Charlotte Wilder details how the potential Jordon Hudson interview fell apart

Things had been relatively quiet on the Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson front until last week, when Charlotte Wilder and Madeline Hill, the co-hosts of The Sports Gossip Show, let it be known that Hudson had cold-called them and almost came on the podcast.

Wilder and Hill detailed the story on a recent episode of their show, which marked its second installment as a part of The Athletic’s podcast network. Per Wilder, the 24-year-old called her to discuss the show’s coverage of her participation in the Miss Maine USA pageant and nearly agreed to be interviewed on the podcast before an abrupt falling out. Hudson later re-posted a message on her Instagram Story that shared disappointment about the way the podcast hosts discussed her.

Wilder was a guest on Tuesday’s episode of Toucher & Hardy on Boston’s 98.5 The Sports Hub, where she provided further details on how what seemed like a massive scoop fell apart so quickly.

After initially ignoring a call from an unknown number on a Saturday night, Wilder picked up when it called back, and the voice on the other line was Hudson.

“She calls me, and it wasn’t totally clear to me why,” said Wilder. “I think It sounded like she was gearing up to be mad at me, but then we were just talking because I was like, ‘She can’t know that I am rattled by this.’ I was just like, ‘How are you? What’s up?’ And we were just chatting. And it turned out I think she had some issues with how we covered the pageant. I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s get Madeline, my co-host on the phone, too. I can’t I don’t answer these questions without her.’

“Also, Madeline and I talked after this. It was a 37-minute phone call, and I was like, okay, Jordon, I got to hop off. I was getting a little… Something was so weird about it that I was like, I’m going to call you back. Over the course of that next week, Madeline and I talked to her on FaceTime on the phone for five hours trying to get her to come on our show.”

There was a brief period where it appeared that Hudson would appear on the podcast, in a situation that Toucher noted would have been a prime opportunity for her to humanize herself. Instead, things went south in a hurry.

“She keeps going in circles about whether she’ll come on the show or not,” Wilder said. “We think there’s a chance that she’s going to show up in New York on Friday to do this interview. But we don’t hear from her. We talked to her till really late on Thursday, and she’s like, ‘Let me figure out if I can make this happen.’ And we’re like, Oh, my God. Okay, great. Don’t hear anything on Friday. And Madeline and I on Friday, we’re just like, ‘You know what? Something feels off about this. It feels like she has too much control over the situation. We’re journalists trying to get her to come on, but we’ve given her more leeway than we would another source.’

“Also, as you said, this is the biggest story in sports. And people might laugh. I might get messages from your listeners being like, Oh, no, it’s not. Having Jordon on a show would be massive. Of course we wanted that.

“On Friday, I think we got to a point on Friday where we hadn’t heard from her by noon, and we were like, ‘You know what? This is not going to happen.’ And also, maybe it’s not the best idea to have this interview. Obviously, it would be amazing for the show and for us, but there was something in the tenor of our conversations where we couldn’t tell if she wanted us to be her friends or wanted advice or wanted us to like her. It wasn’t ever totally clear what was going on. And so we were like, ‘Maybe this is for the best.’ It felt like we had lost a little bit of control over the situation.

“Friday at 2:45, I have two missed calls. She calls Madeline. She calls me again. And I was like, I’m going to answer this because there’s a good chance, given how chaotic the communication had been. She would go dark. She would pop back up. We would talk for a long time. I was like, there’s a chance she’s at LaGuardia at the airport right now, and she wants to do it. And if I didn’t answer, and she’s in New York and was like, ‘I came to do show,’ that would have been really bad. So I answer. She was like, ‘I haven’t been able to make travel work.’

“And then she just really starts yelling at me, and she’s crying and is upset. She says that she listened to the second half of our pageant episode of our coverage, having gone to it, and didn’t like what we said. And I was like, Hold on. I was confused because I was like, I thought this is the episode we’ve been talking about for five hours over the past week. And it became clear that this was just not… She was really upset. And 13, 14 minutes later of her just really letting me have it, I was like, ‘You know what? This wasn’t productive. I get you don’t want to do the show. We’ll get off the phone.’ And that was the last we heard from her.

“And we had said on Thursday, if you don’t come on the show, we are going to talk about the fact that we talk to you because we have been covering the story. We can’t just pretend this didn’t happen. I felt conflicted because I was like, this was so bizarre. And we want to tell the story with humanity, but also, this was wild and so many bad decisions PR-wise. But she gave us no choice. She called reporters for five hours.”

Wilder was left with the realization that Hudson seems to find herself in an unwinnable situation, where she desires the fame that comes with dating Bill Belichick and being part of his media experience, but doesn’t seem to want to have to deal with what comes with that.

“She wants to be famous, but doesn’t understand how it works,” said Wilder. “If you’re famous, you can’t control what everybody says about you all the time. You have to roll with it. As you said, you have to come on a show and be funny. It seems like she doesn’t have interest in playing the game the way you have to play the game to be famous and have people be on your side. But she also wants to be famous, it seems.

“So I don’t know, guys. It was really like the poster on my wall got off the wall and started talking to me, or I saw Bigfoot because she hasn’t talked to anybody, and then she calls us and talks for five hours.”

Hudson has had a few chances to try to change the narratives around her. Every time, so far, she’s somehow made things worse. And with North Carolina football season about to begin and her presumptive role in Bill Belichick’s media career, it’s hard to imagine we’re not looking at a crash-out very soon.