Maine
My Weekend in Maine With Jordon Hudson
Photo: Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
“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?”
TOPSFIELD, Maine — Jenna Stoddard is not sure where her son will spend his days when he starts preschool next fall.
Sending him to East Range II School would be convenient and continue a legacy. Stoddard lives just down the street and her husband graduated eighth grade there in 2007, one in a class of three. Topsfield’s population has dropped since then. The school now has five students, two teachers, few extracurricular activities and nobody trained to teach music, art, gym or health.
Stoddard’s son is too young for her to worry about that now. But the school may not be open by the time he is ready to go. Topsfield, a town of just 175 residents, will vote on whether to close the school on April 30. If it closes, the boy would likely be sent to preschool up to 30 minutes away in Princeton or Baileyville.
“That’s a pretty fair distance for a kid, a 4-year-old, who is now on a bus all by himself,” she said. “[If] school starts at [7:45 a.m.], what time is the bus picking 4-year-olds up here? And what time is he going to get home at?”
Topsfield is an extreme example of how an aging, shrinking population and rising property taxes are forcing Maine towns to make difficult choices about their community institutions. Just over a dozen people came to a Wednesday hearing on the idea of closing the school. The crowd was mostly in favor of it.
“It is emotional to close the school in a town,” Superintendent Amanda Belanger of the sprawling Eastern Maine Area School System said then. “But we do feel it’s in the best interest of the students in the town.”
Teacher Paula Johnson walked a reporter through the building, which is small by Maine standards but cavernous for its five students. It has four classrooms, a small library, and a gymnasium. There is also a cook and a custodian for the tiny school.
A hallway trophy case serves as a reminder of when the school was big enough to field basketball teams. Topsfield’s student population has never been large, but the school’s population has dropped dramatically over the past few years. It had 25 students in 2023, with many coming from nearby Vanceboro, which closed its own school in 2015.
As the student population dwindled, the cost of sending students to Topsfield climbed. With fewer students to defray the costs, Vanceboro officials realized they would be paying $23,000 per student by the last school year. So they opted to direct students to nearby Danforth, where tuition was only $11,000 per student.
East Range lost seven students from Vanceboro, bringing its enrollment below 10. Under Maine law, that means the district may offer students the option to go elsewhere. Parents of the remaining students in grades 5 through 8 took the option and sent their kids to Baileyville. This school began the year with eight students; three have since pulled out.
In Topsfield, Johnson teaches four of the remaining five, holding lessons for pre-K through second grade in one classroom. Another one down the short hallway is home base for the other teacher. She focuses on the school’s lone fourth grader and occasionally teaches one of Johnson’s first graders, who is learning at an advanced level.
The other teacher, who holds a special education certificate despite having no students with those needs, plans to leave at the end of the school year. If the school stays open, that will leave Johnson responsible for educating Topsfield’s youngest students, though the school will need to budget for a part-time special education teacher just in case.
After 11 years at the school, Johnson is not sure what she will do if voters shut it down.
“We’ll see what happens here,” she said.
Topsfield’s school board, which operates as a part of the Eastern Maine Area School System, is offering its residents a choice: continue funding the school only for students between preschool and second grade at an estimated cost of $434,000 next year or send all students elsewhere, which would cost less than $200,000.
At Wednesday’s hearing, the attendees leaned heavily toward the latter option. Deborah Mello said she moved from Rhode Island to Topsfield years ago to escape high taxes.
“It’s not feasible for the town of Topsfield,” she said. “We cannot afford it and it’s not like the children don’t have a school to go to.”
Others bemoaned the burden of legal requirements for the small district, including the need to provide special education teachers even if they don’t need one. Board members also mentioned that in 2028, the district will become responsible for educating 3-year-olds under a new state law. That adds another layer of uncertainty to future budgeting.
“It sounds like we’ve been burdened something severely by this program and that program by the Department of Education, to the point where a small school can’t even exist,” resident Alan Harriman said.
“And that’s been happening for a long time,” East Range board chair Peggy White responded.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.
BANGOR, Maine (WABI) – Good morning and Happy Sunday everyone. Skies are cloudy with fog across much of Maine this morning. Rain has entered locations along the interstate and to the northwest. Temperatures vary from the upper 30s to mid 40s. Winds are out of the SE between about 5-15 mph.
Today will be a wet and impactful day with rain and even snow anticipated as a large cold front passes through Maine. Skies will be cloudy with plenty of fog lasting through the morning. Rain will expand across the interstate by the late morning hours, reaching Downeast locations by midday/the early afternoon.
By the early to midafternoon, temperatures will start to drop across northwestern locations as the cold front passes through Maine. This will result in rain turning over to mixed precipitation and eventually snow across the Western Mountains, Moosehead region, and Northern Maine. Rain will continue steadily and at times heavily across the foothills, Interstate, Coast, and Downeast. A few thunderstorms are even possible closer to the coast.
Snow will expand across areas to the northwest of the interstate this evening, reaching all the way down to Interior Midcoast communities, the Bangor region, and Interior Downeast areas by sunset and into the start of the night. Precipitation will taper off across Western Maine shortly after sunset, before exiting the entire state around midnight tonight. High temps today will vary from the low 40s to low 50s with SSE to NW gusts reaching 20-25 mph.
Snowfall totals will vary under 2 inches across Western, Northern, and Interior Downeast locations. However, a few pockets of 2-4 inches are possible, mostly in higher elevations across the mountains. Rainfall totals will accumulate around a half inch to three quarters of an inch when all is said and done.
Precipitation will be out of Maine by midnight tonight, with cloudy conditions giving way to mostly clear skies by sunrise. Lows overnight will dip back below freezing across much of the state, from the low 20s to mid 30s tonight, so cover up any plants or flowers outside. WNW gusts will reach 20-25 mph. A Small Craft Advisory is expected offshore.
Skies will be partly to mostly sunny across the interstate and coast on Monday morning. However, by the late morning to midday hours, clouds will build with a few scattered rain and snow showers in spots. Conditions will remain on the cloudier side in the afternoon before clearing up around sunset into the start of Monday night. Highs will be chilly on Monday, from the low 30s to upper 40s. WNW to SW gusts will be a bit breezy, reaching 20-25 mph, which will add to the wind chill factor.
High pressure will build on Monday night, remaining overhead on Tuesday. Skies will be sunny in the morning, becoming partly to mostly sunny in the afternoon. Highs will remain cool, in the 40s across the board with North to SW gusts only reaching 15-20 mph.
A weaker low-pressure system could bring showers across Maine on Wednesday and Thursday. There is a bit of model uncertainty on exactly when it will impact Maine. The GFS has impacts on Wednesday, while the EURO, GRAF, and GDPS models have most of the impacts on Thursday. We will continue to monitor this system and potential impacts. All it looks to provide as of now are cloudier skies and rain showers, with some snow shower chances farther to the North.
By Friday and Saturday, conditions are trending on the drier side with sunshine and average temperatures returning to the forecast.
SUNDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Cloudy with AM fog. Rain becoming widespread throughout the day, turning over to snow to the north & west during PM. SSE to NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
MONDAY: Highs from low 30s to upper 40s. Partly to mostly sunny early. Developing clouds with scattered rain/snow showers by midday/afternoon. WNW to SW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
TUESDAY: Highs throughout the 40s. Sunnier AM. Partly to mostly sunny PM. North to SW gusts reach 15-20 mph.
WEDNESDAY: Highs from low 40s to low 50s. Mostly cloudy with a few rain showers. Few AM snow showers possible North. SSE to SSW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
THURSDAY: Highs from mid 40s to mid 50s. Cloudier skies with rain showers possible. Some AM snow showers possible North. NW gusts reach 20-25 mph.
FRIDAY: Highs from upper 40s to mid 50s. Partly cloudy. NNW gusts reach 20 mph.
Copyright 2026 WABI. All rights reserved.
Editor’s note: This story was originally published in September 2022.
When it comes to Maine hiking, summiting Katahdin is the ultimate achievement.
Maine’s tallest mountain stands at 5,269 feet, and there are a number of different trails hikers can take to get up and down Katahdin. And while some are harder than others, none are easy.
But the views are incredible.
Whether it’s the rugged terrain of the Knife Edge or the vast landscape of the 200,000 acres that compose Baxter State Park below, here’s a look at what it’s like to climb Katahdin.
Hunt Trail
Abol Trail
Chimney Pond Trail
Cathedral Trail
Saddle Trail
Northwest Basin Trail
Knife Edge
Tablelands
South Peak
Hamlin Peak
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