“Kissy face, kissy face sent to your phone, but I’m trying to kiss your lips for real (uh-huh, uh-huh),” Rosé croons as 24-year-old Jordon Hudson struts down the runway. She’s wearing an emerald-green bikini, a gold bracelet snaking around her bicep.

Hudson flashes a confident grin at the audience, tosses her hair, and turns on her heel to head offstage — but not before winking at her boyfriend, the 73-year-old former New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. He’s seated in the front row next to his bodyguard, a Navy veteran who goes by “Dutch” and resembles a young, head-shaven John Corbett. Belichick doesn’t applaud. He doesn’t cheer. He just sits there directly in Hudson’s eyeline, chewing gum, looking very much as he did when the Packers beat the Patriots 27-24 on a field goal during overtime.

Hudson — and, to some extent, Belichick, and to a much lesser extent, Dutch — is in a strange position. She’s in the State of Maine Grand Ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn by the Bay competing for the title of Miss Maine USA, a subsidiary of the Miss USA beauty pageant. Hudson’s been on the pageant circuit for years, and last year, her first competing for Miss Maine, she was crowned first runner-up. This time around, however, is different. Hudson isn’t just Miss Hancock, the tiny Maine town where she was born. Thanks to her relationship with Belichick, she’s the star of the show.

A few weeks ago, there would have been minimal media interest in a small pageant held in a Holiday Inn conference room. Other than Hudson, the most noteworthy contestant was Isabelle St. Cyr, a statuesque blonde 24-year-old who made local news for being the first trans contestant in Miss Maine history. But over the past month, Hudson has been besieged by negative media attention. She made headlines after a Belichick CBS News appearance with Tony Dokoupil, where she sat in on the interview and repeatedly stepped in to decline to answer questions. And after the sports podcaster Pablo Torre reported that she had become so involved in Belichick’s career at UNC (where he’s coached since leaving the Patriots) that the university barred her from campus (which UNC has denied), reporters flocked to the pageant, camping out in the lobby to catch a glimpse of Hudson.

The pageant was a two-day event, starting with preliminaries on Saturday that included a private interview with the judges, an evening-gown competition, and a swimsuit competition. Finals, where the 17 competitors were whittled down to the final five, took place on Sunday; save for a brief Q&A with the top-five contestants, the show was virtually identical to the prelims, from the skintight dresses the contestants wore to the music selection during the swimsuit portion. (“Espresso,” by Sabrina Carpenter, played not once but twice during both shows.)

“We expected a few reporters, but nothing like all these big cameras,” the parents of a first-time pageant contestant said. “Whatever.” Others were similarly restrained in showing their annoyance. “All the girls know each other in this community,” the boyfriend of another contestant put it. “It can be hard when someone comes in and steals the show.”

Still, Hudson handled the mêlée with grace, waving and smiling at reporters as she strolled through the lobby, wearing an ombré blue off-the-shoulder sheath. During an interview segment on the second night of the pageant, she made a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the attention. “I’m feeling an immense amount of pride right now,” she said. “I’m hoping that anybody who’s watching this finds the strength to push through whatever it is that they’re going through and embody that hate never wins.” (She, like all the other contestants, declined to speak with any media.)

The Clemente Organization, which puts on the pageant, however, seemed less equipped to handle it. It banned reporters from taking photos or video during the show and prohibited them from speaking to anyone affiliated with the event. “Members of the press, please LEAVE so the contestants can have some PRIVACY,” emcee Sal Malafronte shouted at the end of the first night’s preliminaries as Clemente reps yanked stragglers from the room. “We’ve never heard them tell the press to get out before,” one mom of a former Miss Teen USA competitor told me, laughing.

The interest wasn’t surprising. As the coach with the most Super Bowl wins in NFL history, Belichick is a vaunted figure in Maine, and the nearly 50-year age difference between him and Hudson, whom he met on a plane when she asked him to sign her philosophy textbook, was bound to attract scrutiny. “They’re literally like royals,” said one Patriots fan, who happened to be in town for her son’s graduation and was trying to spot Belichick. Hudson briefly considered dropping out of the pageant, the Daily Mail reported, but she clearly thought better of it.

Following her near victory last year, Hudson seemed determined to redeem herself. “She wants to win,” a source familiar with the relationship said, comparing her drive to that of the famously competitive Belichick. Some attendees expected him not to show up, but he wanted to support his girlfriend, and following the fallout from the UNC story, it likely would have “looked worse” if he didn’t go, the source speculated.

Throughout the pageant weekend, Hudson mostly traveled solo or accompanied by Dutch, arriving at a “pizza and pajama party” clad in a floor-length, feather-trimmed purple robe. (She seems to have been quite busy: A source told me Hudson was not involved in Miss Maine preliminary activities, like a Valentine’s Day volunteer event, and during the finals she was the only contestant to not record a Mother’s Day message for her mom.) “All the girls were so worried about her,” one source told the New York Post. “They’re all friends and she’s been so quiet all week.”

But Hudson put on a solid performance during the first night of preliminaries and finals the next day. In an introductory dance number, she shimmied, clapped, and stomped at the edge of the stage. Though she stumbled slightly during the evening-gown competition, she looked regal in a sparkly purple dress. In the past, she’s chosen the “rich indigo-ish-royal-purple,” she wrote on Instagram, because it’s the color of the oyster bushel bags she grew up surrounded by (her father was a mussel dragger). She’d carry them around as if they were purses and made them into dresses for her Polly Pockets.

In the interview portion, Hudson promoted her platform of fishermen’s rights, which she’s always been vocal about. When asked what childhood moment she would want to return to, she talked about being on her family’s fishing boat in Hancock. “I think about this really often, because there’s a mass exodus of fishermen that’s occurring in the rural areas of Maine, and I don’t want to see more fishermen displaced,” she said. “As your next Miss Maine USA, I would make it a point to go into the communities, to go to the legislature, to go into the government and advocate for these people.”

Not everyone was charmed by her performance. “I don’t think she was anything special,” Julie Rose, a former competitor on the Massachusetts pageant circuit, told me. “She was low-energy. I wouldn’t look twice at her if she wasn’t Bill Belichick’s girlfriend.” Like many other attendees I spoke to, Rose thought the real front-runner was Mara Carpenter, a vivacious, willowy Cumberland County native and longtime pageant contestant.

Nonetheless, Hudson had a strong cheering section: In addition to Belichick, her father Heath was there for the finals, as was her friend Miss Massachusetts USA Melissa Sapini, who warmly greeted Belichick in the front row. After the finals, Laurie Clemente, the co-founder of the Clemente Organization, came onstage to embrace her.

The consensus among the beauty-pageant crowd seemed to be that there were simply too many “distractions,” as another source put it, for Hudson to win. After lengthy deliberations and a four-way tie delayed the final decision — the emcees awkwardly improvised a Miss USA trivia game to stall for time — Hudson made it into the top five. But she ultimately nabbed third place, with Carpenter winning first runner-up and Miss Bangor, a statuesque, deeply tanned blonde named Shelby Howell, claiming the Miss Maine USA title. “I wasn’t surprised she was third place,” the mother of a former contestant told me. “I think all the press really hurt her.”

Hudson appeared to take her loss in stride: Though the pageant organizer was seen comforting her after the show, she quietly snuck out with Belichick through a side exit just moments later. Most of the attendees I spoke with afterward seemed more critical of Howell’s win as a newcomer than of whatever impact Hudson would have had on the results.

“Obviously, there was outside media attention, but I don’t think we let that rattle us,” Kwani Lunis, one of the five pageant judges and a reporter for NBC 10 Boston, told me. The Clemente Organization “approached it the same way that they have done in the past and were able to ignore the outside noise.”

But as the pageant organizers quietly packed up Miss Maine USA promotional posters, the press loaded up their cameras, and the representatives for a wastewater management convention filtered into the Holiday Inn lobby, the reputation of the New England royals still hung over the event.

“Wait, Bill Belichick was here?” I overheard one of the attendees say. “Why was he competing in a beauty pageant?”

Years after Congress passed a milestone Farm Bill, an alliance of marijuana and health advocates are raising the alarm about how a loophole has permitted sales of intoxicating hemp products that appear on shelves with few regulations.

The federal legislation in 2018 legalized hemp, which is cannabis with less than 0.3 percent of THC, the main psychoactive compound in marijuana. But the sweeping bill that Congress may replace or extend by the end of 2025 did nothing to keep hemp-derived products from having higher potencies, such as hundreds or thousands of milligrams of THC.

Hemp-derived drinks, edibles and “THCA flower” have popped up in Maine via smoke shops, convenience stores and online orders outside of the state-regulated medical and adult-use market. Over the past year, members have increasingly noticed intoxicating hemp options with unclear combinations of ingredients and originate from out of state.

The fight between the hemp industry, which prefers the existing federal rules, and an alliance of cannabis and public health groups concerned about intoxicating, unregulated products is reaching Maine and other states. Lawmakers in neighboring Massachusetts and other states are looking at new regulations around the intoxicating hemp-derived products.

Maine lawmakers are not moving as swiftly yet, though they are looking at ensuring buyers of intoxicating hemp products are at least 21 years old while otherwise debating testing rules and how to handle the proliferation of illicit marijuana grow houses linked to China.

“It’s really a whack-a-mole problem,” said former state Rep. Patty Hymanson, D-York, a neurologist who served on a work group last year that formed out of failed legislation to regulate intoxicating hemp and that recommended a 21-year-old age limit for buyers while not reaching consensus on other policy ideas.

Joel Pepin, owner of JAR Cannabis Co., which has several retail stores in the state, said fellow shop owners have removed the intoxicating products manufactured out of state and that they failed tests for Maine’s acceptable levels of mold, heavy metals and other chemicals.

Industry members provided photos of a “THC Nerdz Cluster” for sale at a Farmington smoke shop containing 275 milligrams per cluster. Illustrating the potency of those intoxicating products, Pepin said he advises new customers to start only with a 2.5 mg to 5 mg dose.

The Office of Cannabis Policy under Gov. Janet Mills said the continued absence of clear federal policy on intoxicating hemp-derived products, or IHDPs, has left states “increasingly inundated with IHDPs that are unregulated, untested, untracked and easily accessible by minors,” spokesperson Alexis Soucy said, adding the office wants new regulations.

“While the proliferation of these unregulated, intoxicating products is first and foremost a matter of public health and safety, it also poses a threat to Maine’s regulated cannabis market,” Soucy said.

Intoxicating hemp products are “a major concern for public health and safety,” Matt Wellington, associate director of the Maine Public Health Association, said Friday.

“Young people are easily getting their hands on them, and sometimes people don’t even know the drink they’re buying at the convenience store isn’t a harmless seltzer but actually an intoxicating beverage, because they’re being sold alongside non-intoxicating products,” Wellington said.

State agencies in Massachusetts issued guidance in 2024 saying the intoxicating hemp-derived products are illegal, but enforcement that is left to local health boards has reportedly remained uneven. Lawmakers in Maine’s neighboring state are considering new regulations this year while also not wanting to hinder non-intoxicating hemp products, such as CBD oils or creams.

Sean, who works for the Mystique of Maine cannabis business and preferred not to use his last name for fear of retaliation from government officials, said the state must decide how to best regulate THC and the products containing it. He described suppliers of intoxicating hemp beverages and THCA flowers coming into his stores to try to get Mystique to sell them.

But Rep. David Boyer, R-Poland, an ally of medical growers who helped lead Maine’s marijuana legalization efforts and sits on the committee overseeing the industry, nodded to the state-level regulatory challenges by noting the proliferation of internet sales.

“How do you enforce that at the state level?” Boyer wondered.

A recent letter to the editor suggested that Gov. Mills’ public spat with President Trump simply reflected her support for LGBTQ rights generally. In fact, the governor’s personal views with respect to LGBTQ rights are irrelevant with respect to the transgender portion of this acronym.

In 2019, Maine amended its Human Rights Act. The Legislature clarified the act’s “gender identity” provision. “Gender identity means the gender-related identity, appearance, mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, regardless of the individual’s assigned sex at birth.” (see Public Laws 2019, Chapter 464). The amendment is clear. Maine law allows one to alter their gender post-birth.

Gov. Mills has no latitude to limit gender identification to the sex assigned at birth. She has a constitutional duty to enforce Maine law. That’s what she’s committed herself to do.

No federal law accepts Trump’s definition of gender, or bars adults from altering their gender when they choose. To enforce his singular view that gender is assigned at birth, Trump has cut off Maine’s share of unrelated federal aid dollars. This seems to be unconstitutional.

Further, without legislative authority, Trump has unilaterally barred trans people from military service. His executive order was immediately challenged and is now before the Supreme Court awaiting final disposition.

In sum, 1.6 million U.S. trans people are directly affected by Trump’s executive orders. But millions more will be harmed by his palpable distaste for trans people. Stay tuned.

Orlando Delogu
Portland

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