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.”
Howell will go on to represent Maine in the Miss USA 2025 competition. Donald Trump, who owned Miss USA between 1996 and 2015, has taken credit for making “the heels higher and the bathing suits smaller.”
Hudson placed second at last year’s competition. She appears to be a client of KP Consulting, which “focuses on training and growing women across the country as they work to reach their pageant, personal, and professional goals.”
“Winning titles of this magnitude,” the Miss Maine USA website says, “catapults young women to instant fame where they simultaneously become role models.” A montage of Anne Baldridge’s year as Miss Maine 2024 showed her in glamorous photoshoots, posing for a photo with Gordon Ramsay, and attending a taping of Live With Kelly and Mark. In addition to these opportunities as one of Maine’s reigning beauty-pageant ambassadors—there is a separate Miss Maine competition, which is part of Miss America—the winner also receives modeling opportunities, coaching for the national Miss USA pageant, and “everything they need to be pampered the whole entire year,” Malafronte said.
This year’s local pageant, which had an in-person audience of about 300, had attracted outsized media interest because of Hudson and Belichick’s relationship. The only seeming acknowledgement of this was Malafronte’s insistence that media leave the ballroom Saturday before Miss Maine contestants mingled with family and friends. Afterward, contestants were whisked to a pizza and pajama party, where they recorded Mother’s Day tribute messages that were played on Sunday. Hudson was not featured in the reel. (Another contestant taped her message in silk Patriots pajamas.)
Hudson and Belichick were escorted around the Holiday Inn premises by a security guard, who rebuffed interview requests, and helped them exit the hotel after the pageant concluded.
To the cynical viewer, Miss Maine USA might seem like a moneymaking opportunity built on young women’s beauty pageant dreams. To stream the show, viewers can subscribe to a $29/month membership with PageantVision.TV or a $32.99/month membership with PageantsLive.com, a platform that also streams Miss Texas Elementary America, World Ambassador, and Miss Alabama Teen. News outlets may buy photos directly from the pageant for $3,000, according to The New York Times. The registration fee for applicants is $245, backstage hair and makeup is $250, and a separate entry into the “Miss Photogenic” competition is $30.
Sponsors for the event included the New England Hair Academy and the Maine Plastic Surgery Center.
The Miss Maine USA website solicited applicants with three questions: “Do you love glamor and all things elegant? Do you have a passion or platform you want to share with the world? Or maybe you just believe you’re all-around awesome?”
No prior pageant experience is required, and no performing talent was showcased. The pageant application asks for name, contact information, referral name, and a photo.
Hudson recently launched a new company, Trouble Cub Enterprises, of which, according to her LinkedIn profile, she is the CEO. According to People, she’s filed for 14 trademarks related to famous Belichick sayings, including “No Days Off” and “Do Your Job.” “If successful,” wrote The Cut last month, “the filings would allow for Belichik—and presumably Hudson—to profit directly off of any merchandise created with the phrases.”
Torre reported last week that Hudson was allegedly worried that the CBS Sunday Morning publicity would hurt her chances of winning Miss Maine. “She has been very concerned, to the point of explicitly telling Bill Belichick and others that this whole disaster—this whole episode at this point, honestly—is actively undermining her chances to win the Miss Maine competition.”
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