It’s nearly been a year since Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson went public with their relationship, but it feels like we’re only just getting to know them.
The last month alone has brought a blitz of revelations. We learned that Hudson, nearly a half-century younger than the former New England Patriots coach, may have in fact been 19 when the two met in 2021––which may have also been why Hudson shut down a question posed to Belichick about their origin story in that interview. We learned that, while operating in her capacity as manager of Belichick’s personal brand, she has actively promoted her own, making her presence felt on both the practice field and at television commercial shoots. And we learned that her omnipresence and influence in Belichick’s life have become a source of tremendous anxiety for his friends, family, and new employers at the University of North Carolina, where he is entering his first season as head football coach.
We learned all of this thanks to Pablo Torre, who has emerged as the definitive chronicler of the Belichick-Hudson saga, which has played out everywhere from TMZ to the New York Times. Not that Torre sought the title. “My goal in life is not to be what Robert Caro was to Lyndon B. Johnson, but for Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick,” he joked in an interview this week.
But sometimes, the story finds the reporter. In Torre’s case, Belichick’s awkward interview last month on CBS News Sunday Morning served as something of a bat-signal. By then, Torre had already reported on the relationship; in a February episode of his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, he revealed that Hudson used her power to secure a cameo in a Super Bowl ad for Dunkin’ Donuts, appearing alongside Belichick and Ben Affleck.
The CBS interview was set up as a promotional stop for Belichick’s new book; instead, it shifted the nation’s gaze to his mysterious relationship with Hudson. And for Torre, it gave sources close to the couple “permission to even more explicitly share their stories.” Twelve days after the CBS interview aired, Torre presented his reporting on Belichick and Hudson in an episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that left the public stunned—and his fellow journalists riveted and a bit envious. “Wildly entertaining,” wrote The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson on X, as well as “sort of deeply jealousy-inducing.”
The podcast, which won an Edward R. Murrow Award last year, debuted in 2023 after Torre left his full-time position at ESPN. He remains a frequent guest-host on Pardon the Interruption, ESPN’s longtime talk show hosted by Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, and has more recently become a regular on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But Torre, 39, is still a magazine scribe at heart, having cut his teeth as a fact-checker and staff writer at Sports Illustrated. “As much as I am a podcaster through and through, the question is always: How can I still flex the muscles that I had as a print journalist?” he says.
I caught up with Torre over the phone on Monday—just as he was leaving the set of Morning Joe—to talk about the approach he takes to his podcast, his reporting on Belichick and Hudson, and what to call a controversy that’s more cringe than scandalous.