Podcast star Alex Cooper accuses her Boston University soccer coach of sexual harassment in new doc
Popular podcaster Alex Cooper made startling allegations in the upcoming Hulu documentary, 'Call Her Alex,' that she was sexually harassed by her soccer coach at Boston University.
The revelation in the new Hulu doc, set to premiere on the streaming platform on June 10, comes 10 years after Cooper said she went through the ordeal, which she claimed was three years of escalating sexual harassment at the hands of former head coach Nancy Feldman until she left the team in her senior year.
'I felt a lot of anger—anger at my coach, anger at my school, and anger at the system that allowed this to happen,' the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast host Cooper said in the documentary, according to Vanity Fair. '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.'
Feldman coached BU's women's soccer team for 22 years before she retired in 2022, but Cooper said that the former coach started to 'fixate on me way more than any other teammate of mine' during her sophomore season.
Cooper was a member of the Terriers women's soccer program from 2013-15.
It was during that time Cooper alleges Feldman took an uncomfortable interest in her and would make comments about her body and her personal life, including once asking Cooper if she had sex the previous night.
The podcaster and media mogul also said Feldman would try to get her alone, put a hand on her thigh and stare at her.
In the documentary, Cooper said that any time she would try to 'resist' Feldman, the coach would tell her 'there would be consequences.'
'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 said in the doc. '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.'
And when Cooper and her family attempted to approach Boston University officials about their claims, she said they were brushed off and officials asked her, 'What do you want?'
Cooper claims Boston University officials told her family that they would not fire Feldman, but would allow Cooper to keep her full soccer scholarship.
Cooper said that the school did not investigate her claims.
Feldman compiled 418 victories to rank 22nd all time among NCAA women's soccer coaches and was named conference coach of the year 12 times.
She was the program's only coach since 1995, when it became a varsity sport.
Boston University did not immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post.
Cooper has hinted at a traumatic experience from her time playing soccer at BU, which included interviews with Cosmopolitan and The New York Times, and it was teased in the trailer for the documentary.
The documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival before its release on the streaming platform, and during a Q&A afterward, Cooper, who previously worked for Barstool Sports, said she was motivated to come forward as they were making the film.
'During the filming of this documentary, I found out that the harassment and abuse of power is still happening on the campus of Boston University, and I spoke to one of the victims, and hearing her story was horrific, and I knew in that moment, if I don't speak about this, it's going to continue happening,' Cooper said, according to Deadline.
'Call Her Daddy' became one of the most popular podcasts on the planet after debuting in 2018 and surged to second on the podcast charts behind only 'The Joe Rogan Experience,' before Cooper went over to SiriusXM last year in a massive deal.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
Call Her Alex Isn't a Portrait of Alex Cooper—It's an Infomercial for Her Brand
In the breakout third episode of Call Her Daddy, the podcast's co-hosts, Alexandra Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, encouraged a male listener to track his crush's movements via Snapchat, advised a woman that there was no need to tell her boyfriend about her sugar daddy, and plotted to sell dirty Coachella shoes to foot fetishists. But the bit that really made 'Gluck Gluck 9000,' posted on Oct. 3, 2018, a classic was Cooper's lively and detailed description of the eponymous, supposedly game-changing oral sex technique. Six years and three days later, Cooper hosted an episode of the same podcast in which she posed to Kamala Harris, then the Vice President of the United States and Democratic candidate for President, questions about mental health, reproductive rights post- Roe, and the economic challenges facing young people. How did the Call Her Daddy that launched, not so long ago, as a chronicle of two 20-something Lower East Side roommates' X-rated exploits evolve into the ultra-mainstream Call Her Daddy of today? The short answer is that Cooper and Franklyn's cheerfully raunchy banter quickly attracted an audience of millions and just kept getting more popular, fueled by successive deals with the fratty platform Barstool Sports, then Spotify, and now a three-year Sirius XM contract reportedly worth $125 million. A more illuminating explanation for the show's expansion into a media empire would require an understanding of who Cooper—a solo act since Franklyn's departure in 2020—really is. The Hulu doc Call Her Alex presumably exists to offer such insight. But in just two scattered episodes (whose release as a series rather than a feature probably comes down to marketing), it's less a portrait of the podcaster than an infomercial for her brand. Directed by Ry Russo-Young (Nuclear Family, And Just Like That) and, crucially, produced by Cooper's company Unwell, Call Her Alex takes a form so typical of the authorized 21st century celebrity documentary, it's become a cliché. Behind-the-scenes footage of Cooper preparing for her first tour, which she's determined to make more exciting than the live tapings that comprise so many podcasters' events, is paired with a roughly chronological origin story. In the present, tension builds around troubled rehearsals of a program that includes musical numbers where Cooper is flanked by male dancers. The pressure to give her beloved listeners, known as the Daddy Gang, an unforgettable night seems insurmountable. An anxious Cooper seeks comfort from her unflappable husband and business partner, Matt Kaplan (a figure so adored by the Daddy Gang, some audience members carry giant cutouts of his face). Of course, as the trope dictates, last-minute disasters give way to an unequivocally triumphant opening night. The biographical portions can feel evasive—weirdly so, considering that messiness and candor are central to Cooper's brand—often swerving away from uncomfortable topics. She recalls escaping the pain of boys' bullying, as a skinny redhead, by bonding with other girls on the soccer field and making videos with friends. Then, suddenly, the awkward childhood photos are replaced by images of the perfectly proportioned and coiffed blonde she'd become by the time she matriculated at Boston University. There's no talk of how this glow-up might've affected her personal life or career, or the messages it might send to skinny redheads who worship Father Cooper, as she calls herself. The defining contradiction of Call Her Daddy, like Cosmo and the 'female chauvinist pigs' of Y2K pop culture, is its frequent implication that female empowerment requires catering to male desires. But Russo-Young never really interrogates Cooper's gluck-gluck feminism. Also conspicuously downplayed is the Cooper-Franklyn split, a perennial hot topic for the Daddy Gang. Talking heads who lived through it allude to a breakdown of the women's personal relationship as well as their professional partnership, as they renegotiated their initially meager Barstool contract—old news. Cooper doesn't have much to say about this. And while Barstool's controversial founder, Dave Portnoy, who also became a character in the contract drama, offers a few anodyne words of praise for Cooper in the doc, Franklyn is only glimpsed in archival footage. Anyone hoping to learn more about the end of the friendship, which isn't necessarily unreasonable for fans of a show premised on the intimacy of girl talk, will be disappointed. Still, Cooper is too savvy to put out a product entirely devoid of revelations. The morsel of news that started circulating in the days leading up to the series' release concerns the accusations of sexual harassment she levels in Call Her Alex against a since-retired BU soccer coach. Framed by Cooper's return to Boston for her tour, her story of a female coach who she says pried into her sex life and touched her inappropriately and used the students' scholarships to manipulate them—and of the university's alleged refusal to act on her scrupulously documented complaint—is infuriating. (Boston University has yet to comment on these allegations.) It also complicates Cooper's memories of soccer as a safe space and her choice to build a career around what is often euphemized as locker-room talk, though those aspects of the ordeal are barely explored. Instead, it's framed as yet another chance for Cooper to demonstrate her strength and tenacity. 'I was so determined,' she says in a voiceover that accompanies her stroll across an empty BU soccer field, 'to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.' Cooper is indeed a force—shrewd, ambitious, dynamic, hard-working. She knows her worth and fights for it. But that much has been obvious for years, to anyone with a casual awareness of her ascent to media-mogul status, as she's built an empire that now includes a media company (Trending), a podcast platform (Unwell Network), and an electrolyte drink (Unwell Hydration). The Daddy Gang certainly gets it. Which raises the question of who the audience for this documentary is supposed to be. Potential business partners, maybe? Watching Call Her Alex, at times, I felt as though I was being pitched a product: an empowered woman whose brand is female empowerment. All this marketing detracts from an element of Cooper's personality that is far more fascinating and rare and, I think, critical to her appeal than the stuff Russo-Young focuses on: she's great with people. The glimpses we do see of her interactions with fans are among the doc's highlights. When an audience member at one of her tour dates tearfully recounts how Call Her Daddy helped her cope with her father's death from cancer, Cooper calls her up to the stage, gets her a chair, sits at the young woman's feet, holds her hand, listens and reacts to every sentence of her story. Any performer could go through these same motions, but Cooper's care and curiosity—whether she's talking to a fan or a disgruntled employee or the most powerful woman in U.S. history—always come across as genuine. When she tells someone 'I f-cking love you,' which she often does, it sounds like she means it. This is probably why so many of her Gen Z listeners have likened her to a big sister. Yet she's something more complicated, too, a comforting but also aspirational figure, whose ugly-duckling-to-sex-goddess-swan transformation has left her with an unusual combination of empathy for the everygirl and the charisma to make that Daddy Gang diehard feel special. In a world that plays mean girls against mere mortals, she plays the part of the people's Regina George, her burn book replaced by an endless supply of sincere compliments.
Geek Vibes Nation
an hour ago
- Geek Vibes Nation
‘Predator: Killer Of Killers' Review - Dan Trachtenberg's Animated Anthology Is Sublime Franchise Fodder
In 2022, director Dan Trachtenberg proved Predator still had steam with Prey, a gloriously high-concept and brilliantly realized reinvention of the previously DOA 80s action IP. It was a bold departure from previous films in that it set its story in the early 18th century and centered it on a Comanche warrior, inevitably begging the question, 'If we can do a Predator movie there, where else can we put a Predator?' Fans quickly began generating ideas for what new potential Predator installments could look like. How about a Predator in ancient Egypt? How about a Predator in feudal Japan? How about a Predator during Vietnam? Well, at least one of these wishes has come true in Predator: Killer of Killers, a previously secret Predator project that has now graced our television screens (Hulu in the States, Disney+/Star everywhere else). Trachtenberg has taken his initial experimentation in Prey and blown it up threefold, presenting an anthology of three vignettes that imagine a Predator fight in three distinct time periods: 'The Shield' follows a horde of viking warriors who, in their efforts to take down a warring nation, come face to face a Yautja; 'The Sword' sees a samurai warrior seek vengeance against his estranged brother only to then find himself battling two foes; 'The Bullet' takes the fight to the sky as an inexperienced World War II naval pilot is forced to take down a Predator and his spaceship. While the first two entries feel thematically linked in the emptiness of vengeance and the importance of familial bonds, the third entry feels a bit more loose, though one could argue its underdog story helps link all three stories. Despite this, each vignette is bolstered by excellent voice acting and has just enough story to maintain thematic intrigue throughout. Killer of Killers marks the second time Disney has unceremoniously plopped an exquisitely crafted production straight to streaming, a criminal act for a company that allows hollow cinematic detritus like the new Lilo & Stitch to rack up Memorial Day dollars. Thankfully, this critic was able to experience the film in a theater as part of the Tribeca Festival's 'Escape to Tribeca' midnight programming slate, and calling the experience transcendent would be underselling it. The most notable difference is in the soundscape, which is booming with an absorbing surround mix and an intense, enrapturing score from Benjamin Wallfisch (Alien: Romulus). This is especially stirring in the film's third and final vignette, which incorporates the sounds of aerial combat a la Top Gun to bombastic effect. Unless you have a solid home theater setup, this is something you simply can't fully appreciate from the comfort of your home. Then, of course, there's the animation. This film marks the first foray into full feature animation for visual effects company The Third Floor (Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3) and the results are magnificent; though its 2.5D cel-shaded animation is not rendered as fluidly as other, more premiere examples of the format (Arcane is a particularly good comparison, with whom this film shares a lead animator), it is brimming with gorgeous detail and unafraid to get gory throughout its masterfully choreographed fight sequences. By the time the first sword is slashed, you are able to fully immerse yourself in the film's unique style and let its high-octane action and gruesome kills whisk you away. The film's second vignette, which is essentially Predator versus a samurai, is undoubtedly the film's highlight, bringing the stealth of the franchise to new stylistic heights that echo Asian cinema of the 1980s. It's undeniable that these three short films are infectiously entertaining, taking a previously militarized franchise and imbuing it with the kind of acrobatics, combat, and ingenuity that feel reminiscent of a John Wick-meets-Mortal Kombat bloodbath. It's a shame, then, that Killer of Killers succumbs to the MCU-ification of modern filmmaking and insists that 'everything is connected.' Though it isn't worth getting into for fear that it will spoil what is an admittedly electrifying third act, the final scenes of the film do explicitly connect the three vignettes and imply a much larger story world than Killer of Killers initially lets on. Each film is strong enough on its own that the additional narrative work, while fun, feels both narratively superfluous and vaguely exploitative. One can't help but fear that the film's story devices may eventually be abused to provide nostalgia-fellating franchise fodder. Arnold Schwarzenegger has certainly been brought back to his franchises with less effort. All of that said, the film is so invigorating from a pure genre perspective that it's easy not to care. Unlike franchises within the Marvel machine or even other blockbusters like Mission: Impossible or James Bond, Trachtenberg has proven he is only interested in pandering continuity porn when it comes secondary to expanding his franchise's lore in his own image. Though we expect his next film, Badlands, to be a more narratively coherent experience, there's nothing wrong with letting him experiment with a few creative exercises if they look, sound, and feel this good. Obsessive easter egg hunters will surely have some things to pick apart, but, for the most part, Killer of Killers is a sublime standalone project that invites endless possibilities to the Predator franchise while providing a cutthroat action romp that never takes its foot off the brakes. Predator: Killer of Killers held its New York Premiere as part of the Escape From Tribeca section at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. It is now streaming globally on Hulu and Disney+.
Miami Herald
an hour ago
- Miami Herald
Disney finally owns all of Hulu, ending long tug-of-war with Comcast
Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay Comcast Corp. an additional $438.7 million to finalize the Mouse House purchase of streaming service Hulu. Disney in December 2023 initially paid Comcast $8.6 billion for NBCUniversal's one-third stake in the streaming service. The final payment, announced Monday, brings the total amount the Burbank entertainment giant will ultimately pay Comcast for its stake to $9.2 billion. This week's agreement came after an extended appraisal process as the two companies struggled over Hulu's actual value. The platform that is home to "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Only Murders in the Building" appears to be worth about $27.5 billion. The resolution also represents a major step in Disney's years-long pivot to streaming. "We are pleased this is finally resolved," Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said in a statement, acknowledging Disney's productive partnership with the Philadelphia-based company. "Completing the Hulu acquisition paves the way for a deeper and more seamless integration of Hulu's general entertainment content with Disney+ and, soon, with ESPN's direct-to-consumer product, providing an unrivaled value proposition for consumers," Iger said. The two companies have had tense relations since Comcast launched a failed hostile takeover of Disney in 2004. Tensions flared again seven years ago after Comcast jumped into Disney's bidding process for Rupert Murdoch's entertainment assets, substantially driving up the price for Disney. Disney prevailed. It gained the majority stake in Hulu as part of its $71 billion acquisition of much of Murdoch's company in April 2019. That spring, Disney and Comcast negotiated a pact that outlined the governance of the service while it was jointly owned by the two companies and also provided a blueprint to dissolve their partnership. At the time, they agreed that Hulu would be valued at no less than $27.5 billion, making Comcast's stake worth at least $8.6 billion. Comcast's divestiture process began two years ago when Chief Executive Brian Roberts signaled that his company wanted out. The parties then entered into an appraisal process to find a value for Hulu. Disney noted the $438.7 million payment was substantially less than what Comcast had wanted. The deal is expected to close by July 24. Hulu launched as an NBCUniversal and Fox joint venture in 2008. Disney joined the following year as an equity owner. "Hulu was a great start for us in streaming that generated nearly $10 billion in proceeds for Comcast and created an important audience for NBCUniversal's world-class content," Comcast said in a statement Monday. "We wish Disney well with Hulu and appreciate the cooperative way our teams managed the partnership." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
