Bluesky

Marketed as a glimpse into podcast star Alexandra Cooper’s rise to fame, the Hulu-produced docuseries Call Her Alex instead exposes a legacy of sexual harassment and institutional cover-up within Boston University’s athletics department. Cooper is the host of Call Her Daddy, the world’s most popular podcast among women. The show normalizes taboo discussions around sex, love, and womanhood for a dedicated fanbase known as “the Daddy Gang.”

In the docuseries, she describes how her college soccer coach, Nancy Feldman, isolated and sexually harassed her until she left the team at the end of her junior year. Cooper’s parents maintained a written record of each allegation in support of their daughter’s claims. In 2015, when she first reported Feldman’s harassment to Drew Marrochello, the director of athletics at BU, she and her parents say they saw signs that he was aware of Feldman’s conduct. As Call Her Alex recounts, Marrochello refused to even look at the evidence her family presented, instead asking, “What do you want?”

After Cooper’s resignation from the team, BU allowed her to keep her scholarship—perhaps another indication that the school knew that her claims were legitimate. Yet she was never informed of any disciplinary action against Feldman. Feldman’s harassment of female soccer players reportedly persisted until she retired of her own volition in 2022 after she had been coaching for 27 years. The influx of similar stories surfacing online in response to Call Me Alex—comments and several videos describing nearly identical experiences appeared on Cooper’s social media—points to a pattern of dismissal and denial on BU’s part.

The docuseries provided a platform for Feldman’s other victims. Their stories all follow a similar arc—sustained harassment from Feldman. Cooper and others allege Feldman would insist on driving her chosen victims to class or practice where she’d pry into intimate aspects of their lives, call them into her office to discuss their sexuality and sexual experiences, comment on their bodies during gameplay review, and much more. They also allege institutional intimidation and retaliation from BU’s athletics department. This retaliation included threats to revoke scholarships, cutting playing time for star players who resisted her advances or attempted to report Feldman, and telling players that if they didn’t want to be around Feldman, they had no choice but to resign from the team.

Following the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, Cooper recalledan encounter with one of Feldman’s recent victims that made her realize “the harassment and abuse of power is still happening on the campus of Boston University.” She also confirmed that Marrochello, who she says greeted her complaints with silence and dismissal, remains BU’s athletics director.

Testimonials about Feldman’s abusive conduct are still coming out. The same day that the series premiered, one TikTok user posting as @sizzlinghotsarah alleged that Feldman repeatedly pulled her into an office for conversations that were irrelevant to soccer and deeply personal. She claims Feldman once asked who had molested her as a child to “make her gay,” and that she persistently pried into her sexual history. She says she reported the harassment to Marrochello, only to be told that the word of a disgruntled player couldn’t be trusted over that of a distinguished coach. She alleges that BU’s athletics department revoked her scholarship after forcing her resignation from the team. She was just 17. In another TikTok post, a former BU player appears on camera stating that Feldman “ruined” her soccer career. The video was uploaded by her daughter.

On June 17, 99 former BU soccer players and assistant coaches signed and published an open letter denouncing Cooper’s harassment claims. Their careers under Feldman span from 1996 to 2022. In a statement to The Daily Free Press, former team member Rebecca Beyer (2000–03) wrote, “Over decades, we never saw Coach Feldman act, or heard of her acting, in any way that could be characterized as sexual harassment.” What Beyer and those undersigned fail to understand is that sexual harassment at this level is rarely a public spectacle—it manifests in private, premeditated interactions that rely on imbalances in power and thrive in secrecy.

BU did not respond to a request for comment, but in a statement on June 13, the school told NBC News that it has a “zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment” and that officials “have a robust system of resources, support and staff dedicated to student wellbeing and a thorough reporting process through the Equal Opportunity Office.” The statement went on to say that BU administrators “encourage members of our community to report any concerns, and we remain committed to fostering a safe campus environment for all.” Feldman, for her part, has not responded to media inquiries.

BU is not alone in initially downplaying or disregarding serious charges of harassment only to issue belated and vague statements of support for victims after the fact. Universities routinely fail to fully investigate and verify reports of abuse in order to protect their reputations—and when such allegations involve athletics programs, they tend to privilege the revenues generated by successful coaches over the claims of individual harassment victims.

A 2011 FBI-led investigation of Penn State University found that four senior university officials were aware of child-abuse allegations against assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky but did nothing about them. At Michigan State University, more than a dozen employees—across athletics, campus police, and the administration—were aware of allegations of sexual abuse made against disgraced gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar for nearly two decades without taking meaningful action.

Students who report abuse or harassment are usually fighting an uphill battle against institutions designed to outlast them. A university knows full well that students only have four years—often fewer by the time they are reporting harassment or if they have transferred to the institution—while the administration, legal counsel, and athletics departments remain insulated by time. These bureaucratic systems delay resolution. Appeals drag out cases; Title IX coordinators turn over, forcing delays in proceedings; and students graduate before decisions are made or justice is served. Under Trump-era Title IX rules, schools are not required to conclude investigations within a specific timeframe, allowing them to stall with impunity.

The playing field is uneven—just one voice against a system that isolates, discredits, and demoralizes victims of harassment and abuse. So the question becomes: How do we shift the balance? The answer starts with strength in numbers. University of Michigan law professor Catharine A. MacKinnon found that when observing decades of Title IX proceedings, in cases of campus sexual assault, it took an average of three accusations against the same perpetrator before a school began to take the claims seriously.

Students and families are now able to harness the growing awareness of how institutional forces collude to suppress harassment claims—and the destigmatization of such claims in public discourse—to start imagining a more effective approach to harassment on campus. If students and alumni harmed by the same person could connect with one another privately without having to file a formal report, they could break through the institutional denial that thrives on isolation and shame. This kind of direct connection bypasses the bureaucracy that so often delays or derails accountability. When survivors are empowered to validate each other’s experiences, they reclaim credibility that the institutions so often strip away from them. Breaking through institutional denial means confronting a system that relies on silence, a lack of corroboration to avoid action, and procedural fatigue. Peer-to-peer communication allows people to organize outside of—and in spite of—a university’s refusal to acknowledge patterns.

Indeed, we can see the basic elements of this new approach in the wake of Call Her Alex’s release. By sharing her story of institutional neglect and sexual harassment, Cooper encouraged others who had similar stories to speak up. Since the series debuted, a steady stream of women who say they were harmed during their time as BU athletes have come forward—not because the institution invited them to but because someone went first.

But what if no one had to go first? That’s the model that’s been adopted for Callisto, a site designed to securely exchange information about sexual harassment and abuse. Callisto, an encrypted matching system for survivors of sexual harm, was built to connect individuals who name the same perpetrator and relieve them of the burden of taking the first step so others may follow. Anyone in the country with a .edu email address—faculty, student, or alumni—can access this system without needing to report anyone. The system also allows users to time-stamp and securely store their account of harassment or abuse without submitting it to a school or authority. Once a match occurs, users are connected with a pro bono legal options counselor to advise survivors on their options.

In the current system for handling student harassment claims, survivors tend to report in solitude—and are immediately disbelieved, scrutinized, and burdened with proving a pattern. Resources such as Callisto could reverse this dynamic. Under the protocols of the matching system, survivors can do the fundamental work of identifying patterns of harassment and then pursue meaningful institutional and legal remedies together. And even in instances where survivors act in isolation and then face institutional resistance, the story doesn’t necessarily end there: They may be able to connect with others and coordinate a future response. When survivors feel empowered to speak together, their collective voice can countermand the familiar university strategy of maintaining plausible deniability at all costs.

Call Her Alex is a bitter reminder that universities consistently choose to overlook the reports they receive about sustained patterns of harassment and abuse perpetrated by faculty and staff. And BU’s decades-long silence reminds us that universities aren’t going to reverse this system of malign neglect on their own. But resources like Callisto, and testimonials like Cooper’s, point toward a better system, whereby survivors can work together to hold bad actors—and the institutions that enable them—accountable.