Brooke Slusser remembers the day she moved into “the villa.”It was a four-bedroom apartment in San Jose, California with white walls and no decorations. Her mom and dad drove her and all of her things there, all the way from Texas. She was the first tenant to show up that semester. CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COMSlusser was about to begin her junior year, as a transfer from Alabama, to play her 2023 college volleyball season for SJSU and head coach Todd Kress. Slusser alleged Kress is the one who encouraged her to live in that apartment. At the time, there were two apartments filled with SJSU volleyball players that were looking for one more tenant on the lease, she claims. But Kress allegedly told Slusser to move into “the villa” because he thought she would “get along better” with the women in that unit, she claimed. Slusser lived in the blank-white-walled apartment by herself for her first two days in San Jose. She experienced her first up-close exposure to a homeless man, and witnessed a convention of cosplayers wearing animal costumes, called “furries.” On day three, Blaire Fleming walked in. “He was the first person I met when I got on campus, and we were together, just the two of us, I want to say for the first day or two, after he got there until any of my other roommates showed up,” Slusser told Fox News Digital. At the time, Slusser had no idea Fleming was transgender. She had no idea they would eventually end up on opposite sides of a national culture war. Over the course of that school year in “the villa,” Slusser shared many things with Fleming. They shared laughs, parties, food, germs, gossip and even secrets. Slusser, now regretfully, said she shared her deep personal family trauma with Fleming in moments of vulnerability. And Slusser said she still hasn’t even mentally processed one of the most regretful things she shared with Fleming back then. “You find out you’re just chilling in a bed with a man that you have no idea about… I [was] unknowingly sharing a bed at that time with a man,” she said. “It’s hard to process. I don’t even know if I can say I’ve fully processed it to this day. It’s just, you’re told something for so long, you think something for so long and you act very normally about a situation, and then come to find out it’s all a lie.” Sometimes, the other teammates living in the house would all climb into bed with them, to watch movies or just talk, Slusser said. But other times Slusser said it was just her and Fleming. “Watching movies snuggled up in bed, like, all the normal things you’d think girls do in an apartment, like, my bathroom is across the hall from my bedroom and I’m going back and forth and everyone’s out doing their thing, and I probably would have covered up more,” Slusser said. “I would have changed everything about what I was doing in that apartment if I would have known that it was a man. So it’s just hard to fully say I can grasp all of that when it was almost
Former SJSU volleyball star opens up on living with trans teammate without knowing athlete’s biological sex
