Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick posed for a photo backstage at the 14th Annual NFL Honors at Saenger Theatre on Feb. 6 in New Orleans.
Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick posed for a photo backstage at the 14th Annual NFL Honors at Saenger Theatre on Feb. 6 in New Orleans.Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images
The most successful coach in NFL history is in a Holiday Inn ballroom in Portland, Maine. The lights are low and Devon Cole’s “Play House” is pumping as two dozen young women, many of them teenagers in tiny dresses, are dancing on a stage.
In spite of his grimace, familiar to anyone who watched him stalk the Patriots sideline for two-plus decades, Bill Belichick is not indifferent to the hijinks in front of him. He’s here — sitting in the front row, no less — to support his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, a chestnut-haired former cheerleader competing, again, for the Miss Maine USA crown. At the end of the opening number, Hudson winks in Belichick’s direction and, turning on her heel, struts confidently off stage to change into a bikini.
It’s a head-scratching scene — one of many since Belichick, 73, got involved with a woman who is nearly a half-century younger. The May-December melodrama is not only the subject of intense media interest — Hudson has been tracked by paparazzi for months — but it’s raised questions about Belichick’s judgment and the effect the relationship could have on his new job at the University of North Carolina, where he signed a $30 million guaranteed contract to turn around the school’s moribund football program.
“Should I be worried about Belichick and this girlfriend?” Bill Simmons fretted on his eponymous podcast. “For me, Belichick is like a family member. He’s like my uncle. …I’m just scared for him.”
But many are just as mystified by Hudson, whose father and grandfather harvested mussels and seaweed off the Maine coast until their business went bankrupt. She is clearly relishing the spotlight and the attendant benefits of her boyfriend’s fame and fortune. (Clutching Belichick at the NFL Honors ceremony in February, she was impossible to ignore in a sequined Sherri Hill bralette.) Observers are baffled how Hudson, whom Belichick has called his “creative muse,” has managed to seize such an outsized role in the life of the legendary coach.
In just the past few weeks, she interrupted a CBS interview because she didn’t like a question about how the couple met. (“We’re not talking about this,” Hudson decreed.) And a planned HBO documentary about Belichick’s inaugural season at UNC was scuttled after she insisted on being heavily involved. The school last week denied a report that it had banned Hudson from the football team‘s training facility. “While Jordon Hudson is not an employee at the University of Carolina athletics, she is welcome to the Carolina football facilities,” the school said in a statement. (Striding across the field in a long coat, matching mini skirt, and white boots with a stiletto heel, Hudson was notably present at the Tar Heels’ spring scrimmage several weeks ago.)
North Carolina Tar Heels football head coach Bill Belichick and his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, looked on during the first half of the game between the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Duke Blue Devils on March 8 in Chapel Hill, N.C.
North Carolina Tar Heels football head coach Bill Belichick and his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, looked on during the first half of the game between the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Duke Blue Devils on March 8 in Chapel Hill, N.C.Jared C. Tilton/Getty
“This frankly isn’t the circus I expected Bill to bring to town,” a Tar Heels fan posted on a Reddit forum popular with UNC alums.
Publicly, Hudson serves several functions: She is Belichick’s unofficial manager/publicist; his conspicuous plus-one at events, including a Thanksgiving gathering hosted by President Trump at Mar-a-Lago; and the coach’s playful sidekick on social media. In one Instagram post, Hudson is a petite mermaid fished from the sea by Belichick, who’s dressed like the logo on a can of chowder. But she’s hustling behind the scenes, too.
Over the past three years, according to records on file at the secretary of state’s office, Hudson has formed more than a half-dozen limited liability companies, including Chapel Bill, Coach Show, All BB Team, Trouble Cub Enterprises, Roosevelt Glam, and Gingerbread Apartments. And a deeds search in Suffolk and Barnstable counties reveals that during the same period she purchased several residential properties, including multifamily buildings in Dorchester and Roxbury and a two-bedroom house in Harwich, which is listed as her primary residence. (The real estate acquisitions, worth about $8 million, were first reported by The Daily Mail, whose coverage of the Belichick-Hudson liaison has been particularly zealous.)
Despite the extraordinary hubbub surrounding their improbable union — Hudson was even approached this week about appearing on “Dancing with the Stars” — the couple’s origin story remains opaque. They’ve been Instagram official since October 2024, but Hudson has said on social media they first met in February 2021 — she would have been 19 — on a flight to Florida. The two started chatting, the story goes, about a textbook Hudson was reading, "Deductive Logic." (She was a student then at Bridgewater State University, where she pledged at Phi Sigma Tau, a sorority for students interested in philosophy.) Hudson has since posted a photo of Belichick’s inscription in her book that day: “Jordon, Thanks for giving me a course on logic! Safe travels! Bill Belichick SB 36, 38, 39, 49, 51, 53 Champions.”
Hudson did not respond to an interview request, nor did former classmates or fellow cheerleaders, members of her family, or Joshua Zuckerman, the 65-year-old onetime healthcare executive from Brewster whom she dated on and off before getting together with Belichick. (“She is wise beyond her years,” Zuckerman told TMZ a year ago, “much more than any 20-something I’ve ever met in my life.”) Belichick also did not respond to an interview request.
Dr. Monica O’Neal, a clinical psychologist in Boston who specializes in relationships, believes the intensity of public opinion about the pair is related to their significant age difference, but also to Hudson’s demeanor and the prominent role she seemingly plays in Belichick’s career.
“I don’t know how much women care about this story. It seems like the bigger sense of disgust, disappointment, or ‘what the heck is going on’ is coming from men,” O’Neal said. “It’s because (Hudson) doesn’t fit the mold of a trophy wife who’ll just go along, silently. She’s so brazen, so outspoken, that men are questioning not just (Belichick’s) judgment, but his cognitive function.”
Hudson, who’s called Belichick her “twin flame” on Instagram, was born in April 2001 — 10 months before her beau coached the Patriots to the franchise’s first Super Bowl win in February 2002. She grew up in Hancock, Maine, a Downeast fishing village where her parents, Lee and Heath Hudson, owned Frenchmans Bay Fisheries. Her mom, Lee, managed the books while her dad trawled the mussel beds in Taunton Bay on his 33-foot boat “Miss Daisy.” But the company founded by Hudson’s grandfather ran aground in the late aughts after the state imposed a temporary ban on dragging in Taunton Bay.
Jordon Hudson attended the Sports Illustrated Super Bowl party on Feb. 8 in New Orleans with a "Save Maine Fishermen" bag.
Jordon Hudson attended the Sports Illustrated Super Bowl party on Feb. 8 in New Orleans with a "Save Maine Fishermen" bag.Amy Harris/Amy Harris/Invision/AP
It was a bleak — and, it seems, formative — time for Hudson. A 2007 profile of her parents by the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies focused on the family’s struggle to survive the new fishing restrictions: “[Lee] gets by with gifts from the ‘food fairy,’ her term for the neighbors, friends and family who bring [the Hudsons] food. Lee tries her best to appear confident and cheerful. She says things are ‘peachy keen and wonderful ... but in real life we’re going bankrupt and about to lose everything.’”
Hudson is now leveraging her celebrity — she has 107,000 followers on Instagram — to promote Maine’s fishing industry. She endorsed former commercial fisherman Heather Sprague for a seat in the Maine House. (A strident MAGA Republican, Sprague lost the race.) Hudson also showed up at the Maine Fishermen’s Forum in March, posing for a photo with Senator Susan Collins, and pledged at last weekend’s pageant to “go to the Legislature, go into the government” to advocate for fishermen if she became Miss Maine USA 2025.
“There’s a mass exodus of fishermen that’s occurring in the rural areas of Maine and I don’t want to see more fishermen displaced,” Hudson said, posed in a purple sequined gown.
Left: Jordon Hudson from the Bridgewater State University cheerleading website 2020-2021. Right: Jordon Hudson, class of 2019, pictured in the 2018 Nauset Tides year book from Nauset Regional High School.
Left: Jordon Hudson from the Bridgewater State University cheerleading website 2020-2021. Right: Jordon Hudson, class of 2019, pictured in the 2018 Nauset Tides year book from Nauset Regional High School.
Her family was among those who left Maine. When Frenchmans Bay Fisheries collapsed, Hudson’s mother moved with her four children to Provincetown, where she is the business manager of the Toys of Eros sex shop. Residents say Lee Hudson is well liked in town and occasionally represents the store’s owner at public meetings, including an emergency session of the Provincetown Board of Health in 2017 to address concerns about an injectable erectile dysfunction drug being administered at Toys of Eros during Bear Week. (She told the board the injections would stop.) Amid all the scrutiny of her daughter, Lee Hudson has shunned the media, hanging up on reporters and deleting her LinkedIn profile. But she was often at her daughter’s side during the two-day pageant in Portland.
At Nauset High School, Hudson was a flier on the co-ed cheerleading team; classmates recall her as a “cheerful,” if unremarkable student. She went on to attend Bridgewater State, where she was on a cheerleading squad that won two titles at the 2021 National Cheerleaders Association Collegiate Cheer and Dance Championships. Although Hudson’s LinkedIn profile says she received a BA in philosophy from BSU, the school’s registrar has no record of her getting a degree. Hudson later received a cosmetology certificate from The New England Hair Academy in Malden.
Speculation that she and Belichick may be engaged was sparked when Hudson arrived at a recent luncheon at the American Museum of Natural History in New York flashing a large diamond ring. Belichick has been married once and has three adult children, two of whom — Steve and Brian — work for their father at UNC. His marriage to Debby Clarke, whom he met when both were students at Wesleyan, ended in 2006 amid a frenzy of tabloid stories involving a New York Giants receptionist whose husband claimed in court documents that Belichick began a long-term affair with his wife while he was the Giants’ defensive coordinator in the 1980s. Between 2007-2023, Belichick was in a relationship with Linda Holliday, who trolled her ex after they split by dressing up for Halloween as Uma Thurman’s character in the movie “Kill Bill.”
It’s not clear what effect Hudson’s notoriety had on the outcome of this year’s Miss Maine USA pageant — after being runner-up in 2024, she finished third in a field of 17 this time — but it did earn her the respect of other contestants, including Isabelle St. Cyr, the pageant’s first transgender participant.
Most years, St. Cyr, who lives with her boyfriend on a farm in the small Piscataquis County town of Monson, would have been the primary object of curiosity at the pageant. But Hudson’s participation changed that.
“I hadn‘t paid much attention to the stories about her,” St. Cyr said. “But Jordon and I had some good conversations backstage about how the media can be unkind.”
Jordon Hudson, second from left, posed on stage after the Miss Maine USA pageant in Portland on May 11. She took third place.
Jordon Hudson, second from left, posed on stage after the Miss Maine USA pageant in Portland on May 11. She took third place.Portland Press Herald/Portland Press Herald via Getty
Mark Shanahan can be reached at mark.shanahan@globe.com. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.