This weekend, Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend Jordon Hudson made their first public appearance since the CBS Sunday Morning debacle.
Inside the ballroom of a Holiday Inn in Portland, Maine, Belichick watched Hudson compete in the Miss Maine USA pageant from the front row. Belichick, 73, wore a suit and tie during Saturday’s preliminary competition and Sunday’s finals. Hudson wore an emerald green bikini and towering gold heels (for the swimsuit round) and a sparkly royal blue gown, with high slit, low neckline, and towering silver heels (for the eveningwear round). She and 16 other competitors alternated walks across the reflective stage, where they hit three marks, made audience eye contact, and twirled. Alas, on this given Sunday, it was not to be.
The source of the CBS Sunday Morning controversy centered on a question, which Hudson didn’t want Belichick to answer, about the origin story of their relationship. (Hudson herself had posted about it on social media, and in a statement issued after the CBS interview, Belichick reportedly confirmed that the pair met on a flight in 2021.)
There was no risk of interview controversy at the Miss Maine USA pageant, though. Contestants were reportedly barred from speaking to media. During the 45-minute prelims on Saturday, the only words spoken by competitors were their names, ages, and hometowns, which each announced at the microphone. Hudson was representing Hancock, a town of about 2,500 people located approximately 20 miles north of Acadia National Park.
On Sunday, when Hudson was announced as one of five finalists, she made prayer hands and mouthed “thank you” to the audience. Later that evening, Sal Malafronte, a hairstylist and one of the hosts of the event, asked her how she was feeling.
“I’m feeling an immense amount of pride right now,” Hudson told him. “I’m hoping that anybody who’s watching this finds the strength to push through whatever it is that they’re going through and embodies that hate never wins,” she added, in an apparent reference to her own press situation.
In the two weeks since the CBS Sunday Morning interview aired, anonymous sources close to UNC have shared their growing concern about how Hudson could impact Belichick’s collegiate coaching career. A Belichick family member told sportswriter Pablo Torre, “There is deep worry for how detrimental Jordan can be, for not just North Carolina, but Bill’s legacy, reputation—everything he has built and worked for over decades.” Charles Barkley, a close friend to Belichick, said he was also “concerned with some of the stuff going on…. It’s not a good look right now.” (A representative for Belichick declined to comment.)
Each finalist pulled one question from a plexiglass box. Hudson’s was: “If you could relive one moment in your life, what would it be and why?”
The proud daughter of a fisherman, Hudson responded, “I would go back to the days where I was on my family’s fishing boat in Hancock, Maine. I think about this really often because there’s a mass exodus of fishermen that’s occurring in the rural areas of Maine, and I don’t want to see more 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 and advocate for these people so that they don’t have to think about these memories as a past moment.”
Though Hudson won the style award, she placed third overall, finishing after Shelby Howell of Bangor and Mara Carpenter of Cumberland County. On Monday, when reached for comment by VF, Carpenter said that Hudson “was a joy to be with all weekend, as were the other ladies.”
