PORTLAND, Maine — Jordon Hudson stepped down from a riser and toward the middle of the Miss Maine USA pageant stage, where an emcee held a microphone and a question chosen at random. He began with small talk that happened to be on the minds of sports fans and tabloid rubberneckers across the country:
“How are you doing?”
A few feet from the stage, in the front row, sat Bill Belichick — six-time Super Bowl champion, North Carolina’s new head coach and, at 73, boyfriend of the 24-year-old Hudson. Their romance and professional partnership, combined with the public’s appetite for any crumb of information about both, had vaulted Hudson into prominence and infamy. Life in that spotlight, she’d recently written her former cheerleading team, had led to “a slow, exterior erasure of my strong, individual identity.”
But for at least a few more moments Sunday afternoon, inside a Holiday Inn ballroom, she was simply Miss Hancock, one of five finalists for Miss Maine. She took a deep breath.
“I’m feeling an immense amount of pride right now,” she said. “I’m hoping that anybody who’s watching this finds the strength to push through whatever it is that they’re going through. … ”
She paused, chuckled, caught her breathe and let out a deep exhale.
“… and embodies that hate never wins.”
With that, Hudson had indirectly provided her clearest description of how she views the microscope she finds herself under, with reporters digging into her personal life and tabloid photographers staking her out during pre-pageant hours.
A former college cheerleader and philosophy major raised in two small New England towns, Hudson became famous last year as Belichick’s girlfriend, after meeting him on a flight in 2021. Then, two weeks ago, Belichick appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” to promote his book “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football.” Described as a “constant presence” by reporter Tony Dokoupil, Hudson cut off a question about how she and Belichick met with the curt phrase that has since become fodder for late-night comedy: “We’re not talking about this.”
The moment went viral, and Hudson morphed from curiosity to a character shaping what is likely the final professional chapter of a football icon. Revered and feared for decades as a grouchy mastermind, Belichick has seen his reputation altered, at least momentarily, from a coach who once purged distractions to one engulfed by a frenzy of his own making.
Hudson and Belichick often appear in the public view. She posed with him at the NFL awards at the Super Bowl. She posted a Halloween photo on Instagram of Belichick dressed like a New England fisherman reeling Hudson out of the ocean while she wore a mermaid costume. Another post showed Belichick lying on beach sand, balancing Hudson on his feet. In his recently published book, Belichick referred to Hudson as his “idea mill and creative muse.”
“It’s just so odd,” said a UNC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the coach’s personal relationship. “And we just don’t know what’s coming. Those two decide what they’re going to do and they do it.”
Complicating matters for UNC and his book publisher, if not others, Belichick and Hudson’s relationship has expanded beyond tabloid grist into a professional partnership. Despite a dearth of experience in publicity, and to the puzzlement of many in Belichick’s orbit, she now serves as the de facto manager of his personal brand.
He asked UNC officials to include her on correspondence about media and promotion, according to emails obtained through public records requests, and she posted to social media internal communications between herself and Belichick’s book publisher. Public records name her as the manager of several companies with apparent ties to Belichick, including All BB Team LLC, Coach Show LLC and Chapel Bill LLC.
Hudson did not respond to The Washington Post’s requests for an interview or comment on the details included in this story. A spokesman for Belichick declined comment. But emails and interviews with people who have interacted with them show that she plays the same role in the coach’s life that she did during the CBS interview: always there, ready to act on his behalf.
After a podcast, “Pablo Torre Finds Out,” reported on Friday that Hudson had been banned from UNC’s football facility, the university issued a statement assuring the public that she is still welcome.
“She is very, very involved in the crafting of Bill’s projected image, everything you see on Instagram, all of that,” the UNC official said. “I know it’s hard to separate out this image of Bill Belichick and Bill Belichick the North Carolina football coach. Maybe it sounds silly for me to try to separate the two things. But really the football side of Bill and now the public side of Bill have become two different things, and she is in charge of the public side.”
Alongside her professional alignment with Belichick, Hudson has continued personal pursuits. On Sunday, after briefly sharing how she was doing, the emcee asked her a prescribed question that, given her previous two weeks, seemed a little on the nose.
“If you could re-live one moment in your life, what would it be and why?”
‘Local girl’ takes flight
Hudson’s answer had nothing to do with the misadventure on Sunday morning television.
“I go back to the days I was on my family’s fishing boat in Hancock, Maine,” she said, exhaling. “I think about this really often.”
She grew up in Hancock, a map-dot seacoast town in the state’s Downeast region. Her father, Heath, harvested mussels with a 33-foot dragger named Ms. Daisy, continuing a generations-long family fishing tradition. It didn’t make his family rich, but it made ends meet.
“It ends up not being enough,” Heath once told an interviewer for a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project, “but enough to make a comfortable living and keep the family healthy, fed, and sheltered.”
The Hudsons of Hancock, in Jordon’s public telling, were forced to move once their fishing grounds shrank on account of environmental protection laws. They resettled in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the tip of Cape Cod.
The plight of Maine fishermen remains an animating cause for Hudson. She spoke at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in February. Before the election in November, she posted a photo of herself in front of a yard sign for Republican congressional candidate Heather Sprague and the all-caps slogan, “Fishermen’s Lives Matter.”
“There’s a mass exodus of fishermen that’s occurring in the rural areas of Maine,” Hudson said on the pageant stage. “I don’t want to see more fishermen displaced. As your next Miss Maine USA, I would make it a point to go into the communities, to go to the legislature, to go into the government to advocate for these people, so they don’t have to think of these memories as a past moment.”
In high school, Hudson worked as a Henna artist and then a hairdresser at West End Salon & Spa. She tattooed customers outside on Commercial Street in Provincetown, sometimes wearing a sash earned at a beauty pageant. “That’s always good for business,” owner Dougie Freeman said.
Over 42 years at West End, Freeman has served several celebrity clients and employed a handful of hairdressers who went on to minor reality-TV level fame. He recognized the same star quality in Hudson. “When I hired her, I told her, ‘You’re one of the most beautiful young women I’ve ever seen,’ ” Freeman said. He found her ambitious, driven and multitalented, he said.
Hudson was a star cheerleader at Nauset Regional High, and in college at Bridgewater State she competed on the 2021 Division III National Cheerleaders Association national championship cheerleading squad.
Hudson met Belichick on a flight from Massachusetts to Florida in February 2021, when she was a sophomore in college, Hudson detailed on social media. They struck up a conversation about the textbook — “Deductive Logic” — she was reading. Belichick signed the book, “Thanks for giving me a course on logic! Safe travels!”
Belichick has three children — one of whom, Stephen, serves as UNC’s defensive coordinator — from his marriage, which ended in 2006. He separated from his girlfriend of 16 years, Linda Holliday, in 2023, and reportedly started dating Hudson that year.
As their relationship grew more serious, Hudson gave up training at her gym in Hingham, Massachusetts, according to a letter, obtained by The Post, that she wrote to her team last year.
She opened the letter by citing “the philosophy of Team, Teammate, Self,” which she said is used “in my office and in my household.” Though she didn’t attribute it to Belichick, it’s a mantra he adapted from the U.S. Naval Academy.
“I hope you can all understand that my absences were symptomatic of my commitment to put the needs of my other ‘team(s)’ above my own need for recreation,” she wrote. “Selfishly, I would have preferred to be in the gym, with all of you, doing what I love: cheerleading.”
She also apologized for “all of the ‘baggage’ that comes with having me around; from the interlopers at practice, to the subsequent media exploitation, to the lack of dependability.”
“During this time,” she added, “I have faced a slow, exterior erasure of my strong, individual identity. I can’t thank you [enough] for helping keep that in tact [sic] by embracing me, for me. It is so difficult for me to give up my time with you, because I feel like I am giving up a part of myself in the process.”
Hudson’s family’s move to Provincetown, Freeman said, may have shaped an open-mindedness in her. Originally founded as a Portuguese fishing village, Provincetown exists as a summer playground for billionaires and a vacation haven for the LGBTQ community. “It’s one of the most liberal places in the world,” Freeman said. “Anything goes here.” Hudson’s mother, Lee, manages a popular sex boutique in Provincetown.
“I believe the time she spent in Provincetown showed her and reaffirmed her belief that you should be able to love anybody you want as long as it’s legal,” Freeman said. “I will defend that. It’s an alternative relationship, and I feel as though those relationships should be embraced.”
Owing to that ethos, perhaps, the talk about Hudson among locals veers more toward pride than judgment — “local girl does very well,” Freeman said.
“I understand Jordon is the toast of Nantucket society over there,” Freeman said. “She got sand in her shoes, you know what I mean? She loves to be by the water. She’s living a dream life in many ways. I expect her to be First Lady someday.”
A moment as Miss Hancock
She might have settled for Miss Maine. Hudson’s presence brought outsize attention to a local pageant over the weekend, but she was “very easy to deal with,” said Laurie Clemente, the co-founder of the organization that ran the event. “She was really looking out for us, too, knowing what was going to be following her into this building.”
“I can imagine as a young woman, it was a lot of pressure on her,” Clemente added. “The media really took her story and ran with it. Part of me feels it was unfair for her to have to come into this with that much controversy surrounding her. But she did an amazing job. She handled it with grace.”
Though interest in Hudson spiked with her “CBS Sunday Morning” appearance, the promotion of Belichick’s book had faced Hudson-inspired headwinds even before the episode aired.
On April 10, Belichick wrote an email to publicists at Simon & Schuster, Hudson, his former Patriots administrative assistant and others expressing his displeasure at the presentation of an upcoming essay/excerpt to be published in the Wall Street Journal.
One person who worked with Belichick and Hudson on publicity for the book described their approach as difficult, from confusion over how excerpts would be placed to what kinds of routine questions reporters might ask on a media tour. “They are insanely suspicious of media,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect working relationships. “It’s almost Trumpian.”
The contents of the email are known because on April 29, days after the essay ran in the Journal, Hudson posted it to her Instagram account set to Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” The publicizing of internal communications incensed people at Simon & Schuster, the person familiar with the dynamic said.
As the May 6 book release approached, promotion slowed to nothing. Pre-sales underperformed, the person said. The clip of Hudson attempting to control a puff-piece interview had overshadowed the contents, if not the existence, of Belichick’s book.
“She’s not good at what she’s trying to do,” the person said. “And how could she be? She’s 24.”
Hudson aside, Belichick’s hiring at North Carolina, after six Super Bowl titles in New England, promised to be a well-covered event that would require a hands on communications approach. The list of media requests that came in was extensive, emails to UNC show. CBS’s 60 Minutes pushed hard for a segment that UNC ultimately passed on. ESPN’s Wright Thompson, who’s written some of ESPN’s most notable profiles in recent years, asked to spend time with Belichick, adding, “Coach K would be happy to vouch for me to y’all.” Mike Krzyzewski, the legendary Duke coach himself, wanted him on his Sirius XM show. The Athletic pitched spending a day with him on the recruiting trail. NBC News offered a sit-down with Hallie Jackson, as did Michael Strahan at “Good Morning America,” which will air an interview this week. People magazine asked for photos of the couple.
Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, wrote to Athletic Director Bubba Cunningham, offering his communications expertise ahead of Belichick’s introduction. “You just know Bill Belichick is a very newsworthy guy,” Fleischer said in an interview.
Fleischer now shakes his head over the public relations debacle the story has become in the wake of the “CBS Sunday Morning” interview. He has a Power Point presentation that he shows his sports and corporate clients, filled with best practices and do’s and don’ts for how to answer questions. “As soon as this hit I said, ‘We need to add this to tips and techniques for what not to do,’” he said.
This week, after months of deliberations, UNC hired Brandon Faber, a former NFL communications staffers, to beef up its football media relations office. He will be Director of NIL Strategy and Player Brand Development.
Hudson’s latest public appearance ended Sunday afternoon. In her “Hancock” sash and a sparkling purple gown, Hudson listened as the emcee declared the order of finish. When she was announced as second runner-up, behind winner Miss Bangor and Miss Cumberland County, Hudson wore a thin smile of disappointment. She blew a kiss to the crowd, waved her arm and mouthed, “Thank you.”
Shortly after the reigning Miss Maine pinned a crown to Miss Bangor’s hair, Hudson stepped away from the celebration. She walked off the stage and slipped out a side door, exiting public view, if only for a moment.
Barry Svrluga contributed to this report.
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