The two of them bought this house, set on a tiny island in the Thames called Sonning Eye, around the time they married, and then spent their honeymoon here, camping out in the unfurnished rooms.
Last June, Amal gave birth to twins, Ella and Alexander, and since then the house—much like the Clooneys themselves—has grown giddy with the trappings of first parenthood. “We’ve had some ‘Mamas’ and ‘Dadas,’ ” Amal says. She smiles coyly. “George was
very careful to ensure that ‘Mama’ was the first word.”
The many charms of her life, in other words, have not arrived without some background work. I’ve spent the morning interviewing members of her family, but it’s when I meet her that I learn—and this is why she feels we know each other—that she also subsequently interviewed them about me: a barrister’s instinct for discovery, the better to respond by knowing how things stand.
Many people first encountered Amal Clooney in 2014, on
her engagement to George. By then, though, she had already built a notable career as a London barrister in international human rights law—the system through which some of the world’s slipperiest transnational villains, such as ISIS, can be held accountable in court. “I remember all the stages in my career where I almost didn’t have enough confidence to try for something,” she says, “almost didn’t have the guts to follow something I was excited about doing, because I didn’t know anyone else who’d done it or other people made me question it.” Recently she’s tried to help young women approach similarly unconventional paths in law.
“What distinguishes a really great barrister in international-law practice is creativity,” explains Geoffrey Robertson, a cofounder of Doughty Street Chambers, the firm where Clooney works, and one of the giants of the field. International law is, as he puts it, “newfangled”: It requires an eye for synthetic connections and an ear for deft persuasion. “She’s been a leading intellectual thinker on the concept of fairness—in a trial where you don’t have a jury and where, sometimes, you don’t have a defendant,” he says. “That set her apart even before she met George.”
If the standard model for Hollywood marriage is either celebrity pairing or quiet consortship (a spouse outside the limelight, a supportive partner on the running board of the career), Amal Clooney quickly flouted such customs. She was not a celebrity, yet she rose to fame’s conventions and constraints. At the same time, she remained carefully herself, heralding a subtle, welcome change in social expectation on the way. Once, a high-achieving working woman would have been trapped in the shadow of her leading man. Now you go out evenings and expect to find women outshining, in their brilliance and accomplishment, whoever dangles on their arm—even George Clooney.
“She’s the professional, and I’m the amateur,” says George, who’s done a share of humanitarian work on his own. “I get to see someone at the absolute top of their game doing their job better than anybody I’ve ever seen.” He was not alone in feeling so, and a shower of jokes followed news of their vows across their world. “Internationally Acclaimed Barrister Amal Alamuddin Marries an Actor,” went one version of a popular headline gag. At the 2015 Golden Globes, Tina Fey met their match with a punch line: “Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected for a three-person U.N. commission,” she said onstage. “So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.” Nobody in the audience seemed to laugh more joyfully than George.
“Where would you like to sit?” she asks, gesturing with a mug of espresso. (Two years ago, she and George tried to go on a healthy-eating cleanse. “It was hard to give up the glass of wine in the evening, but even harder to give up the espresso first thing in the morning,” she recalls. “We’re like, Aren’t we supposed to be feeling amazing?” They bailed on day eleven of three weeks.)
We contemplate two rooms off the main entry. To the left is a very correct sitting room (stuffed chairs, a couch, a hearth) decorated with a mix of family photos (Amal’s parents, George’s parents) and photos decidedly not family-like: George and Amal shaking hands with President Obama; George and Amal meeting the pope. To the right is a room, lined with bookshelves, that is ever-so-slightly strange. There’s a framed antique map of Berkshire, the county nearby; a ship in a bottle; and a gold monogram sculpture (G and A). Amal’s laptop is splayed across a cushioned coffee table, and some art books (Bruegel, Gauguin) are stacked sideways on a shelf, near a collection of vintage Penguin paperbacks. The mantel is decorated with wedding photos; the Clooneys love photos above all else. Some of their most cherished paintings, by contrast, are of George’s late, beloved cocker spaniel, Einstein (posed as a physics professor at a chalkboard), and the head of a giraffe (Amal adores giraffes). When some insurance appraisers came by, a while back, they spent some time peering at these paintings of dogs and leaf-munching mammals before issuing a pointedly low estimate on the Clooneys’ art.
“They were like, ‘It’s barely worth getting a policy,’ ” Clooney says, dropping her voice in mock umbrage. “They were very judgmental.”
Murad and I settle into the cozier, more interesting book-laden room, and Clooney goes to make tea: The snow is heavy on the ground, and it is near the sleepy hour of the afternoon. Murad is shy but self-possessed, and wears her history in her manner. She’s a Yazidi: a member of a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious minority that follows a faith entirely its own and, as a result, has been virulently targeted by ISIS. In August 2014, when ISIS fighters appeared in her hometown of Kocho, they escorted her and other Yazidis to the local school. Males were separated from females, who were then sorted by age. The older women and the men, including six of Murad’s siblings, were killed in a mass slaughter. Murad and other young women were transported to Mosul and distributed as sex slaves. She was beaten, raped repeatedly, and, at one point, put in a room with six ISIS guards, who violated her two at a time until she passed out. Then finally one day she was able to escape through an unlocked door (she was one of the lucky ones) and made it to a refugee camp. Through a German refugee program, she began a new life in Stuttgart and started telling her story in the West.
In 2016, Murad met Clooney, who took on the Yazidis’ plight. Over months, Clooney interviewed other refugees and survivors, building a case that could carry through the international justice system.
“Not many people stepped up to help as she did,” Murad confides now, through a translator, as Clooney fusses in the kitchen. Murad is wearing jeans and a playful gray sweater with a cat embroidered on it, but she is still hauntedly thin. “I was surprised that someone like her—a successful lawyer with a strong record—would help us. We’re a very small community.”
The Yazidi case brought Murad and her lawyer to the floor of the U.N., in September 2016. There, in crisp barrister fashion, Clooney delivered a rending plea. “She has shown us the scars from cigarette burns and beatings,” she said of Murad. “Nadia’s mother was one of 80 older women who were executed and buried in an unmarked grave.”
She drew herself up. “Make no mistake: What Nadia has told us about is genocide, and genocide doesn’t happen by accident. . . . I am ashamed, as a supporter of the United Nations, that states are failing to prevent or even punish genocide because they find that their own interests get in the way.”
Progress followed incrementally. In late 2016, the German supreme court authorized an arrest warrant against a high-ranking ISIS commander. In 2017,
following a second presentation by Clooney, the U.N. Security Council resolved to establish an investigative team to collect evidence about ISIS’s actions in Iraq. “It tells victims that they may finally have their day in court,” Clooney wrote in an opinion piece following the resolution. “Justice is now, finally, within reach.”
To help draw attention to what remains of the fight, Murad recently published a memoir,
The Last Girl. (Clooney wrote the foreword.) In cooperation with the French government, she has started a fund-raising campaign, the Sinjar Action Fund, to support schools, clinics, and other infrastructural necessities in her home region. When the more than 350,000 displaced Yazidis can finally come home, Murad hopes to do what she dreamed of before her nightmare started: open a beauty parlor for women in Kocho, where there are none.
“She’s so eloquent,” Clooney says later. “There are many cases where I think, Well, the reality is, politically, nothing will be done. But there is actually no reason why nothing could be done on this case, where the perpetrators were confessing to the crime.” The Yazidi case, she says, is “a test of the whole international system—if the U.N. can’t take meaningful action, something is really fundamentally wrong.”
Questions of destiny and volition have trailed Clooney through her life. Her mother, Baria Alamuddin, is a well-known political journalist, but her first ambition was to be a lawyer. (Her university had no law course.) Amal’s father, Ramzi Alamuddin, was vice president of the Universal Federation of Travel Agents’ Association, which consults with the U.N., so the family was often on the move. For a while, they lived in Paris. By the time Amal, their second daughter together, was born, they had returned to Beirut.
“My pregnancy with Amal was a rather difficult one,” Baria Alamuddin recalls. She had placenta previa and spent two months in the hospital. “At some point I was told that I should lose the baby. I said no. I kept on having these dreams in which I would see her face and how she was going to look.” In the end, the child was born “exactly as I saw her,” she says. Because the birth came during a lull in Lebanon’s civil war, her father named her Amal—Arabic for “hope.”
When Amal was still a child, the family left Lebanon again, for London, and later settled in a Buckinghamshire house with a swimming pool. Extended family often visited, and the kids were left alone to make their own fun. “Amal was the youngest, and because of that always got shafted,” recalls Tarek Miknas, a cousin who was near the same age as Amal. “If we were to put together a music band to entertain the family after dinner, my brother might get two instruments, her sister would get lead singer, I’d get the guitar, and she would get something like the triangle.” Clooney excelled in school but was not one to skulk in libraries. “I wanted to do well academically,” she recalls. “But it was equally important to do things”—she chuckles—“in an effortless manner.”
“All my family, we are party animals,” says her mother. “Amal partied hard and worked hard.” Also, like the other women in her family, Clooney saw no contradiction in being serious and chic, and used to raid her mother’s closet. “She would come and grab a series of shoes and bags and whatever,” her mother says. “I’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ She’d give me this legal argument that went on and on.”
Clooney went to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she studied law. “I loved it because, having done six years at a girls’ school—a very sort of English country setup—Oxford was much more international. There were boys there!” she says. On graduating, she came to the United States for New York University’s LL.M. program—a more practically oriented course—and did an externship with Sonia Sotomayor, then a judge for the Second Circuit. She left school with a job at the white-shoe firm Sullivan & Cromwell. “If I could leave the office at 10:00 p.m., it would be an amazing achievement because I could still catch friends at the end of dinner,” she remembers. She was part of the defense team for Enron’s lead auditor but also took on pro bono criminal cases. “I cared more about the outcome of those cases than my paid cases,” she says. “And that made me think, Well, why am I not doing more of that kind of work?”
In 2004, she applied for a one-year clerkship at the International Court of Justice, the main judicial organ of the U.N. in The Hague. Friends in her circle tended to regard this as insane. The program came with a subsistence-level stipend of $20,000, and The Hague was—well, not such a fun town. But the post thrilled her, and she went on to spend a year working on the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Miloševi´c. “She gets into the granular detail,” says Philippa Webb, one of two fellows with whom Clooney shared a Peace Palace office in The Hague. “But she also has a deeper reflection on what this is doing to the development of the law.” (“Fortunately, I haven’t been against her yet,” Webb adds. “I really wouldn’t want to be on the other side.”)
Clooney was preparing to go back to practice in New York when she heard about a U.N. investigation in Beirut to prosecute the murderers of Lebanon’s prime minister. “I thought, OK, I’ll just go work there for a couple of months while my visa comes through,” she says. She ended up staying for years, traveling from The Hague to Beirut. “I was in my late 20s, and I was literally living on top of a mountain, in a secured compound, with four checkpoints between me and the outside world,” she says. The danger was real: Investigators like her were being targeted with explosives. The Lebanon tribunal ultimately led her to Doughty Street Chambers, where one of her early assignments was to petition the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of Orange Revolution leader and former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who alleged a politically motivated legal case against her by the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, free speech was becoming one of Clooney’s focal points. She represented Mohamed Fahmy, the Canadian Egypt bureau chief of Al Jazeera, who, with other journalists, was taken into custody by the Egyptian government. (Fahmy was released from prison following her efforts.) She also represented Mohamed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, who says he was forced to resign at gunpoint and, after criticizing the government, imprisoned on a terrorism charge. (He is currently in the U.K. as a political refugee.) And she worked on a team representing Julian Assange in his extradition case. (She no longer represents him.)
Much of her work also centers on the mistreatment of women. In 2015, she signed on to represent Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani investigative journalist who published evidence of corruption by Azerbaijan’s president. Ismayilova had been sentenced to prison on charges that, Clooney sought to show, were fabricated. In 2016, after Clooney submitted evidence to the European Court of Human Rights, Ismayilova was released.
“As women we may not be a minority, but there is a bond that we all share,” Clooney said in a speech a year and a half ago. “It is not a bond of geography. Or religion. Or culture. It is a bond of shared experience—experiences that only women go through, and struggles that only women face.” Today, this brings her to the
#MeToo movement. “I think because of the brave women who have come forward to tell their stories, the future workplace will be safer for my daughter than it was for people of my generation,” Clooney says. “We’re in a situation where a predator feels less safe and a professional woman feels more safe, and that’s where we need to be.”
One day in 2013, Clooney’s cousin Miknas was passing through London and suggested that the two of them get dinner. “She’s like, ‘Oh, this is great. I have so much to tell you,’ ” he recalls. When they caught up at a restaurant in town, he asked her for her news.
“She’s like, ‘Eh—I don’t want to talk about it yet. Let’s have a glass of wine. Tell me about you,’ ” he recalls. Miknas did, and then the conversation circled back to her. She balked, strangely: Shyness was unlike his cousin. “She’s like, ‘Uh, ah, second bottle. This one needs a second bottle of wine.’ Finally she goes, ‘Welllll, look. There’s a bit of a romance brewing.’ ”
Some months before, Amal had come along with a friend to George Clooney’s house on Lake Como, in Italy. His parents were staying with him, and everyone talked deep into the evening. “Of course she was beautiful,” George says. “But I also thought she was fascinating, and I thought she was brilliant. Her life was incredibly exciting—the clients she was taking on and the superhuman work that she was doing. I was taken with her from the moment I saw her.”
They became friends; they stayed in touch. Amal is a big emailer, and George responded with a clownish gambit, writing her repeated notes in the voice of his dog Einstein, who claimed to be trapped in various places and in need of legal rescue. By the time she saw Miknas, their friendship was seeming like something more. “ ‘I don’t know what to make of it,’ ” Miknas remembers her saying. “ ‘The worst part is, I really like him. And he’s coming tomorrow!’ ”
“I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ ” Miknas recalls. “ ‘It’s not like you can meet in Starbucks and have a chat. It’s not going to be that easy.’ She’s like, ‘I know.’ ”
In the end, she made them a dinner reservation at one of London’s best restaurants—the sort of thing that one would expect to be a good idea for a discreet date with a movie actor but is actually (she learned that evening) a naive mistake: It put them in the path of waiting paparazzi. Following the dinner, she and George saw each other, more quietly, every day.More photos below.
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