Jordon Hudson, girlfriend of University of North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick, allegedly called a podcast host out of the blue, leading to a week-long back-and-forth that ended with Hudson yelling at her in a 13-minute rant.
Charlotte Wilder of The Athletic’s “The Sports Gossip Show” recalled the story with her cohost, Madeline Hill. She said it began on a Saturday night when her phone rang and the voice on the other end introduced herself as “the president of your universe.”
That voice was Hudson’s, and she was referencing an episode of the podcast that Wilder and Hill recorded about her performance at the Miss Maine pageant.
“I couldn’t tell what the tone was,” Wilder said on the Thursday, August 7, episode of the podcast. “She would oscillate between friendly but there was clearly an edge to her voice, she kind of wanted to let me have it. She wanted to talk about our Miss Maine episode, our opinions around the pageant.”
All the Wildest Claims and Revelations From Podcast Deep Dive Into Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick
“She said, ‘You know, you guys have gotten as close to the truth as anyone. You’re still very far away from it,’” Wilder added.
Knowing Wilder was talking to who she called the “biggest story in sports,” she tried to convince Hudson, 24, to appear on their podcast. What followed was a series of FaceTime calls and texts between Wilder, Hill and Hudson that the hosts say totaled around five hours.
Their next conversation came that Monday via FaceTime between the three of them — a call Wilder described as “circular.” The cohosts allegedly offered Hudson a chance to appear on their show to correct any inaccuracies.
They ended the call without a commitment from Hudson and they did not hear from her again until that Thursday, when the cohosts reached out to her. They told her that their podcast was about to join The Athletic’s podcast network, and, Wilder said, “she was not pleased.”
Jordon Hudson Shares Behind-the-Scenes Clip of Bill Belichick’s CBS Interview Amid Controversy
Hudson allegedly expressed her anger over how The Athletic has covered her in the past, causing Wilder and Hill to try and convince her that the partnership would not change their coverage. Hudson eventually expressed she was open to coming on the podcast before their partnership with The Athletic became official. They left it that night with the possibility open that Hudson would be in New York the next day to record.
They also told Hudson that if she did not come on the podcast by Thursday, August 7, they would have to disclose to their audience that they had been speaking to her. To the podcast hosts, it was a matter of trust with their audience. They were covering Hudson and couldn’t continue to do so without being transparent.
“I think this gets into the broader PR picture of, like, she wants intense control without understanding you will never have that,” Wilder said. “So you got to choose a different strategy.”
The two sides spoke again the next afternoon. This time, it was Wilder answering a call from Hudson directly — and that’s where she said things got tense.
“I mean, she’s yelling at me. She’s crying. She said that she finished the rest of the Miss Maine episode, and she didn’t like what we said,” Wilder recalled. “And I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ I was like, ‘I thought we’ve been talking about the Miss Maine episode that we did, that you watched the whole time.”
“This goes on for 13 minutes,” she said. “I’m a journalist. This is my job. I’ve had sources yell at me before … Because we had what we thought [was] some level of trust with her, I think it felt like it was incredibly jarring.”
Wilder continued, “To call me, so upset, I was like ‘What are you doing?’ You want to save her from herself. She clearly doesn’t trust us anymore, we don’t trust her as a reliable narrator about herself.”
