Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper claims in her new Hulu documentary that she was sexually harassed by her soccer coach, Nancy Feldman, at Boston University.
Call Her Alex premiered at the Tribeca Festival on Sunday, and in part one, the podcasting mogul details the harassment she suffered over three years at the school, accusing Feldman of commenting on her body and asking questions about her intimate life, among other claims. Cooper, a top soccer player in high school, went to Boston University on a full scholarship.
“My sophomore year, everything really shifted,” she said in the documentary. “I started to notice her really starting to fixate on me way more than any other teammate of mine. And it was confusing because the focus wasn’t like, ‘You’re doing so well, let’s get you on the field, you’re gonna be a starter.’ It was all based on her [Feldman] wanting to know who I was dating, her making comments about my body and her always wanting to be alone with me.”
Cooper said she would try to avoid Feldman, but that her coach would retaliate by benching her during games. It ultimately ended with Cooper being kicked off the soccer team senior year.
“It was this psychotic game of you wanna play? Tell me about your sex life, I have to drive you to your night class, get in the car with me alone,” she recalled. “I started trying to spend as little time as possible with her, taking different routes to practice where I knew I wouldn’t run into her. During meetings, I would try to sit as far away from her as possible, literally anything to not be alone with this woman.”
In Call Her Alex, Cooper claimed university officials “dismissed” her allegations against Feldman and that there was no investigation. Cooper graduated from Boston University in 2017, and Feldman retired in 2022.
The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to Boston University for comment.
In a Q&A following the premiere, Cooper shared why she chose to open up about the sexual harassment allegations in the documentary. “I think a lot of this process almost made me realize, if I have the finances to pay for a lawyer and I have the resources to do all these things, how is another woman going to feel comfortable to come forward? I’m still fucking scared up here, you know. And I was nobody when I was in college. I did come forward. I was denied, essentially. And so the story is frustrating, because I want to tell women come forward … But I did, and I wasn’t believed, and then it took me a decade.”
She continued, “I actually think this is just the beginning. It’s really opened my eyes to how difficult the system is, and it’s so built against us as women, and we have to fight so fucking hard to have our voices heard, and we are denied, or we’re questioned, or you feel shame, and that started to really get in my head of, how am I about to not put this in the documentary? … I realized, holy shit, I have so much more work to do, and I’m going to use my platform to hopefully inspire other people to come forward and tell their stories, because conversation is the only way that we’re going to actually have change and we’re going to make change.”
