Alex Cooper is opening up about a dark chapter in her life, and it’s not what you’d expect from the confident, unfiltered host of Call Her Daddy.
In her new Hulu documentary Call Her Alex, premiering June 10, podcast queen Cooper claims she was sexually harassed for years by her former soccer coach while playing for Boston University.
The alleged abuse, Cooper says, stretched across three years, starting when she was just a sophomore, and involved her then-head coach, Nancy Feldman, who led BU’s women’s soccer program for over two decades before retiring in 2022.
According to Cooper, Feldman zeroed in on her in a way that went far beyond standard coaching.
The doc details how Feldman allegedly made inappropriate comments about Cooper’s body, pried into her sex life, and even asked her outright if she’d had sex the night before. And the alleged conduct didn’t stop at words; Cooper says Feldman would find ways to be alone with her, touch her thigh, and stare in a way that made her deeply 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 film, according to Vanity Fair. “She turned something that I loved so much into something extremely painful.”
What’s even more disturbing? When Cooper and her family tried to report the coach’s behavior to the university, they were allegedly met with indifference. She says Boston University officials brushed off their concerns and asked her bluntly: “What do you want?”
The school, Cooper claims, offered to let her keep her full athletic scholarship, but refused to launch an investigation or take any real action against Feldman.
And according to Cooper, she wasn't the only student being harassed. While filming Call Her Alex, Cooper says she learned that similar abuses of power were still happening on BU’s campus. She even spoke to another alleged victim. That conversation, she says, was a turning point.
“Hearing her story was horrific,” Cooper said during a Q&A at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the documentary premiered. “And I knew in that moment, if I don’t speak about this, it’s going to continue happening,” Deadline reported.
Nancy Feldman, the coach at the center of these allegations, was a powerhouse in college soccer. With 418 career wins and 12 conference Coach of the Year titles, she was a respected figure in the NCAA. She also ran the BU women’s program from the moment it became a varsity sport in 1995 until her retirement.
Boston University has yet to publicly respond to Cooper’s allegations or the documentary.
Cooper, who previously worked at Barstool Sports before signing a huge deal with SiriusXM, had hinted at a traumatic experience from her college soccer days in past interviews. But Call Her Alex is the first time she’s spoken about these allegations in such raw detail.
Her rise to podcast superstardom (turning Call Her Daddy into one of the most listened-to shows on the planet) has made her a powerful voice in pop culture. And now, she’s using that platform to shine a light on something much bigger than sex advice and celebrity interviews.
“I don’t think anyone could’ve prepared me for the lasting effects that came from this experience,” Cooper says in the documentary. “It was this psychotic game of control. I started doing everything I could to avoid being alone with her; taking different routes to practice, sitting far away in meetings, anything.”
As the doc drops on Hulu this week, Cooper’s story adds to the growing conversation about abuse in collegiate sports, and how institutions still fail to protect the people most vulnerable.