earle in April, once again voicing the kind of supportive, feminist messaging of a company tasked with building the future Alex Coopers. It’s a vision that has attracted a generation of young women who follow Cooper’s every move.
