Alex Cooper is talking about a bad time in her life, and it’s not what you’d expect from the strong, honest presenter of Call Her Daddy.
In her new Hulu documentary Call Her Alex, which comes out on June 10, podcast queen Cooper says that her old soccer coach s**ually ass@ulted her for years while she was playing for Boston University.
Credit: Getty Images for Tribeca Festival
Cooper claims that the abuse happened over three years, commencing when she was a sophomore. It involved her then-head coach, Nancy Feldman, who ran BU’s women’s soccer team for more than 20 years before retiring in 2022.
Cooper says that Feldman focused on her in a way that was not normal for a coach.
The doc describes how Feldman allegedly made improper comments about Cooper’s body, inquired into her s** life, and even asked her outright if she’d had s** the night before. Cooper alleges that Feldman would find ways to be alone with her, touch her thigh, and stare at her in a way that made her very uncomfortable.
“I felt a lot of anger – anger at my coach, anger at my school, and anger at the system that allowed this to happen,” Cooper says in the video, according to Vanity Fair. “She made something I loved very painful.”
What makes this more worse? When Cooper and her family tried to tell the university about the coach’s behavior, they say they were ignored. She says that Boston University authorities didn’t care about their worries and asked her directly, “What do you want?”
Cooper says that the school offered to let her keep her full athletic scholarship, but they wouldn’t look into Feldman or do anything about him.
Cooper also said that she wasn’t the only student who was being h@rassed. Cooper adds that when she was making Call Her Alex, she realized that similar abuses of power were still happening on BU’s campus. She even talked to someone else who said they were a victim. She says that talk changed everything.
Cooper stated during a Q&A at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the documentary first showed, “Hearing her story was horrible.” Deadline said, “And I knew in that moment that if I didn’t talk about this, it would keep happening.”
Nancy Feldman, the coach at the core of these claims, was a great college soccer player. She was a well-known figure in the NCAA, with 418 career wins and 12 Coach of the Year awards from her conference. She also ran the BU women’s program from 1995, when it became a varsity sport, until she retired.
Boston University hasn’t said anything publicly about Cooper’s claims or the movie yet.
Cooper, who used to work at Barstool Sports before getting a big deal with SiriusXM, has talked about a tragic event from her college soccer days in other interviews. But this is the first time she’s talked about these claims in such a clear way.
She has become a significant voice in pop culture since she has become a podcast celebrity and made Call Her Daddy one of the most popular shows in the world. And now she’s utilizing that platform to talk about something much broader than s** tips and celebrity interviews.
In the documentary, Cooper states, “I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for the long-term effects that came from this experience.” “It was this crazy game of control.” I did everything I could to stay away from her, like taking various routes to practice, sitting far away in meetings, and so on.
Cooper’s story adds to the growing discourse about abuse in college sports, and how schools still don’t do enough to protect the individuals who need it most. The doc premieres on Hulu this week.