What Bill Belichick’s relationship tells us

0:00In the spring of 2024, I was watching the roast of Tom Brady on Netflix, and people kept making jokes about Bill Belichick. relationship. I laughed, though I wasn't quite sure I got it. But now I know why you're 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.

0:40Why 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 Explained.

1:02You're listening to Today Explained.

1:07Jason 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.

1:32It'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 works. 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.

2:10And 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.

2:28He 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 though. And he refused to talk to the media. 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.

3:04You want to talk about the game? I'm worried I could get into a post-game analysis here. I didn't realize I've had enough of that. I could just zero actually copy the game plan. You could send it over to Kansas City. I mean, it might be easier for all of us. Coined a lot of catchphrases 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 Days Off! 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?

3:40Who 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 – 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.

4:20No 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.

5:07He 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.

5:45They reported some stuff about how she was really involved with the coaching at UNC. But that's kind of inside baseball, inside football. 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. Huh. 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.

6:24It like pretty clearly was supposed to be kind of a pretty easy interview. Not, 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 DeCoppo is interviewing Bill Belichick and then DeCoppo asks him very, very basic questions about Jordan Hudson.

6:57How did you guys meet? Which he refuses to answer and then Hudson from offscreen goes, 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 DeCoppo that says... Jordan was a constant presence during our interview. 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?

7:36Or 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. Like that's kind of undoubtedly true. She is doing people's jobs for them. But is she scary? Is she all controlling?

8:16This is where like the vibe goes like a little bit like she's a witch. She's a succubus. Kill her. Kill her. Like you like you see the Salem witch trials like 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.

8:49so that she's definitely in places where she maybe shouldn't be. And also people start reacting to her with layers of misogyny.

9:01Right, you started off this conversation by saying, like, Bill Belichick, famously a bit of a dick, maybe a bit of a tyrant. Who knows how he coached his football team. How does the narrative so quickly shift to elder abuse? Is that what you're saying? 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 like 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.

9:45When I think that a more likely situation is that they're both in on this.

9:59Jason 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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13:28Sean 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 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.

14:25When did we start calling people a gold digger in this country or another one? Yeah, so the phrase gold digger in its originalist, purest 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.

15:12And 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 it work? Yeah, he did it. And then when she's 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. OK, 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.

16:03Would you say you loved him? I loved him very much. No, 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, I loved him for so much what he did for me and my son. I mean, I just loved him. I've never had love like that before. 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.

16:49And 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? I think 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.

17:37Howard 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 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.

18:34And 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 a gold digger by implication is manipulating.

19:15They 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. 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.

20:00And 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 marched 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 insists that our culture is best characterized as an oppressive patriarchy.

20:42And 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.

21:26These 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 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.

22:02and 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 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 negging 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.

22:49You 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 an 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.

23:41The 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.

24:02What I 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. But we could perhaps consider our history of having 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.