“Call Her Daddy” host Alex Cooper opened up about years’ worth of alleged sexual harassment that she experienced from Boston University soccer coach Nancy Feldman.
Before Cooper became a sex and dating podcaster and media mogul, she was a Boston University soccer player. A decade after playing for her D1 team, Cooper shared the sexual harassment she faced from her female coach in her new Hulu docuseries “Call Her Alex.”
In the two-part Hulu series, the podcaster said she noticed Feldman “really starting to fixate on me, way more than any other teammate of mine, and it was confusing,” during her sophomore year of college.
She added that her coach leveraged field time in exchange for stories about Cooper’s sex life and dating history. Cooper claimed she also made specific comments about her body and “always wanted to be alone with me.”
She also alleged in the documentary that the BU athletic director Drew Marrochello, who per the university’s website still serves in this position, declined to hear the evidence of harassment when her parents tried to present it to him.
According to Boston University, Feldman retired in 2022. Feldman, Marrochello and the BU Athletics Department have yet to respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
Toward the end of filming the documentary, Cooper said she found out that other women younger than her experienced the same abuse she did at the hands of her soccer coach.
“Everything changed for me that day,” she said in an episode of her podcast released Tuesday.
The podcast host released an eight-minute episode of her podcast Tuesday, discussing why it took her 10 years to open up about her “college soccer trauma.” The Unwell founder said she was afraid of “retaliation” in coming forward.
“I also worried people would downplay or dismiss the severity of what I experienced because the abuse wasn’t physical,” she added. “And with a podcast that focuses on empowering women, I felt shame that my abuser happened to be a woman.”
Cooper said even saying the allegations aloud still makes her feel “uneasy and uncomfortable and anxious.”
The Unwell founder said that while on her live podcast tour she opened up to “Call Her Alex” director Ry Russo-Young about the sexual harassment she experienced. He suggested that they revisit Boston University to unpack that part of her story.
“The minute I stepped on that field I felt so small,” she said. “The minute I saw Nickerson Field I broke down, and I started sobbing. I didn’t realize how much I had suppressed and how much I was still carrying with me.”
Both parts of “Call Her Alex” are available to stream on Hulu now.
