When we look at the relationship between 73-year-old legendary football coach Bill Belichick and his girlfriend and business partner, 24-year-old Jordon Hudson, it’s hard to know exactly what we’re seeing. Two grown-ups in love forging a dynamic business partnership? Elder abuse, as some have wildly speculated? Or is it, as the vitriolic comments in Hudson’s social media posts would have it, good old-fashioned gold digging?
Gold digging is a misogynistic and retro term, but this scandal is a retro one. It’s a bizarre, slightly off-putting mystery that fits remarkably well into our current age of newly regressive gender politics.
Hudson and Belichick, the six-time Super Bowl-winning former NFL coach, met on a flight in 2021 and went public with their relationship last December. While their nearly 50-year age gap has raised eyebrows amid observers, the scandal has only grown as Hudson has taken on an increasingly central role in Belichick’s professional world.
It’s a bizarre, slightly off-putting mystery that fits remarkably well into our current age of newly regressive gender politics.
But speculation around the relationship reached a fever pitch when Hudson interrupted during Belichick’s interview on CBS Sunday Morning in April. “How did you guys meet?” host Tony Dokoupil asked Belichick, referring to Hudson. “We’re not talking about this,” Hudson cut in tersely from off-camera. “Jordon was a constant presence during our interview,” Dokoupil informs viewers in voiceover, in a moment that launched a thousand TikTok reaction videos.
In the midst of this controversy, the couple has been manufacturing social media content about their relationship that isn’t alarming so much as it is lightly uncanny, especially given Belichick’s famously gruff public persona. On Hudson’s Instagram account, she has posted beachside pictures of herself balancing athletically on Belichick’s outstretched legs, and of Belichick, dressed as a fisherman, reeling in a mermaid-tailed Hudson from the surf. (“Ouucchhhh!!!” goes the caption on that one.)
A few have defended the relationship between Belichick and Hudson. Sports media personality Colin Cowherd has said that Hudson’s choice to hop into Belichick’s interview was normal for PR directors, if “kind of a cringy thing.” Right-wing sports outlet The Outkick has rallied to Hudson’s side on the grounds that she triggers the libs, saying, “If Jordon wants to spend her weekends at Bill’s house on Nantucket, soaking up the sun and enjoying Cisco Brewery on Bill’s dime, I say GO FOR IT.”
But the most common reaction to the spectacle of Hudson and Belichick’s relationship is the one outlined by sports media personality Katie Nolan on a podcast in February: This is weird and seems like it has sinister undertones.
“We’re already going, ‘You’re how much younger than him?’ And then you show up in a commercial. And then you hear that she’s in charge in his career.” Nolan said. “It seems like you could be taking advantage of the guy. And he’s obviously taking advantage of the girl.”
Notably, it doesn’t appear to be much of a head-scratcher why a powerful septuagenarian would choose to be with a recent college graduate and pageant contestant. But the nefarious reason implied about why Hudson wants to be with Belichick is the one people are misogynistically and freely throwing around: gold digger.
The resurgence of the gold digger
I don’t know anything about Hudson and Belichick’s private relationship, and most likely, neither do you. I don’t want to make any claims about who is using whom or what their private life is like. But as a feminist pop culture critic, I am interested to see the term “gold digger” swim back up from the collective unconsciousness again, ready and willing to go to work.
There’s something almost old-fashioned about it. The last time “gold digger” was thrown around in pop culture so much was when teenager Courtney Stodden skyrocketed to fame in 2011 after they got married at age 16 to 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison. Stodden would later describe their marriage as one characterized by grooming and sexual assault.
Before that, the great pop culture gold digger was Anna Nicole Smith, the model turned paparazzi obsession who married oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994. Since Smith’s untimely death in 2007, she’s found a place in the pantheon of wronged women of the 1990s, someone we came to believe over the last decade was publicly mistreated — in part by her tarring as a gold digger.
“It’s a bit provincial to look down one’s nose at a woman wanting something from a man and give a pass to a man who arguably would have never given her a second glance had she not been a beautiful, blonde Playboy Playmate,” essayist and sex work activist Laura LeMoon argued in 2023, writing about Smith in Salon. “Rather than singling out and condemning Anna Nicole Smith, we should be pointing our fingers at the inequities and systemic failures that put people like me and Smith in positions where obtaining money and resources from men, directly or indirectly, is our best option for survival.”
“Gold digger” is a euphemism that allows us as a culture to talk around those systemic failures. It’s a way to deride women when they take seriously the idea that their financial well-being should depend on their relationships with men. So it’s odd to see the term becoming so popular during a moment when popular culture has become rather infatuated with the idea that life is most pleasant, simple, and straightforward when women’s finances do depend on romantic relationships with men.
TikTok is full of tradwives explaining how their lives became better once they got out of the 9-to-5 grind to make cereal from scratch for their children and let their husbands do the breadwinning. (That the most successful of the tradwife influencers are actually the primary breadwinners in their homes is an irony the influencers themselves seldom discuss.) Or there are the stay-at-home girlfriends cooing over how taking care of their boyfriends without even the financial safety net of a marriage contract has been their ticket to the soft life.
The gold digger is the tradwife as seen through a funhouse mirror: a woman living off her ability to attract a man, only here done crassly.
Meanwhile, some of President Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters are arguing that his tariffs will force women out of the workforce and make them once again financially dependent on men, either through marriage or through sex work, life paths these men treat as equivalent. Trump’s appeal to the dream of a lost American manufacturing economy is a nostalgic one. It’s an appealing fantasy to some of his more incel-adjacent fans: that under this economy, the sexes will revert to an older, allegedly more natural economic relationship, one in which women trade their sexuality and childrearing capabilities to men in exchange for financial security.
The gold digger is the tradwife as seen through a funhouse mirror: a woman living off her ability to attract a man, only here done crassly, without the show of love to soften the crude edges of the transaction. The gold digger is simply a figure we can blame for how uncomfortable this dynamic makes us feel, without having to think through just what is so uncomfortable about it.
So if we’re angry at Jordon Hudson, it’s worth asking the question: Are we angry with her, or with the fact that powerful people want to make gold digging one of a woman’s most viable career paths again?
