Shortly after taking the stage Sunday evening at the Tribeca Film Festival, Alex Cooper started to choke up. The Call Her Daddy host, there to celebrate the premiere of her two-part Hulu documentary, Call Her Alex, spoke for the first time about the years of sexual harassment she experienced while playing soccer at Boston University.
Cooper is not known for such displays of emotion — her podcast went from raunchy retellings of her own sex life analyzed in R-rated detail to celebrity sit-down interviews in which stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Hailey Bieber talk about their sex lives. But in her doc, she comes forward with allegations against her former coach, Nancy Feldman. “I haven’t spoken about this, and I’ve spoken about so much of my life,” Cooper said during the post-screening Q&A. “Why haven’t I?”
The reasons are, of course, familiar. Cooper was fearful that she wouldn’t be believed (she and her parents say they confronted the athletic-department heads with written documentation of many instances lawyers described as “clearly a case of sexual harassment,” but they allegedly refused to investigate) and of the repercussions of coming forward (when BU officials wouldn’t take action on Feldman, Cooper quit the team). “Another part of why I struggled was because the person who abused their power over me and harassed me is a woman,” she said onstage. “And I really struggled with that for a long time because I didn’t want it coming out to undermine everything I stand for.”
Call Her Alex goes from a behind-the-scenes look at Cooper preparing for her first live tour in 2023 to a deeper examination of her past thanks to director Ry Russo-Young, whom Cooper said “push[ed] me to open up but at my own pace.” The first step, she said, was visiting the Boston University campus while Russo-Young filmed. “The minute I stepped back on that field, I felt so small,” Cooper said of the experience, tearing up as the crowd cheered in support. During her time on the soccer team, Cooper alleges that Feldman was obsessed with her appearance, making comments about her body in private and in front of other players. She found excuses to be alone with Cooper, sometimes putting a hand on her thigh, and asked invasive questions about her personal life, then threatened to bench her if she wasn’t forthcoming. “It was this psychotic game of ‘You wanna play? Tell me about your sex life,’” Cooper claims in the film.
Part one acts as an origin story for Cooper, who says she always had an easy time making friends with other girls but was bullied by boys for her body and red hair, while part two explores the beginnings of Call Her Daddy in 2018 through to her 2024 wedding to producer Matt Kaplan. (Both parts will be available to stream on Hulu Tuesday, June 10.) Call Her Alex is a portrait of a woman packaging herself as a girlboss Howard Stern.
Cooper’s rise to fame, which began a year after the Me Too movement and has always centered on enthusiastic discussions of sex, is now entering its era of “empowerment.” The documentary follows Cooper navigating the pressures of being a young woman in charge: At one point, a stage manager for her live tour threatens to quit due to burnout and overwork; Cooper gives him a pep talk and frets over her desire for control while fearing that people will think, as she puts it, “Alex Cooper is, like, a cunt.” The onstage Q&A with Cooper and Russo-Young was moderated by Dr. Orna Guralnik, the reserved, soft-spoken psychologist behind Showtime’s Couples Therapy (hearing her refer to the “Daddy Gang” was a treat), who praised Cooper’s frankness and vulnerability. The premiere crowd was more New York media people than Daddy Gang (Cooper’s affectionate name for her fan base) and included friends and family such as Cooper’s parents, her childhood best friend and current producer Lauren McMullen, and influencer Hallie Batchelder, whose podcast, Extra Dirty, is part of Cooper’s Unwell Network, all of whom attended the swanky after-party at Zero Bond. There, guests made custom “Call Her” tote bags and sipped drinks with branded ice cubes featuring the documentary’s title.
When Guralnik asked what’s next for her, Cooper hinted at wanting to hold more live events and possible weekend gatherings sponsored by Unwell, her flavored electrolyte-water company, while continuing to mentor new podcast creators in her network. But, she said, in light of the accusations made in the documentary, her water becoming the official hydration sponsor for the National Women’s Soccer League is the cherry on top of it all. “I was ready to reclaim my relationship to the sport that I loved so dearly,” she said. “I’m not gonna lie, that felt really good. I feel like that’s a good fuck-you.”
The podcast host grappled with sharing her experience publicly during a Q&A at the film’s Tribeca premiere.
