“Kissy face, kissy face sent to your phone, but I’m trying to kiss your lips for real (uh-huh, uh-huh),” Rosé croons as 24-year-old Jordon Hudson struts down the runway. She’s wearing an emerald-green bikini, a gold bracelet snaking around her bicep.
Hudson flashes a confident grin at the audience, tosses her hair, and turns on her heel to head offstage — but not before winking at her boyfriend, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He’s seated in the front row next to his bodyguard, a Navy veteran who goes by “Dutch” and resembles a young, head-shaven John Corbett. Belichick doesn’t applaud. He doesn’t cheer. He just sits there directly in Hudson’s eyeline, chewing gum, looking very much as he did when the Packers beat the Patriots 27-24 on a field goal during overtime.
Hudson — and, to some extent, Belichick, and to a much lesser extent, Dutch — is in a strange position. She’s in the State of Maine Grand Ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn by the Bay competing for the title of Miss Maine USA, a subsidiary of the Miss USA beauty pageant. Hudson’s been on the pageant circuit for years, and last year, her first competing for Miss Maine, she was crowned first runner-up. This time around, however, is different. Hudson isn’t just Miss Hancock, the tiny Maine town where she was born. Thanks to her relationship with Belichick, she’s the star of the show.
A few weeks ago, there would have been minimal media interest in a small pageant held in a Holiday Inn conference room. Other than Hudson, the most noteworthy contestant was Isabelle St. Cyr, a statuesque blonde 24-year-old who made local news for being the first trans contestant in Miss Maine history. But over the past month, Hudson has been besieged by negative media attention. She made headlines after a Belichick CBS News appearance with Tony Dokoupil, where she sat in on the interview and repeatedly stepped in to decline to answer questions. And after the sports podcaster Pablo Torre reported that she had become so involved in Belichick’s career at UNC (where he’s coached since leaving the Patriots) that the university barred her from campus (which UNC has denied), reporters flocked to the pageant, camping out in the lobby to catch a glimpse of Hudson.
The pageant was a two-day event, starting with preliminaries on Saturday that included a private interview with the judges, an evening-gown competition, and a swimsuit competition. Finals, where the 17 competitors were whittled down to the final five, took place on Sunday; save for a brief Q&A with the top-five contestants, the show was virtually identical to the prelims, from the skintight dresses the contestants wore to the music selection during the swimsuit portion. (“Espresso,” by Sabrina Carpenter, played not once but twice during both shows.)
“We expected a few reporters, but nothing like all these big cameras,” the parents of a first-time pageant contestant said. “Whatever.” Others were similarly restrained in showing their annoyance. “All the girls know each other in this community,” the boyfriend of another contestant put it. “It can be hard when someone comes in and steals the show.”
Still, Hudson handled the mêlée with grace, waving and smiling at reporters as she strolled through the lobby, wearing an ombré blue off-the-shoulder sheath. During an interview segment on the second night of the pageant, she made a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the attention. “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 and embody that hate never wins.” (She, like all the other contestants, declined to speak with any media.)
The Clemente Organization, which puts on the pageant, however, seemed less equipped to handle it. It banned reporters from taking photos or video during the show and prohibited them from speaking to anyone affiliated with the event. “Members of the press, please LEAVE so the contestants can have some PRIVACY,” emcee Sal Malafronte shouted at the end of the first night’s preliminaries as Clemente reps yanked stragglers from the room. “We’ve never heard them tell the press to get out before,” one mom of a former Miss Teen USA competitor told me, laughing.
The interest wasn’t surprising. As the coach with the most Super Bowl wins in NFL history, Belichick is a vaunted figure in Maine, and the nearly 50-year age difference between him and Hudson, whom he met on a plane when she asked him to sign her philosophy textbook, was bound to attract scrutiny. “They’re literally like royals,” said one Patriots fan, who happened to be in town for her son’s graduation and was trying to spot Belichick. Hudson briefly considered dropping out of the pageant, the Daily Mail reported, but she clearly thought better of it.
Following her near victory last year, Hudson seemed determined to redeem herself. “She wants to win,” a source familiar with the relationship said, comparing her drive to that of the famously competitive Belichick. Some attendees expected him not to show up, but he wanted to support his girlfriend, and following the fallout from the UNC story, it likely would have “looked worse” if he didn’t go, the source speculated.
Throughout the pageant weekend, Hudson mostly traveled solo or accompanied by Dutch, arriving at a “pizza and pajama party” clad in a floor-length, feather-trimmed purple robe. (She seems to have been quite busy: A source told me Hudson was not involved in Miss Maine preliminary activities, like a Valentine’s Day volunteer event, and during the finals she was the only contestant to not record a Mother’s Day message for her mom.) “All the girls were so worried about her,” one source told the New York Post. “They’re all friends and she’s been so quiet all week.”
But Hudson put on a solid performance during the first night of preliminaries and finals the next day. In an introductory dance number, she shimmied, clapped, and stomped at the edge of the stage. Though she stumbled slightly during the evening-gown competition, she looked regal in a sparkly purple dress. In the past, she’s chosen the “rich indigo-ish-royal-purple,” she wrote on Instagram, because it’s the color of the oyster bushel bags she grew up surrounded by (her father was a mussel dragger). She’d carry them around as if they were purses and made them into dresses for her Polly Pockets.
In the interview portion, Hudson promoted her platform of fishermen’s rights, which she’s always been vocal about. When asked what childhood moment she would want to return to, she talked about being on her family’s fishing boat in Hancock. “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 fishermen displaced,” she said. “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.”
Not everyone was charmed by her performance. “I don’t think she was anything special,” Julie Rose, a former competitor on the Massachusetts pageant circuit, told me. “She was low-energy. I wouldn’t look twice at her if she wasn’t Bill Belichick’s girlfriend.” Like many other attendees I spoke to, Rose thought the real front-runner was Mara Carpenter, a vivacious, willowy Cumberland County native and longtime pageant contestant.
Nonetheless, Hudson had a strong cheering section: In addition to Belichick, her father Heath was there for the finals, as was her friend Miss Massachusetts USA Melissa Sapini, who warmly greeted Belichick in the front row. After the finals, Laurie Clemente, the co-founder of the Clemente Organization, came onstage to embrace her.
The consensus among the beauty-pageant crowd seemed to be that there were simply too many “distractions,” as another source put it, for Hudson to win. After lengthy deliberations and a four-way tie delayed the final decision — the emcees awkwardly improvised a Miss USA trivia game to stall for time — Hudson made it into the top five. But she ultimately nabbed third place, with Carpenter winning first runner-up and Miss Bangor, a statuesque, deeply tanned blonde named Shelby Howell, claiming the Miss Maine USA title. “I wasn’t surprised she was third place,” the mother of a former contestant told me. “I think all the press really hurt her.”
Hudson appeared to take her loss in stride: Though the pageant organizer was seen comforting her after the show, she quietly snuck out with Belichick through a side exit just moments later. Most of the attendees I spoke with afterward seemed more critical of Howell’s win as a newcomer than of whatever impact Hudson would have had on the results.
“Obviously, there was outside media attention, but I don’t think we let that rattle us,” Kwani Lunis, one of the five pageant judges and a reporter for NBC 10 Boston, told me. The Clemente Organization “approached it the same way that they have done in the past and were able to ignore the outside noise.”
But as the pageant organizers quietly packed up Miss Maine USA promotional posters, the press loaded up their cameras, and the representatives for a wastewater management convention filtered into the Holiday Inn lobby, the reputation of the New England royals still hung over the event.
“Wait, Bill Belichick was here?” I overheard one of the attendees say. “Why was he competing in a beauty pageant?”