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Sunday marked exactly one year since Blaire Fleming and Brooke Slusser’s final college volleyball game for San Jose State University.
They had been playing together, traveling together and doing team bonding activities for months even after Slusser took legal action, alleging she was never told Fleming was a biological male transgender athlete. Before that, they had already shared hotel rooms and changing spaces for a whole season in 2023 before Slusser said she even found out.
Slusser now says the panic and stress from that period in her life caused her to develop an eating disorder, which led to severe anorexia that got so bad she lost her menstrual cycle for nine months.
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Brooke Slusser #10 and Blaire Fleming #3 of the San Jose State Spartans call a play during the first set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym on October 19, 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
“From the stress and how anxious I was every single day, I just wasn’t eating really at all,” Slusser told Fox News Digital.
“I went from around 160 to 128 [lbs] in that one semester. It definitely isn’t healthy for someone of my size to be that weight, and I ended up losing my menstrual cycle for nine months. So it was definitely severe.”
Slusser is 5-foot-11.
People at home started to take notice of the issue.
“When I came home, some of my friends and family were very worried about me,” she added. “Some of my friends were just like, ‘You always looked tired all the time. You always look dead … I was able to come home three days that fall semester my senior year, and I had a friend later on tell me that when I saw her, she went home and cried to her mom, because she was so worried about me, just because she could tell I looked so unhealthily skinny.”
She said some days she ate as few as 400 calories, then still went out to court to compete with her teammates, and some days she went out to do news interviews on her battle to “save women’s sports.”
“Every day was really hard… the hardest thing to do was, some days I would be waking and I’d have to hop on two to three interview calls with news outlets… then get ready, go to practice go to lift… get pulled into meetings with my coaches about how I’m just such a terrible person and all of these things, and then go straight from that right back into interviews,” she said.
But once the season and semester ended, her parents saw the physical impact the situation took on her, and demanded she come home to Texas.
“As soon as the season was over, she came home for Christmas, and we were like, ‘you’re not going back,'” her father, Paul Slusser, told Fox News Digital. He told his daughter, “‘You can go get your stuff next summer when your lease is up, and stay here.’
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Former SJSU volleyball star Brooke Slusser and her parents Paul and Kim Slusser at a game on Sept. 8, which Kim claims is “the last fond memory we have of her playing.” (Courtesy of Kim Slusser)
The father was particularly concerned about the way the media was portraying his daughter, and how that influenced her peers’ perception of her.
“She was the enemy. The news vilified her. All the media outlets vilified her. And the students were reading that kind of stuff about her.”
Her mother, Kim Slusser, said she was “devastated” when she saw her daughter’s physical state last Christmas.
“When I found out how bad everything really was and really saw her at Christmas time when she came home … I was devastated. I couldn’t sleep. I was having nightmares,” Kim Slusser said.
Brooke herself also began to have recurring nightmares when she moved back into her parents’ house.
In one dream, Brooke envisioned herself back at practice in the San Jose State gymnasium, and then getting called a private meeting head coach Todd Kress.
“I woke up sobbing in the middle of the night,” she said.
“I definitely struggled a lot with my sleep and being able to fall asleep and stay asleep during the night. I was taking melatonin to help me sleep. At that time, I was only getting two to four hours of sleep per night.”
Once winter break was over, and what was supposed to be her final semester began, Brooke attempted to complete her course online.
Her parents said she began online classes, but dropped them shortly later. As a Division I scholarship athlete, dropping the classes resulted in her losing the scholarship, and her family had to pay for the full semester’s worth of tuition out of pocket, and her housing.
“We had to pay, basically her mortgage and her apartment for the rest of the semester. So it was a pretty large financial burden on us when that happened,” Paul Slusser said.
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The family will have to pay out of pocket again for additional tuition, as Brooke still hasn’t finished her degree. She is no longer an SJSU student, and will finish her education at another school.
A former scholarship athlete, Slusser previously imagined that, at that point in her life, she would have a degree and a license in dietetics, preparing to start her own business in the dietetics field.
But instead, she had to focus on self-repair.
The family claims they didn’t consult any doctors and the daughter didn’t use any medicine, except the melatonin for sleep help.
“My family, and so do I, we don’t really believe on leaning on medication for those type of things,” Brooke said. “The reason I was able to heal from everything is because of God.”
In one of her final Sundays at San Jose last fall, she randomly decided to go to church on a Sunday, just because she wanted to get out of the house.
“I just broke down in tears during worship, and that was the day that I decided to give my life back to Christ,” Slusser said.
She started going to church more when she was back home, then got officially baptized in the final week of June. This past summer, she also moved to North Carolina, and is working as a youth girls’ volleyball coach.
Kim Slusser said her daughter also formed a romantic relationship with a guy she went to high school, which has also helped her recovery.
“He was a high school friend, and now they’re dating, and he was someone she leaned on during the hard times at San Jose,” Kim Slusser said.
By this Thanksgiving, Slusser and her parents say she has recovered physically and mentally from the situation, as they navigate the completion of her college degree.
“She just got back in her comfort zone, the weight came back on, she went back to her comfort zone, got her period back,” Paul Slusser said.
None of the physical and mental damage over the last year has deterred Brooke from fighting in the national conflict to “save women’s sports.”
She is a plaintiff in two Title IX lawsuits, citing her experience at SJSU, including Riley Gaines’ suit against the NCAA, which partially advanced past motions to dismiss in September. Slusser is the leader of a lawsuit against the Mountain West and representatives of SJSU along with 10 other current and former women’s volleyball players.
SJSU athletic director Jeff Konya answered Fox News Digital in July on whether he is “satisfied” with how the university handled the controversy involving Flemming and Slusser in 2024.
“I think everybody acted in the best possible way they could, given the circumstances,” Konya said.
President Donald Trump’s Department of Education (ED) is in the midst of an investigation against the university for its handling. The department launched the investigation on Feb. 6, simultaneous with a similar probe against the University of Pennsylvania over its handling of the incident involving trans swimmer Lia Thomas in 2022.
ED came to a resolution with UPenn over that issue on July 1. U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon told Fox News Digital that day that the department’s investigation into SJSU “will continue.”
Slusser is eager to see the potential outcome of that investigation, and its impacts on the university officials that oversaw the situation she was involved in at San Jose State.
“Those people need to have some consequences,” Slusser said.
What about Blaire?
Blaire Fleming of the San Jose State Spartans looks on during the third set against the Air Force Falcons at Falcon Court at East Gym on Oct. 19, 2024 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Andrew Wevers/Getty Images)
Fleming has been rarely active on social media in the past year. The athlete posted an Instagram story appearing to celebrate graduation from SJSU in May, and has made two posts appearing to show exotic vacations.
In a New York Times Magazine profile piece in April, Fleming admitted to feeling “suicidal,” saying the season was “the darkest time in my life.”
Slusser told Fox News Digital of Fleming’s suicidal thoughts, “If that’s what [Fleming] was going through, that’s terrible.”
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The outlet also reported that Fleming often received hateful or threatening messages, cried “almost every night.”
Fleming is not named as a defendant in any of Slusser’s lawsuits. Fox News Digital has reached out to Fleming to request an interview and for a direct response to Slusser’s statements.
Fox News Digital has reached out to SJSU for a response.
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