Alex Cooper says the red carpet chatter around her and husband Matt Kaplan was never about a marriage in trouble. It was about the two of them trying, and failing, to keep her pregnancy quiet.
On the Wednesday, June 10 episode of her Call Her Daddy podcast, Cooper said the online speculation after the May 13 YouTube Brandcast event in New York City centered on how miserable she and Kaplan looked. She said she was actually relieved people focused on alleged marital issues instead of noticing the baby bump she was trying to conceal.
That event happened four days before she announced her pregnancy on Instagram on May 17, and Cooper said the timing made every photo from the carpet feel risky. She said her outfit was too small to hide the bump, and she worried the buttons would give her away while cameras were flashing.
Cooper said she had a mental breakdown while taking photos because she felt the pregnancy was about to be exposed before she was ready. She told listeners she had wanted to keep the news private until at least August or September, but the bump was becoming too hard to hide under her clothes and the pressure was building. “The process of trying to hide it was literally causing me more anxiety than just putting it out there and being honest with the world,” she said.
The friction in the reaction came from the way people online read the couple’s body language. Cooper said it was sad to see people talking about her relationship that way, and she made clear that no one in her life was wondering whether she and Kaplan were on the rocks. “Matt and I are great,” she said, drawing a line between the public speculation and their private reality.
Cooper and Kaplan married in April 2024, and she said the red carpet moment showed how quickly a private milestone can become public when every detail is picked apart online. She had hoped to stay in her own bubble a little longer, but the photos and the comments turned that plan upside down. What remains unanswered is not whether the marriage is sound — Cooper has already addressed that — but how much longer she could have kept the pregnancy hidden if the carpet had not exposed it first.
