Call Her Daddy's Alex Cooper Reveals Sexual Harassment Allegations Against Soccer Coach
How the podcast host brought the tour to life—her first time performing before a live audience—is chronicled in Call Her Alex, a two-part documentary, directed by Ry Russo-Young, that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night and will drop on Hulu on June 10. Interspersed among the scenes of the pressure-filled countdown to opening night, is archival footage and interviews with Cooper and her family and friends that tell the story of how she went from being a goofy kid in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with a mic and a dream, to becoming the wildly successful media mogul she is today.
Father Cooper, as she is known to her loyal listeners, has long been known for telling-all. In 2018, with her then roommate Sofia Franklyn, Cooper launched Call Her Daddy and began revealing the intimate details of her dating and sex life. 'I was fortunate to grow up in a household where it was normalized to speak your mind, so I was like, give me the microphone, I'll say it,' Cooper says in the documentary.
Call Her Daddy was quickly signed to Dave Portnoy's Barstool Sports network and became the top podcast for women in record time. After a few years, Cooper struck out on her own and signed with Spotify for $60 million. Since transitioning the show to an interview format, Cooper has landed sit-downs with everyone from Hailey Bieber and Simone Biles, to Vice President Kamala Harris and Jane Goodall.
She has also expanded her business—in 2023, Cooper launched a Gen Z-focused media company called Trending, and the Unwell podcast network, with her husband Matt Kaplan—and extended her brand—most recently via an electrolyte drink and a partnership with the National Women's Soccer League during the Paris Olympics—while continuing her reign as host of Call Her Daddy, which was recently signed to SiriusXM for $125 million.
But despite all of her oversharing over the years, Cooper has been holding some things back from her Daddy Gang. Her listeners know her favorite sex positions and blow job techniques, but they are less familiar with her life story, particularly some formative life experiences that, as she says in Call Her Alex, made her 'determined to find a way where no one could ever silence me again.'
'When you're filming a documentary, there is a level of exposure that I wasn't used to,' Cooper said on stage at Tribeca following the screening in a Q&A with Russo-Young and Dr. Orna Guralnik, a clinical psychologist featured in Call Her Alex. 'You're really seeing me in my life with my husband. I know you guys know how private Matt and I usually are, but I think this was a goal to show a little bit more. … It was hard to trust the process in moments because I didn't edit this and usually, I edit everything. So it was just a nerve-racking experience overall, but it turned out.'
Read on for the documentary's biggest reveals.
Clips from home videos shot during Cooper's childhood show she was raised with a camera in her hand. Her father worked for an NHL team, the Philadelphia Flyers, producing the broadcasts of the game for television. Cooper would sometimes go with him to work and sit in the back of the control room wearing her own mini headset, watching him in action.
'I thought it was the most incredible, magical job,' Cooper says in Call Her Alex. 'My dad would say go to camera A, go to camera B, let's roll B roll. I was enamored with the world.' And she adds, it instilled the idea in her that, 'When you are seeing something or have a vision, film it.'
'We knew we needed a catchy name to get people's attention,' Cooper says, while archival footage of her in the sweatshirt plays on screen. 'I was in our apartment one day and I threw on a hoodie. It is a dark grey hoodie that has a huge bold 'Daddy' on it. I bought it in college because I was like, this is hilarious.' She says men in college would say to her, 'Why do you have daddy on your shirt?' and she'd reply, 'Because I am.' The name that suggests girls can be daddies too ended up being a perfect fit for a show that sought to make it okay for women to talk about sex 'like men.'
In Call Her Alex, Cooper says she had no problem befriending girls, but boys made her life at Catholic school hell for years. They would constantly make comments about her appearance, teasing her about her red hair and skinny legs. Cooper says in the doc that she grew to hate herself, but kept the bullying a secret as she was too embarrassed to tell her parents.
Her home, however, was a happy place where she could let her confidence shine and develop her stage presence. Virtually every moment that she and her two best friends, Lauren and Kristy, weren't at school, sleeping, or at soccer practice, they were in Cooper's basement singing into a microphone and making music videos, movies, and plays, often with elaborate costumes and wigs.
They kept a filming schedule, once reenacting Devil Wears Prada word for word, with Cooper producing, directing, operating the camera and the lighting. She also used a green screen and taught herself how to edit video in Adobe Premier before she was 10 years old. 'I was obsessed with editing. I loved having control over the timing and the pacing and the comedy,' Cooper says in the documentary. 'Creating these worlds that I had control over, was the place where I felt 100 percent myself.'
There has long been speculation about the unraveling of the relationship between Cooper and her former cohost Franklyn. In Call Her Alex, Cooper clears up a number of things. First, she makes it clear the podcast, particularly the idea for women to speak frankly about sex, was firmly her idea. The documentary even includes a clip from the first episode, where Franklyn introduces herself and says she's 'probably here to ride Alex's coattails.'
Cooper also explains that she only knew Franklyn a few months before asking her to make the podcast with her, and that listeners assumed they were better friends than they actually were. The doc doesn't go in-depth about their falling out, but says they differed about their goals for the future of the podcast.
After the show became a huge success, the cohosts sought to renegotiate the terms of their deal with Barstool Sports (their original three-year contract was for around $70K, Portnoy says in the doc). Cooper says they were offered what she considered to be 'the deal of a lifetime,' from Barstool: Stay one more year and then leave with the ownership rights to Call Her Daddy. 'Sofia didn't want to take the deal, but I did,' Cooper says in the doc. And that was that, she would go it alone. She even returned to her parent's basement where it all began during the pandemic to record her first solo show.
In interviews over the years, Cooper has alluded to the fact that she had a traumatic experience in college and that she would talk about it when she was ready. In Call Her Alex, Cooper reveals that she was sexually harassed by her female soccer coach, Nancy Feldman.
Cooper grew up playing soccer competitively, and was recruited to play Division 1 soccer at Boston University on a full-ride scholarship. Cooper said she was determined to make a name for herself on the team, and assumed that when the coach began paying her extra attention her freshman year that it was because she was emerging as a standout player.
Over the following two years, Cooper says Feldman became more fixated on her—asking her who she was dating and for details about her sex life, making comments about her body, and always wanting to be alone with her in meetings, where Cooper says she would stare at her and put her hand on her thigh. 'It was this psychotic game of, 'You want to play, tell me about your sex life. I have to drive you to your night class, get in the car with me, alone,'' Cooper says in Call Her Alex. 'I started trying to spend as little time with her as possible, taking different routes to practice where I knew I wouldn't run into her, during meetings I would sit as far away from her as possible, literally anything to not be alone with this woman.'
Cooper explains in the doc that she was afraid to push back too hard because she risked losing her scholarship. 'I was attending BU on a full tuition scholarship, if I didn't follow this woman's rules, I was gone,' she says. 'Every time I tried to resist her she would say, there could be consequences, and there were.'
The situation ultimately came to a head at the end of Cooper's junior year when Feldman kicked her off the team, while allowing her to keep her scholarship. In the doc, Cooper alleges she and her parents sat down with athletic department officials who asked her, 'What do you want?' but said they would not fire Feldman (who retired in 2022) and that the decision was final despite the lack of investigation.
Cooper returns to the soccer pitch at BU for the first time in the film. 'The minute I stepped back on that field, I felt so small. 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 that power,' Cooper said during the Q&A at Tribeca. '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.'
She said she felt compelled to share what happened to her as a way of healing, and also because '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.' She went on to call out the athletic director, who dismissed her allegations and who is still in the position, by name. 'This isn't just happening on college campuses for soccer, this is everywhere. This is systemic,' she said on stage. 'And so I knew it was time to speak about it, and I was terrified and I'm still terrified.'
Boston University did not immediately respond to ELLE's request for comment. Call Her Alex does not include a statement from the university or Feldman. No charges were ever filed.
Call Her Alex begins two weeks before her first-ever live show. The fact that her listeners were coming to see her from far and wide had Cooper feeling an intense amount of pressure to deliver 'the best damn show that they've ever seen in their lives.' But the day before the tour was set to open in Boston, the production manager says he is burned out and threatens to quit. It's hard to imagine how the show could have gone on without him, and Cooper handles the situation like the boss she is and talks the production manager into staying. 'It's very hard to say no to Alex Cooper,' he says in the doc.
After the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 that overturned Roe v Wade, Cooper visits an abortion clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina. 'When Roe v Wade was overturned that for me was the first moment in my career that I was like, I need to speak on this because this actually comes down to human rights and the fact that we don't have bodily autonomy,' Cooper says in Call Her Alex. She interviews protesters outside of the clinic, asking one man if men should be required to get vasectomies until they are ready to have children as a way of pointing out the hypocrisy of the government regulating vaginas but not penises. 'To see women changing their opinion because of an episode I put out was incredible,' Cooper adds of the reaction.
Later in the documentary, viewers see Cooper getting a call where she was informed that she would be interviewing Vice President Kamala Harris on the podcast. 'I'm very aware that the Daddy Gang is both Republican and Democrat and I have made a very concerted effort not to dive into politics on my show but I'm going to do it the way that I want to do it,' Cooper says of her decision to interview the VP in the doc. 'I'm not CNN, I'm not Fox News, this is Call Her Daddy and we talk about women's rights.' Adding that she felt compelled to do it because she could have a daughter one day and interviewing the VP 'could make a difference.'
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