Yes, if Bill Belichick had simply taken a job at Duke, there’s much we would never know.
But because he opted to take a job with a public and not a private institution, his communications with North Carolina officials are fair game.
On Friday, WRAL posted an item featuring quotes from some of the documents it has obtained through public-records requests. They focus on the aftermath of the disastrous CBS interview, which included Belichick’s girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, instructing him not to answer the question of how they met.
Belichick previously has accused CBS of editing the interview to create a “false narrative” regarding Hudson’s perceived effort to control the conversation. In a message to Beth Keith, a senior associate vice chancellor in the office of university communication at North Carolina, Belichick claims that CBS surreptitiously recorded video of Hudson during the interview of Belichick.
“Secretly, CBS had a camera focused on Jordon where Lead producer Gabe instructed her to sit,” Belichick wrote to Keith.
Belichick also explained that Hudson attended the interview because Simon & Schuster publicist David Kass was not present. Earlier this month, someone from Belichick’s camp (possibly, Hudson herself) leaked various allegations to TMZ.com about Kass’s role in the interview debacle.
Belichick persists in his claim that questions unrelated to his book were not supposed to be asked during the interview with Tony Dokoupil of CBS.
“For approximately 35 uninterrupted minutes, Tony asked questions about the book,” Belichick wrote. “Then, the questions shifted to other subjects that were not related to the Art of Winning, which we had outlined as off-limits with my book publicist.”
The communications with UNC also include an explanation from Belichick as to how he and Hudson met — and as to why she shut down the question.
“I met Jordon randomly on a flight to Palm Beach in 2021,” Belichick 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.”
It really would be useful to see the full interview, so that the reasonableness of Hudson’s apparent “enough is enough” interjection could be assessed. Why won’t CBS post the full interview? It would leave no doubt as to what happened during what should have been a slo-pitch softball session, and as to how often Hudson interrupted.
While this isn’t another example of Belichick or Hudson kicking a sleeping dog and pushing a dormant story back into the news cycle, the release of the communications received now by the media is a natural consequence of Belichick taking a job with a public institution.
