What Bill Belichick’s relationship tells us
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In the spring of 2024, I was watching the roast of Tom Brady on Netflix and people kept making jokes about Bill Belichick's relationship. I laughed, though I wasn't quite sure I got it. But now I know why you were so obsessed with Foxborough High School. You were scouting your new girlfriend. About a month later, 73-year-old Bill's relationship with 24-year-old Jordan Hudson became public and it seems like the country's been obsessed with it ever since. ♪

There are interviews. Not talking about this. Investigations. When did she get control over Bill Belichick's new media empire? Articles, plural, in the New York Times. Why do we care about these people? You care because he's Bill Belichick and you care about whoever he's with. And number two, you should care because she's 24 years old and a lot of people are very scared of her. What Bill Belichick's relationship tells us about us on Today Exploined.

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You're listening to Today Explained. Jason P. Frank writes about things like theater, comedy, music at Vulture. So the first thing we asked him was if he was the right person to ask about Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson. Totally. No, I actually am the right person to ask this because I grew up in New Hampshire. Perfect. And Bill Belichick famously was the coach of the New England Patriots. I'm not a scientist.

It's football time, fellas. Let's get into it. He won eight Super Bowls. Patriots win the Super Bowl! I don't remember a time when I didn't know who Bill Belichick was. And that's not because I love football. That's not because I follow the Patriots religiously. That's because I was, like, gifted a Patriots jersey in the hospital, basically. Like, that's just what happens in New England. That's how it worked.

Bill Belichick is an icon to that area, and I think he's an icon to the entire country because the Patriots were so, so successful under him. He created Tom Brady. Tom Brady doesn't exist without Bill Belichick.

And before we get into who Bill Belichick happens to be dating, what did we know about his personality in this wildly successful era that the New England Patriots had? Yeah, Bill Belichick sucks, man. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

He was like always wearing, you know, ratty clothing, you know, making millions and millions of dollars a year and wearing, you know, sweatshirts that were cut off and had rips in them. Bill Belichick's wardrobe is getting some attention on social media today. He talked with reporters while sporting a well-worn top of some sort. Maybe it's not even really a top anymore. It does look very comfortable.

And he refused to talk to the media. Like, he always considered media the enemy in a really, really vicious way, which made him always...

feel very standoffish because the only time that you perceived him was through the media you want to talk about the game somewhere i could get into a post-game analysis here i mean really i've had enough of that i could just zero actually a cup of the game plan you can send it over to kansas city if you'd go i mean it might be easier for all of us coined a lot of catch phrases that were all very like do the work look fellas it's just about doing our job if you've ever heard no days off that's a bill belichick original no day

And it was really, really successful. But the vibe is bad. The vibe's bad. Very controlling. Now he's about to start coaching at UNC. Okay. Who is his 24-year-old girlfriend? Who is Jordan Hudson? Jordan Hudson spelled O-N. Jordan is spelled with an O-N, which is wrong. I mean, if nothing else, I'm scared of that. Yeah, yeah. That's a really, that's, I was poor decision-making, but she didn't make that decision. We can't blame her for that.

She's 50 years younger than him. She's a beauty pageant contestant and a former college cheerleader. She's kind of the head of his public relations team, although whether or not that is a true thing or just functionally the case is a little bit unclear. And she is working the media circuit is what she's doing. She's a fascinating personality. No one really...

can get a real handle on her. She hasn't done a real, real media interview since she started dating him. And yet she's been a constant presence in everything that's been going on in his life. Okay. And before we get to that constant presence, how did these two lovebirds meet? So what they say is that they met on a plane. She was reading a college textbook.

He struck up a conversation with her about that college textbook, which he was apparently really interested in. He signed the textbook. Wait, he signed a textbook that like he didn't write? He just signed a random book? No, no, no. He just signed her textbook. Yes. Yeah. Okay. She's from Maine. So it is totally possible that she knows who this guy, like really knew who this guy was, like wanted to talk to him anyway before she even realized that Grandpa wanted to date her.

And Grandpa did indeed start dating her. Yeah, Grandpa and Jordan are officially dating.

Tell us what happened more recently. Where do we get this idea that Jordan Hudson is sort of a stakeholder in the Bill Belichick experience? There's two things that happened. Number one, sports fans started hearing about it because there started being reporting. The Athletic was reporting on her on April 15th. They reported some stuff about how she was really involved with the coaching at UNC. But that's kind of inside baseball-y, inside football-y.

They also reported that she was filing for trademarks.

for his phrases, which were already coined by the Patriots. So he said them, but they're trademarked by the Patriots. So he can't really like double trademark. So she started trademarking them with parentheses Bill's version after them, like Taylor's version, like no days off Bill's version. So that's like a thing that's happening in the background. But then on April 27th, CBS Sunday Morning interviews Bill Belichick about his memoir. It like pretty clearly was supposed to be kind of a pretty easy interview, not a

I mean, all up to CBS Sunday morning. But like if you want to go and do like a pleasant enough interview, they are down for a pleasant interview. Right. But Bill Belichick and Jordan Hudson together, like they're not here for a pleasant interview because if you ask them anything other than like, what was it like to write the memoir that you probably had ghostwritten, let's be honest, then they're mad.

So, Tony DeCople is interviewing Bill Belichick, and then DeCople asks him very, very basic questions about Jordan Hudson. How did you guys meet? Which he refuses to answer, and then Hudson from offscreen goes, I'm not talking about this. No? No. But that's the moment that the Jordan Hudson figure kind of blows up. There's also a voiceover from DeCople that says, Jordan was a constant presence during our interview. Make sure.

How do people respond to this CBS Sunday morning interview? Negatively. We got to talk about Bill Belichick. You ripped him. Okay. I mean, I thought it was elder abuse. TMZ claims they spoke to sources who said Hudson was a nightmare on the set. Is she dating Bill Belichick because she really cares about him? Or is she potentially...

A gold digger. This is where it really starts to blow up and where she starts to be known as like kind of scary, which I would say is a loaded word and potentially misogynistic, right? Like, do I think that Bill Belichick is entirely in, like, is she puppeteering Bill Belichick to get whatever she wants? I don't know about that. Is she involved in places that she probably should not be based on the fact that she has no experience in publicity for football? Yes. Yeah.

Like, that's kind of undoubtedly true. She is doing people's jobs for them. But is she scary? Is she all-controlling? This is where, like, the vibe goes a little bit like, she's a witch, she's a succubus, kill her, kill her. Like, you see the Salem witch trials start to happen a little bit because, like, she's a weird girl doing weird things but isn't, like, a monster. It's an interesting dynamic where, like, she is being...

Potentially inappropriate, particularly in the Sunday morning interview. She also reporting comes out that she prevented Hard Knocks, which is a documentary series about football teams, was planning on doing a series about Belichick's first season at UNC. And she blocks that from happening so that she's definitely in places where she maybe shouldn't be. And also people start reacting to her with layers of misogyny. Right. You started off this conversation by saying, like, Bill Belichick famously said,

Yeah, basically. I know, and it's interesting because normally, I feel like the social media stereotype is that social media perceives May-December relationships as always abuse toward the younger person, right? So you would think that,

People would be like, "Protect Jordan Hudson!" And that is not what's happening. Instead, it feels like she is being demonized. When I think that a more likely situation is that they're both in on this.

Jason with an O has been writing about Jordan with an O over at Vulture with some U's. After a word from our sponsors, why one of the ways Jordan Hudson's being demonized is particularly pathetic. This is Today Explained.

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Sean Ramos from here with our colleague Constance Grady, who wrote about one specific form of Jordan Hudson's demonization that she saw. People were calling her a gold digger. And it's a little bit of a retro term. It kind of surprised me when I saw people using it in relation to her because she's

It makes me feel like I'm in a time machine. I haven't really heard people using the word gold digger in a non-Kanye West context in probably like 10, 20 years.

But they are using it a lot about Jordan Hudson with two O's. As she's known by her friends. Well, let's just put calling Jordan a gold digger on hold for a second, because I want to know where this term came from and where it eventually went, because it sounds like

It had a moment and then that moment passed. When did we start calling people a gold digger in this country or another one? Yeah. So the phrase gold digger in its originalist purist sense as just like a person literally taking gold out of the ground emerges in the 1830s and 40s during the gold rush period.

It starts to take on this other sense of being a person who is using a romantic partner for money, usually a woman using a man for money. At the beginning of the 20th century, we first start seeing it around like 1915 or so. The most famous gold digger so-called of that era was this showgirl named Peggy Hopkins-Joyce.

Who low-key is kind of iconic. Oh. And I'm a little obsessed with her now. She got married six different times, mostly to millionaires and also divorced from all of them. On one of her wedding nights, she locked herself into the bathroom and refused to come out until her husband wrote her a check for 500 grand. Did

Did it work? Yeah, he did it. And then when she divorced him, he countersued and said she only married him to defraud him. She doesn't sound like a gold digger. She sounds like a genius. Honestly, yes. What an icon. Okay, so Peggy was one of the first people to be labeled a gold digger. And then I assume it's just thrown around a lot over the decades because when I was growing up in the 90s, I remember...

probably reading this term in like magazines to refer to one Anna Nicole Smith. Would you say you loved him? I loved him very much. Now without being in love, right? I mean, you weren't physically... I wasn't physically, oh my God, you hot, hot body, you know, like that. It was just...

Oh, yes. Anna Nicole Smith, who was labeled a gold digger after she got married to J. Howard Marshall II, incredible billionaire name. He was an oil tycoon.

What's kind of interesting about Anna Nicole Smith is after her death in 2007, she's kind of become one of the women of the 90s and 2000s that we have all kind of collectively agreed we mistreated at the time. And one of the ways that we have sort of collectively agreed we mistreated her is by calling her a gold digger. Because what? Like, we shouldn't be judging people for getting married for whatever the reason might be? No.

That there's a sense that we don't really know what was going on in that marriage. It didn't seem to be unaffectionate or as though both parties didn't know what they were getting out of it in a pretty clear sense.

So the question becomes, right, why did we put all the blame on Anna Nicole Smith and not on Marshall? Right. Like no one even knows his name. Absolutely. Like if I said Anna Nicole Smith's husband, who on earth could name J. Howard Marshall II?

Right. Yeah. But the fact of their marriage became this scandal that really tarred her name for the rest of her very short and tragic life. But you did mention earlier, Constance, that eventually, you know, apart from Kanye's anthem, we see.

stopped using this term as much? Yeah. So as many listeners will recall, the 2010s were a pretty tumultuous decade in terms of

our pop cultural relationships to gender and power dynamics and lots of progressive ideas getting mainstreamed in ways that they hadn't been before. And a lot of these sort of

I don't even want to say lightly, these pretty misogynistic terms like gold digger kind of start to fade out of common usage and you start to see people more interested in exploring the power dynamics in relationships that they might have initially 10 years earlier been willing to write off as just like a gold digger and a sap.

Do we come up with nicer ways of describing a relationship in which someone's maybe looking for financial security? I mean, certainly we have the expression sugar baby, sugar daddy. Oh, yeah. Sweet. And I think the big thing distinguishing that from a gold digger is the implication that it's fully consensual. Everyone's going in there with their eyes open.

Whereas Gold Digger, by implication, is manipulating. They are telling their mark that they're totally in love and that's why they're there. Okay, so we've got Sugar Baby and Sugar Daddy and yet the discourse around one Jordan Hudson, just to bring this back to the subject at hand, does not seem to be so sweet. Not so sweet, not so much. People seem really off-put by the dynamic relationship

But at the same time, the consensus becoming almost immediately, Jordan is definitely doing something to Bill. She is taking advantage. She is manipulating. That's interesting to me, that we all decided at once that the 24-year-old is the one with the power and the 73-year-old is not. And why are we deciding that? Why are we inclined to side with the old man instead of the young woman? So I think...

One of the things that's interesting about this moment in time is we're right in the middle of a pretty reactionary, regressive turn against feminism. How many 65-year-old women do we have to hear saying that I march with the feminist movement and I bought into the fact that men are the enemy? I've never been married. I'm alone and I'm miserable and I wish I would have never bought into that philosophy. There's a brand of more radical feminism that

that insists that our culture is best characterized as an oppressive patriarchy. And I think that, first of all, that that's an appalling sociological doctrine. And I think it has very negative psychological effects. There's this sort of widespread feeling, somewhat...

on the center, but very much so among people on the right, that the Me Too movement from five years ago went too far and it overreached, and now we have to start correcting for it. So we're seeing a lot of these older anti-feminist ideas make their way back into the mainstream. And one of the forms that's taking right now is people arguing that

Our culture is falling apart because women do not depend any longer on men for their financial well-being. These are jobs where you can support a family, you get a retirement plan, you get a pension, you have good health care, you're paid well.

well, well above what you would consider to be the living wage. One of the things that's happened is that traditional masculinity, the idea that it is a man's job to protect women, this is one of our jobs as human beings, as men, to protect women, the feminist movement doesn't like that. So this is something that a lot of Trump's supporters believe his tariffs are going to fix.

They think the tariffs will bring us back to this kind of imaginary 1950s economy where men have rugged masculine jobs at factories and women's feminine made up email jobs will all fall away, which means that in turn women will be forced to return to the home, to the kitchen, and they'll need to rely on men to support them financially. So now all these single men without prospects will finally exist.

have a girlfriend. That's kind of the fantasy that people hope that Trump will make come true for them. And it's in that fantasy that

Jordan Hudson for dating Bill Belichick makes some kind of sense? Well, I mean, the thing is, it's a really... When you hear it outlined in those terms, it's a really gross fantasy, right? We have a lot of more rosy ways of talking about this idea as a culture. You know, there's...

The image of the trad wife and the stay-at-home girlfriend and all these women on social media talking about how they're living a soft life and taking their homemade sourdough out of the oven and doing their Pilates in beautiful sunlight. And that makes this whole arrangement look very rose-tinted and lovely. But when you look at it in the context of a...

alleged gold digger, then the relationship has lost the justification that love can offer it. It looks coarse. It looks crass. It's just this kind of brutal financial logic being laid bare. And I think that makes us as a culture really uncomfortable. The gold digger becomes this person we can blame for our own discomfort. We can make her the scapegoat for this

financial arrangement that a lot of very powerful people in our culture are currently saying we should all aspire to have. What

would love to see happening is a scenario where we're able to acknowledge that we don't really know what the power dynamic with this couple is. We don't know who is using who or if anyone is actually being used. And maybe just as we feel ourselves inclined to say, well, probably it's the young hot woman who's at fault. We could perhaps consider our history of having a

recently decided that we were actually really mean to a bunch of young hot women when we blamed them for everything 20 years ago. And, you know, maybe learn from that and take a step back and say, we don't know who's to blame. We don't know that there is anything to blame. We don't know that anyone's being hurt here. Amen. Let's give them a little space.

Constance Grady is holding space for Jordan and Bill at Vox.com where you can read her on the hopefully retired phrase gold digger. Heidi Mawagdi loves the Pats and produced our show. Jolie Myers edited. Laura Bullard was on due diligence. Andra Kristen's daughter was on the mix.

Our team includes Gabrielle Burbey, Victoria Chamberlain, Miles Bryan, Abishai Artsy, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Patrick Boyd, Devin Schwartz, Denise Guerra, our supervising editor Amina Alsadi, our executive producer Miranda Kennedy, and Noelle King, who's celebrating her...

Birthday. Happy birthday, King. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder, and we got another show on Sundays. This week's Explain It To Me is all about Gen Z finding religion. You can listen right here. I'm Sean Ramos for Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of Vox.