Podcaster Pablo Torre has quickly become one of the foremost experts on Bill Belichick’s relationship with Jordon Hudson, breaking a number of stories related to it, and the ex-ESPNer said he’s willing to take the University of North Carolina to court if they fail to comply with public record requests related to the football program.
Torre, who has dedicated two episodes of his show “Pablo Torre Finds Out” to uncovering details around the relationship, said during an appearance with Mike Florio on “PFT PM” that UNC owed him a response to multiple public records requests by Friday.
And he hinted that he would be willing to sue the university to “hold them to account.”
“These are public records requests,” he said. “I don’t know why this should be vague or ambiguous. If you’re listening, like, it’s not like, ‘Show me your emails,’ as if there is no expectation of it. It’s, ‘You get as part of the pact between a public university and the federal government, you get things in exchange for what feels like a reasonable level of transparency.’ So we can tell what is this public money going towards? It’s standard operating procedure, and if we don’t — if we feel like they are not obliging their legal obligations, we will certainly pursue avenues to make it so.”
Belichick, 73, is headed into his first season at the helm of the UNC football program, marking the first time he’s coached at the collegiate level.
Coaching at UNC does open Belichick up to more public transparency.
The school is a public institution, making him a public employee subject to having his emails fair game for open records requests.
Torre did not indicate what these specific records requests were in reference to.
The Athletic, The Assembly NC, and Torre have successfully had requests responded to earlier this year, which has led to some interesting revelations.
The Assembly NC that first reported that Belichick had directed North Carolina officials to copy the 24-year-old Hudson on messages sent to him.
The reporting by Torre over the past few weeks has come under attack from Hudson, who posted and then deleted a response on her Instagram page after Friday’s episode investigating the Ring doorbell cam footage of the ex-Patriots coach that made headlines in 2023.
“Pablo Torre’s ‘findings’ have been nothing short of factually incorrect, slanderous, defamatory and targeted,” she wrote in the Instagram story that was taken down a short time after it was posted.
Others have also questioned the reporting and interest in the relationship, which Torre himself pushed back on during the interview with Florio on Tuesday.
“I’ve seen enough reporters who love to suck up to coaches who are like, ‘Look, the Jordon Hudson story was wildly exaggerated from the start,’ and all I can tell them is that, ‘You guys got to do some reporting if you think that that’s plausible that we are overestimating the impact here,’” Torre said, “because it’s verified, documented, now increasingly public.
“They’re missing the story, and that’s what’s also darkly humorous about this.”