ALL MY DOGS
“I love to make people uncomfortable,” says Cooper, though she seems to really mean men. Valentino jacket and jeans. Cartier watch.
Cooper grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, in a tight-knit family, the youngest of three children. She was skinny and goofy and red-haired, and the boys at her elementary school bullied her viciously on all three counts. “My family was always my safe space,” she says. Her father, Bryan, was a TV producer for the Philadelphia Flyers who encouraged Alex to experiment with his own cameras, which she did with her friends in the family basement, performing skits and reenactments of their favorite movies. (“Our biggest fight was who got to play Regina George,” Lauren McMullen, her best friend since childhood, tells me.) Her mother, Laurie, was a psychologist who encouraged Alex to be self-aware and emotionally literate. When Alex began to stand out on the soccer field, her parents enrolled her in club teams and traveled with her all over the world for games and tournaments. Cooper says, “They recognized, Oh my gosh, one of our kids is an athlete that could get a full scholarship and it could change her life.”
The family was solidly middle class, and Alex knew that her house was smaller than those of many of her friends. “I definitely grew up with an awareness of money,” she tells me. This deepened in 2004, when her father lost his job due to an NHL labor lockout. “I remember he was posting flyers around the neighborhood to help repair computers,” she says. Her mom had her therapy practice, “but it wasn’t enough to sustain a five-person household,” she says. Cooper, always a determined kid, resolved that one day she would provide for her family. “I understood money came with an opportunity to care for people around you.”
What the Coopers lacked financially they more than made up for in their efforts to rear confident children. “I had a very liberal, feminist mother,” Cooper says, and neither of her parents were squeamish about sexuality. “I went to a Catholic school that was so conservative, and the people around me were so conservative, but I’d come home and not feel constrained by that Catholic idea,” she says. “You’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, and if you do, you’ll go to hell. There was a lot of that that was ingrained in my friends.”
By the time Cooper got to Pennington high school in New Jersey, the bullies were gone, and she was the soccer star who her friends came to for boy advice. “I was the one that was going to say the things or call the boyfriend and call him out for cheating.” She shrugs. “I’ve always been outspoken like that—and I’m a Leo.”
Cooper was a strong enough soccer player that she was recruited by Division I colleges. She picked Boston University because they offered her a full scholarship, her mother had grown up in the greater Boston area, and they both liked that the head coach was a woman. But during her sophomore year, Cooper alleges, she began to feel that the coach, Nancy Feldman, was singling her out: making inappropriate comments about her body, asking invasive questions about her sex life, endeavoring to get her alone after practice, sometimes touching her thigh unnecessarily. Before her senior year, Cooper finally told her parents the extent of what was happening, and they contacted a lawyer, who told them it sounded like they had a clear case of sexual harassment but warned that a lawsuit against the university could drag out for years and be financially disastrous.
The Coopers took their concerns to Boston University’s athletic director, who they allege refused to address the harassment or review their evidence, but allowed Alex to quit the soccer team while keeping her scholarship. (In June, BU issued a statement that they have a “zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment,” and then when another former student came forward later that month with similar allegations about Feldman’s successor, who has denied the allegations, the university launched an investigation. Feldman retired in 2022 after 27 years at BU; a group of alumni, all former team members, have written in support of the coach.)
The morning that we meet, Cooper has posted defiantly on Instagram (“I’m coming for all of you who abused your power,” she wrote). But when I ask her in her office what the plan is, she equivocates a little, saying she’s “weighing my options. I talked with a lot of people in my life, saying I am determined to make a change, whether it’s with Title IX and the NCAA or on these university campuses in these locker rooms.” She plans to invite more people on her show who have experienced harassment. “This is everywhere,” she says. “This is in the workforce; this is in relationships. As far as you get in achieving and garnering a platform and having money and security and influence, all of it goes out the window when something traumatic happens to you.” She’s still haunted by the events in college but that’s only emboldened her. “I was like, Okay, this is bigger than me. Let’s go. I need to use my voice because what have I actually built this whole thing for?”
