Alex Cooper Accuses Her College Soccer Coach of Sexual Harassment

Alex Cooper, best known for the ultra-popular and highly confessional podcast Call Her Daddy, is opening up about a painful chapter in her life. The two-part docuseries Call Her Alex, which debuts at the Tribeca Film Festival before streaming on Hulu on June 10, follows Cooper as she mounts her podcast as a live show, gets married to now husband Matt Kaplan, and interviews Kamala Harris during her 2024 presidential run.

But the most harrowing revelation in the doc, directed by Ry Russo-Young, relates to Cooper’s three-season run on the Boston University soccer team. Cooper’s mother, Laurie, says she was “thrilled” when her daughter selected the Division-1 organization because of its female head coach, Nancy Feldman. “Boy, that turned,” Laurie adds, “The whole thing turned.”

In the documentary, Cooper alleges that she was the victim of sexual harassment at the hands of Feldman, who retired in 2022 after 27 years as the first and only head coach in the history of Boston University’s women’s soccer program. (Vanity Fair has reached out to both Feldman and Boston University for comment.)

“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 film. “I don’t think anyone could’ve prepared me for the lasting effects that came from this experience. She turned something that I loved so much into something extremely painful.”

When Cooper arrived on campus in 2013, “I was determined to make a name for myself on that field, so when my coach started to pay extra attention to me, I figured it was probably because I was playing well,” she says in the documentary. “My sophomore year, everything really shifted. 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 going to be a starter.’ It was all based in her wanting to know who I was dating, her making comments about my body, and her always wanting to be alone with me.”

Both Cooper and Alex Schlobohm, her dormmate and teammate, allege in the doc that Feldman would fixate on Cooper’s physical appearance, rather than her athletic performance, while reviewing game tape. “We’re gonna rewind my tape every five seconds and we’re gonna talk about my hair and my body,” said Cooper, recalling Feldman as saying, “‘Look at those legs. Everybody look at Alex in her uniform.’”

During pre-season, Cooper claims that Feldman would “pull me in, just be staring at me, sit next to me on the couch, put her hand on my thigh,” adding, “I felt so deeply uncomfortable.” The podcaster says she felt pressured into complying with her coach: “I was attending BU on a full-tuition scholarship. If I didn’t follow this woman’s rules, I was gone.”

Cooper recalls one instance when Feldman allegedly asked if she’d had sex the night before, then benched her for most of a championship tournament after seeing a man drop her off on campus. “Every time I tried to resist her, she would say, ‘There could be consequences,’” says Cooper. “And there were.”

Prior to her documentary, Cooper alluded to a traumatic experience involving collegiate soccer in interviews with both Cosmopolitan and The New York Times. But she told the latter that she wouldn’t delve into any details until she was “personally healed” from the situation. “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,’” Cooper alleges in the film. “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.”

Ahead of Cooper’s final year at BU, her parents contacted lawyers, who explained that “this is clearly a case of sexual harassment,” Laurie says in the film. But attorneys also allegedly warned them about possible fallout of pursuing legal action. “If I’m gonna be real with you, they will drag this on for years and this will be your life,’” Cooper recalls them saying.

Though they allegedly gave Boston University athletics officials written documentation of Feldman’s inappropriate interactions with Cooper, she and her parents claim that the department declined to penalize the coach. “I want to play my senior year. I want to finish out what I worked my entire life for, but I can’t play for this woman,” Cooper recalls telling university staff. “They said, ‘We’re not gonna fire her, but you can keep your entire scholarship and that’s that.’ No investigation. Within five minutes, they had entirely dismissed everything I had been through.”

Cooper did not play soccer her senior year, and Feldman continued to earn coaching accolades—the city of Boston even declared December 11 “Nancy Feldman Day”—until her 2022 retirement. “One of the greatest coaching careers in college soccer has come to an end,” BU athletic director Drew Marrochello said in a statement at the time, “and words really can’t describe what Nancy has meant to BU and to all of the women who have been lucky enough to call her ‘Coach.’”

In her own remarks at the time, Feldman said: “Hopefully by being challenged, [her players] grew, learned more about themselves, and became stronger, empowered, and prepared for life. That really is the legacy I hope to leave.”

A year after the #MeToo movement began, Cooper launched Call Her Daddy, a brand that has now become synonymous with female sexual agency. In the documentary, she revisits Boston University for the first time since graduating. “When I look back at that time in my life, I was scared, hopeless,” she says. “I had no resources and no options. And the minute I left that campus, I was so determined to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.”