Popular podcaster Alex Cooper claims in a new docuseries that she was sexually harassed by her soccer coach during her time playing the sport at Boston University.
“Call Her Alex,” which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday and debuts on Hulu on Tuesday, chronicles the media figure’s ascent to stardom, detailing her early childhood in Pennsylvania and her journey to become one of the most influential podcasters.
In the two-part docuseries, which NBC News viewed screeners of, the “Call Her Daddy” host alleges that her former coach Nancy Feldman “fixated” on her, “wanting to know who I was dating … making comments on my body, and always wanting to be alone with me.”
Cooper played on the team from 2013-2015, according to the B.U. women’s soccer website. Feldman, who retired in 2022 after 27 years at the university, made comments about her appearance and her legs, Cooper alleges, and put her hand on Cooper’s thigh. She said Feldman also once questioned her about a date, asking if she had sex the night before.
“I felt so deeply uncomfortable,” she says in the docuseries, adding that she was attending B.U. on a full-tuition scholarship and felt if she “didn’t follow” Feldman’s rules, she’d be “gone.”
In the docuseries, Cooper’s mom says the family reached out to a lawyer who advised them to sue Feldman, but warned litigation could take years. Cooper said her parents reached out to B.U. to report the claims of sexual harassment. Her mom said she provided notes to B.U. that she took from her calls with Cooper over the years in which her daughter described the alleged incidents. The notes were shown in the docuseries.
Cooper claims she told B.U. she wanted to play her senior year but she couldn’t play for Feldman. The university, she alleges, said they told her they wouldn’t be conducting an investigation and said they wouldn’t fire Feldman. They said Cooper could keep her scholarship even if she didn’t play her senior year.
“Within five minutes, they had entirely dismissed everything I had been through,” Cooper said.
Feldman and a representative for Boston University did not respond to requests for comment made on Monday. A spokesperson for Cooper said she is not commenting further.
The docuseries does not include a statement from the university or from Feldman.
During a Q&A with director Ry Russo-Young after the Tribeca screening, Cooper reflected on her decision to speak out 10 years after the alleged harassment.
In the years since she graduated, Cooper, now 30, has built a media empire. Her millions of listeners, nicknamed the “Daddy Gang,” consider her the go-to voice on relationships, dating and life in your 20s and 30s. In addition to her podcast, one of the most listened to on Spotify, she launched the Unwell Network, a subsidiary of the media company Trending, which she founded with her now-husband, Matt Kaplan, and a drink brand.
She said that while filming the documentary project she returned to B.U.’s campus for the first time, and she got emotional.
“At this point in the filming process, I was not sure I wanted to talk about this experience,” she said during the Q&A, according to People, which also shared a clip of the conversation on Instagram.
“The minute I stepped back on that field, I felt so small,” Cooper said. “I just felt like I was 18 years old again, and I was in a situation with someone in a position of power who abused their power, and I felt like I wasn’t the ‘Call Her Daddy’ girl. I wasn’t someone who had money and influence or whatever. I was just another woman who experienced harassment on a level that changed my life forever and took away the thing I loved the most.”
This is the first time Cooper has opened up about the allegations, though she has alluded to having a “traumatic experience” with a coach during her time on the team in the past. In a 2023 interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, she described a “specific thing” without mentioning what had happened, saying “it’s so personal to me and it took such a toll on my mental health.”
She said reconnecting with people she played soccer with, “who were around when things were happening,” had been “pretty cathartic” for her.
“I met up with one of my teammates in Santa Monica who I hadn’t seen since we graduated — we didn’t even say hi, we just both started crying,” she said. “There’s another woman that went through it with me, and we finally saw each other recently, and it’s just wild to talk about it together. Connecting with these other women with these scars, that’s the first step to me actually being like, “Oh my god, I’m feeling better.”
