Alex Cooper’s podcast, “Call Her Daddy,” finished 2024 in second place between “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “The Huberman Lab” in Spotify’s annual rankings. At the Tribeca Film Festival in June, Cooper premiered an autobiographical documentary, in which she accused her college soccer coach of sexual harassment between 2013 and 2015.
The stakes of such an accusation are higher for Cooper than they would have been even just a year ago. Three recent verdicts from the sports world show that when the courts take their rightful place between the accused and the mob, both facts and truth matter.
Nancy Feldman coached Boston University’s women’s soccer team from its inception in 1995 until her retirement in 2022.
Cooper alleges that Feldman would touch her “in a way that would make me aware of her physical power, like putting her hand on my neck after practice, and like squeezing my neck and saying, ‘We need to have a one-on-one talk.’ ... And a hand on the thigh when she’s saying something inappropriate … but then leans back and laughs.” Cooper also says Feldman made inappropriate comments about her physical appearance. She says stayed silent because she feared retaliation by Feldman and the university.
Cooper bolstered her claim by saying that she has contemporaneous evidence of Feldman’s misconduct.
In an Instagram reel, Cooper shows snippets of a notebook in which her mother supposedly kept a record of Cooper’s mistreatment. Cooper says that in 2016, she and her parents had a meeting with Boston University’s athletics director and senior associate director of athletics, who was also one of the school’s deputy Title IX coordinators. According to her, the administrators entirely ignored the notebook.
After the meeting did not produce her desired result, she quit the team ahead of her senior year. The school honored her scholarship for her remaining year.
“No innocent construction”
Brian Holzgrafe was the tennis coach at Quincy University in Illinois. In 2017, Daniel Lozier, a player on the men’s team, accused Holzgrafe of having a sexual relationship with a female player. The school conducted a Title IX investigation, which completely cleared Holzgrafe. Lozier sued the university, several administrators, and Holzgrafe. All of Lozier’s claims were dismissed by the court or settled by the university.
Holzgrafe countersued Lozier for defamation. After six years of legal motions and filings, a jury took four days to find in favor of Holzgrafe. Still another year passed until a federal judge upheld that verdict in May 2025 and awarded Holzgrafe $2 million in damages.
Holzgrafe’s case is quietly making the rounds among canceled coaches. It’s the proof of concept that shows that it can be done. More importantly, it puts a federal judge’s stamp on two grave facts.
First, the judge affirmed that there is “no innocent construction” of a rumor about a coach having a sexual relationship with a student-athlete.
Lozier started a “scandalous” rumor of an adulterous affair in order to “impugn [Holzgrafe’s] name.” There is “no innocent construction” to such a rumor, which “is made worse by the existence of a coach and student athlete relationship.”
To understand the level of understatement, remember the context of the sports world when Lozier put Holzgrafe in his crosshairs in 2017. Every coach-athlete relationship was under the microscope, and every administrator and journalist was on a hair trigger, after the revelations of widespread sexual abuse by USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. Congress was establishing the U.S. Center for SafeSport to provide a non-judicial mechanism for investigating and punishing allegations of improper behavior stemming from the “power imbalance” between coaches and athletes. More broadly, the #MeToo movement was just getting underway.
Second, the judge validated the severe damage any such rumor wreaks on a coach’s mental health, professional status, social circles, and finances.
Holzgrafe lost the personal and professional satisfaction, as well as the income, that came from coaching. The defamatory rumor ruined Holzgrafe’s reputation in a college town of 40,000 people. He was publicly humiliated, which still follows him to this day. He became “withdrawn, depressed, and [said] his life was destroyed.” A Quincy resident said Holzgrafe is an accomplished violin player who performs with a local band. He now plays with his eyes shut, after suffering panic attacks on stage from thinking audience members are laughing at him.
Another W for Trevor Bauer
Between the Holzgrafe verdict and Cooper’s allegations, another long-running legal battle produced another victory for the falsely accused.
Professional baseball player Trevor Bauer won a default judgment against his one-time accuser, Lindsey Hill, on the grounds of non-appearance.
Bauer sued Hill in October for violating their 2023 settlement. That settlement arose from Bauer’s defamation suit against Hill after she accused Bauer of sexual assault in 2021. Hill countersued Bauer, which opened the door for Bauer to obtain videos and text messages from her phone from the days immediately before and after the alleged assault. Those videos and texts fully exonerated Bauer, as he detailed in a video he posted in October 2023.
Neither party paid any money to the other as part of that settlement. However, in podcast interviews last year, Hill stated that Bauer paid her to drop her suit. Bauer asserted that such statements were untrue and violated the terms of the settlement. In the absence of Hill attempting a defense, the Superior Court of California agreed with Bauer and awarded him $300,000: $22,000 in damages for each of ten such statements, plus fees.
“Mutual influence and error in memory”
Finally, one week after Call Her Alex premiered, another documentary-fueled accusation ended in acquittal in a Norwegian courtroom.
The Ingebrigtsen family is like the Mannings combined with the Kardashians. Brothers Jakob, Henrik, and Filip are professional distance runners (Jakob has two Olympic gold medals) who were coached for most of their lives by their father, Gjert. From 2016–21, they had their own reality show.
In 2023, the three brothers wrote an article alleging years of physical and emotional abuse by their father, including him punching, kicking, and threatening to kill Jakob. This led to charges against Gjert and a recurring point of interest in their 2024 Amazon Prime series, Born to Run.
This month, Gjert was acquitted of all charges related to Jakob, Henrik, and Filip. He was convicted on one charge of assaulting his daughter, whom he hit in the face with a towel.
The court said the brothers made “credible statements, [but] the total weight of the statements and other evidence reviewed means that the court must conclude that there is reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt.”
Notably, the court said that footage from the documentary showing Jakob arguing with Gjert was “difficult to reconcile with the prosecution’s claim that the defendant subjected Jakob to continuous and repeated abuse throughout the period from 2008 to 2018.”
Even more anathema to the “believe all victims” mindset, the court acknowledged that the passage of time, the escalating acrimony between Gjert and the brothers, and conversations between the brothers “provide the opportunity for mutual influence and error in memory.” The court accounted for these potential “sources of error” in weighing the testimony and evidence at trial.
Although it probably is not the case with the hyper-successful Ingebrigtsen brothers, a common factor in many accusations against coaches is a current or former athlete attempting to rationalize why his athletic career did not turn out the way he had hoped. Sometimes it’s poor coaching, and sometimes it’s bad luck. Other times, the output reflects the input: the athlete’s effort, mindset, commitment, and abilities. But years of ruminations, toxic conversations, and social panics can lead a certain type of disaffected athlete to make the jump from “Why not me?” to “Me, too.”
Alex Cooper has deployed her immense platform and resources to take on Nancy Feldman and Boston University in the media. The Holzgrafe and Bauer cases show that those assets could become her liabilities if she is challenged in court.
Given the nature of cancelation and media-based trauma, Alex Cooper has already inflicted significant harm on Nancy Feldman. If Cooper cannot prove her claims to a judicial standard, Feldman is well positioned to prove her own.
Image via Picryl.
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