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Most people at UNC-Chapel Hill thought of May 9 as graduation day. But not Jordon Hudson.
Three hours before the university’s main commencement ceremony kicked off in Kenan Stadium, Hudson, the girlfriend of UNC-CH football head coach Bill Belichick, wrote an email to the university’s vice chancellor for communications and marketing, Dean Stoyer.
“Happy BANniversary!” it began.
One year earlier, journalist and podcaster Pablo Torre had reported that Hudson had been banned from UNC-CH’s football facilities. The university pushed back on Torre’s reporting the same day, saying Hudson was welcome in the facilities, but she seemed to carry a grudge: In November, she posed for Instagram with an all-access football pass and a necklace that read “banned.” In the caption, she wrote that she was suing Torre.
Torre did not respond to interview requests, but he told The Contrarian in December that he had not received any legal notices from Hudson.
“As a BANniversary present,” Hudson wrote in her email to Stoyer, she was requesting public records from 24 UNC-CH staff, including Stoyer, other media relations employees, and then-incoming athletic director Steve Newmark. Most intriguingly, she also included Belichick’s longtime right-hand man, Michael Lombardi, who now serves as the Tar Heels’ general manager—and who Torre reported had told multiple people that Hudson wasn’t allowed in the building.
Hudson asked for call logs and voicemails, plus “text messages, iMessages, WhatsApp messages, documents, Asana Memos, Instagram DMs, Twitter Messages, Zoom Meetings (scheduled, fulfilled and canceled) and of course, emails (including all attachments)” between January 29, 2025, and May 9, 2026, that include the words “banned” or “ban.”
Should there be any lingering confusion about what counts as a public record, Hudson included screenshots of a UNC School of Government article on the subject.
In addition, Hudson asked for records that included the phrase “request for comment” alongside “Pablo” or “Jordon,” all records that included a link to the podcast episode in which Torre claimed she had been banned, and all communications between the named UNC-CH staff and eight reporters, including Torre, me, and The Athletic’s Brendan Marks. Finally, she asked for a document tracking press inquiries and other inquiries received via text.
Stoyer responded to Hudson’s email at nearly 3 a.m. that night. “Email received,” he wrote. “Just back from commencement production. I’ll follow up with legal tomorrow.”
This wasn’t Hudson’s first go-round with UNC-CH’s public records process. In December, she used the university’s online portal to request emails sent by the top sports communications official about a 60 Minutes interview with Belichick last spring in which she chimed in to dismiss a question about their relationship.
But requests made through the portal are public, as Hudson likely saw when hers made news across the sports world after they were reported by David Covucci, author of the newsletter FOIAball.
In April, Covucci reported on additional documents showing that Stoyer, Newmark, and other senior officials were keeping tabs on her requests.
Hudson’s requests in May went straight to Stoyer and didn’t appear in the portal, which—like most major universities—UNC-CH routinely directs journalists to use. Over the next two weeks, Stoyer provided Hudson with regular status updates. Then, on May 27, he informed her that her May 9 request could return nearly 800,000 pages of documents, which could cost her more than $8,000 to review and redact.
Public agencies in North Carolina are legally allowed to charge fees for requests that require “extensive clerical or supervisory assistance,” but courts have not set a clear standard for what that means, and agencies often cite large costs to discourage broad requests. Stoyer offered to put Hudson in touch with the school’s legal and public records staff to refine the search.
She had not replied by June 2, when I filed a records request for her communications with Stoyer. But later that day, the online portal shows, she filed four new public records requests seeking my communications, previous record requests, and a “certified copy” of the newsletter in which The Assembly reported that Belichick had asked UNC-CH athletics communications staff to copy Hudson on all emails they sent him.
She did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Stoyer declined to comment.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of David Covucci’s name.
