Nearly two months after CBS News Sunday Morning aired an uncomfortable interview with former NFL coach Bill Belichick and SNL riffed on the 49-year age gap between him and his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, newly-released emails and texts are shedding new light on the situation.
In the interview, Belichick wore a tattered sweatshirt as he fielded questions from Tony Dokoupilabout leaving his New York Patriots post, moving to college football as coach of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tar Heels, and writing his new memoir, The Art of Winning. Hudson was present for the interview — in fact, Dokoupil called her a “constant presence” during the sit-down — and she shut down a question about how she and Belichick met.
Two days after the interview aired, Belichick emailed Beth Keith, senior associate vice chancellor in UNC’s Office of University Communication, according to records released to WRAL on Friday following a public records request.
“Jordon and I have both a personal [and] professional relationship,” he wrote. “This is not a secret. Jordon assists me with my personal media, which is why I asked UNC to forward media requests (e.g. CBS’ 60 Minutes) to her. Jordon has zero involvement in the UNC football program, beyond the degree that my personal media intersects with it.”
Belichick added in the email that Hudson was there for the CBS interview because his Simon & Schuster publicist was not. And he said that after about 35 minutes of conversation about the book, Dokoupil’s questions “shifted to other subjects that were not related to The Art of Winning,” adding that such questions had been “outlined as off-limits” by the book publicist.
The coach also said that Hudson asked to sit “off-camera” and that CBS “secretly … had a camera focused” on her where a CBS producer told her to sit.
And when the seated portion of the interview was over, Dokoupil and the producer spent more than 36 minutes trying to persuade Belichick to join Dokoupil in a walk-and-talk portion of the interview, Belichick said in the email. “We were unable to reach an agreement on the conclusion of the interview, so there was no walk [and] talk,” he wrote.
In his email, Belichick also explained Hudson’s intervention during the interview. “I met Jordon randomly on a flight to Palm Beach in 2021,” he wrote. “That is no secret. Jordon was not dodging the specific question regarding how we met, but rather was preventing the interview from continuing to probe into personal matters.”
Keith and Belichick then communicated back and forth as they collaborated on an official statement the university would end up sending out on April 30, three days after the CBS News Sunday Morning interview aired. During those conversations, Belichick told Keith he was “working [through] the situation” with his publisher and his literary agency. “I apologize for the delays here — I don’t want to make a wrong move,” he said.
Later, UNC staff discussed how to deal with outreaches from disgruntled fans and alumni, WRAL reported. Christi Hurt, chief of staff to the UNC chancellor, forwarded to Keith an email from a 1977 alum who wrote she had “never felt compelled to write a letter to our leadership, until now.”
That alum said, “I’m writing in response to the actions taken by Bill Belichick and his 24-year-old girlfriend. Never did I think UNC would become a laughingstock in the sports world because of his young girlfriend.”
For its part, CBS News said in a statement that Belichick had agreed to a wide-ranging interview. “There were no preconditions or limitations to this conversation,” the news organization’s statement added. “This was confirmed repeatedly with his publisher before the interview took place and after it was completed.”