Because Huma Mahmood Abedin’s name is often yoked to a former relationship, it can come as a surprise to learn that long stretches of her life have been spent alone.
Since the breakup of her first marriage in 2016, she has been mostly single. And even before the marriage, she was more often without a partner than not, she said. Her first conversation with Alexander George Soros in the fall of 2023 left her no reason to think that pattern was about to change.
Ms. Abedin, 49, and Mr. Soros, 39, knew each other by reputation well before Oct. 13 of that year, when a birthday party for the heiress Nicky Hilton Rothschild brought them to the same restaurant in Manhattan’s meatpacking district.
Mr. Soros is the son of George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire and philanthropist, and Susan Weber, an American-born art historian and founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center. He is the chairman of Open Society Foundations, a philanthropic empire founded by his father that supports liberal causes.
Ms. Abedin is most known for her work in politics, especially with Hillary Clinton. Before she was the vice chair of Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, she was her longtime aide and close adviser.
She is also familiar to many for the blowup of her marriage to Anthony Weiner, a former Democratic congressman whose highly public sexting scandals cost him his congressional seat and more.
At the 2023 party, Mr. Soros said, “I recognized Huma, just from over the years.” He remembered meeting her as early as 2015 at an event for Mrs. Clinton, but the two had never exchanged more than pleasantries.
“I knew there were a lot of Soros brothers,” Ms. Abedin said. (Mr. Soros is the second-youngest of George Soros’s five children; four are sons.) “We kind of walked parallel paths, but we never actually connected,” she said.
That they did that night now seems incredible to both. Each had felt ambivalent about going to a party days after Oct. 7, when Hamas’s attack on Israel incited what has become the continuing war in Gaza. (Ms. Abedin is Muslim; Mr. Soros is Jewish.)
“I frankly wasn’t in the mood to be out at a celebration,” Ms. Abedin said.
Nevertheless, the two had their first meaningful exchange that night. “I went up and just said, ‘Hi,’” Mr. Soros said. “I was drawn to her. I was curious if she would recognize me.”
Though Mr. Soros had been in the news a lot that year — months earlier, in December 2022, he had been named chairman of his 94-year-old father’s empire — she did not recognize him. But it did not matter. “Two sentences in, we connected,” Ms. Abedin said. “And then we just went into a fairly deep, serious conversation, which you don’t really have in these New York parties. It was dark, and the D.J. was right behind us.” (That D.J., she later said, was Paris Hilton.)
Mr. Soros remembers asking Ms. Abedin if she was ready to leave when their conversation wound down. But she was not.
“I said I was excited for the birthday cake, and then I found some other friends,” she said. He stuck around, too. “She had become my focus,” he said. Not so much that she sensed he was attracted to her, though.
“Alex and I have had this conversation a lot,” she said. Mr. Soros thinks he made his interest clear at the party; Ms. Abedin does not.
“I found him attractive,” she said. “When he walked up to me, I was struck by him. But I didn’t get the sense he was being flirtatious.” That impression held even when he approached her again that night and asked if she wanted a ride home. She took an Uber instead.
“But driving home, I remember that conversation stayed with me,” she said.
With him, too. “We really kind of vibed,” he said. Vibing was not something he took for granted. “I have not had a lot of relationships,” he said.
The day after the party, Mr. Soros followed her on Instagram. She did not follow him back. When he DM’d her soon after, she never responded.
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“I thought, ‘All right, she’s not into me,’” he said. But he got a text from her a month later.
Ms. Abedin is on the board of Vital Voices, a nonprofit group that works to advance women to leadership positions globally. A friend there asked her if Ms. Abedin knew Mr. Soros and could help with getting him an invitation to receive the organization’s Voices of Solidarity Award, an honor it gives out annually to a top ally.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I just met this guy,’” she recalled. She texted Mr. Rothschild to ask how to reach him. “The next thing he said was, ‘I’m adding all of us on a text chain.’”
That Mr. Soros might have been trying to reach her after the Oct. 13 party had not occurred to her. The conflict in the Middle East was so distressing that she had initially been staying away from Instagram.
“It was a very emotional time,” she said. She was not particularly social media savvy anyway. She said that if she had seen that Mr. Soros had followed her, she might not have known how to follow him back.
But both, it turned out, were attentive texters. Mr. Soros was not able to accept the Vital Voices invitation because he was headed to that year’s Doha Forum, a global event for policy leaders, in Qatar. But the forum, which Ms. Abedin would also be attending, was not until December. In the meantime, their texts became a forum for two.
“I don’t know when I started waking up looking forward to seeing a text message from Alex,” Ms. Abedin said. “But it was pretty soon. He would send me poetry — we would talk about our lives and families.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Soros said, “I upgraded myself to phone calls.”
Ms. Abedin was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., to an Indian father, Syed Zainul Abedin, and a Pakistani mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin. She grew up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from George Washington University and currently works as an MSNBC contributor, the vice-chair of the Forbes 30/50 Summit and an adviser to Mrs. Clinton. In 2021, she published a memoir, “Both/And: A Life in Two Worlds.” She shares a 13-year-old son, Jordan, with her former husband.
Mr. Soros, who grew up in Katonah, N.Y., and London, holds a bachelor’s degree in history from N.Y.U. He earned a Ph.D., also in history, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Though both lived in Manhattan, their schedules prevented them from meeting in person. “I remember being disappointed about that in real time,” Ms. Abedin said. “But in hindsight, it’s one of the best things that could have happened.”
By the time they came face to face at the Doha Forum, they had already built a strong connection through late-night calls and texts. When Mr. Soros was in Vienna before a trip to Ukraine, he learned that Ms. Abedin’s father, Dr. Abedin, who died in 1993, had loved Vienna and had given her Sacher-Torte, an Austrian confection, for her 13th birthday. He found one, packed it and brought it to Qatar. By the time they left the forum on Dec. 11, 2023, they had plans to meet for dinner back in Manhattan.
In a car on the way to the airport, “we shook on it,” Ms. Abedin said.
The Friday after, they had dinner at I Sodi in Greenwich Village, a favorite Italian restaurant of both. The next night, they ate at Torrisi, another downtown restaurant. “And on Sunday night, I cooked,” Mr. Soros said. “That means I ordered from Nobu.”
He said by then he was in love: “Definitely.”
Ms. Abedin joined the Soros family in the Caribbean for New Year’s. Around the same time, Mr. Soros told his father and friends that he had fallen for her.
“It was sort of the time of, we’re off to the races,” he said. In May, they attended the Met Gala together in what tabloids called their “public debut.” Not long after, Mr. Soros dipped into Camilla Dietz Bergeron, a jewelry store on Madison Avenue, and bought a ring, his selection based on previous jewelry purchases for Ms. Abedin.
“I knew her style,” he said.
On June 4, 2024, at the home they now share in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, he got down on one knee and presented her with an emerald-cut diamond ring, flanked by a pair of baguettes, tucked inside a takeout container.
Both said the hurdles in their relationship, outside of work obligations that pull them in different directions, had been few. “Given how complicated each of our lives are, I think it’s pretty remarkable how easy this part has been,” Ms. Abedin said of the relationship.
Mr. Soros said he was transformed. “She brings out a much more joyful, loving side of me,” he said. “I’m completely vulnerable with her, and she’s kind and warm and nonjudgmental. I’m at the point where she’s a part of me.”
The morning of June 13, at George Soros’s estate in Southampton, N.Y., Ms. Abedin and Mr. Soros signed the ketubah in honor of Mr. Soros’s Jewish faith and the nikah in honor of Ms. Abedin’s Muslim faith in an intimate, interfaith ceremony. Ms. Abedin wore a vintage-inspired Erdem dress with lace sleeves.
Darren Levine, the founding rabbi of the New York City synagogue Tamid, officiated, with Jamal Mahmood, a trustee with Muslims for Progressive Values and a certified life cycle celebrant, participating in the ceremony, which took place the next day at the groom’s estate in Water Mill, N.Y.
A roster of A-list Democrats were in attendance, including Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton; former Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff; Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leaders from New York; and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Celebrities included Jimmy Fallon, Jennifer Lawrence, Adrien Brody, Sienna Miller, Mariska Hargitay, the Rothschilds and Anna Wintour. Boyz II Men performed, according to two attendees.
In lieu of gifts, the couple asked guests to support VOW for Girls, which is focused on ending child marriages globally.
For Saturday’s ceremony, Ms. Abedin, who is now legally Huma Abedin Soros, wore an off-the-shoulder ivory Givenchy gown with a slim belt designed by Sarah Burton. Mr. Soros wore a Dior tuxedo that he mentioned was not new, because his favorite clothes tend to be well-made pieces he has hung onto for years.
In that sense, his fashion philosophy matches his attitude about waiting to find the perfect woman to marry.
“The good stuff,” he said, “takes time.”
On This Day
When June 14, 2025
Where Alex Soros’s home in Water Mill, N.Y.
Fathers and Sons “One of the most beautiful things about this relationship with my partner, Alex, is watching his relationship with my son,” Ms. Abedin said. “They’ve connected in the most magical way. It brings me the most joy.”
Well-Versed Mr. Soros often reads love poems to Ms. Abedin. A friend gave them a collection of Pablo Neruda’s poetry; he has since become a favorite. “The book is totally dog-eared now,” Ms. Abedin said. The couple tucked a booklet of Neruda poems into guests’ gift bags.
Speeches on Theme Mr. Soros and guests, including Hillary Clinton and Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, gave toasts at the reception. Their remarks followed the theme of celebrating love during hard times. After the wedding, Ms. Abedin said, “With so much hardship and violence across the world today, it wasn’t an obvious time for a wedding party. But as so many friends shared in their toasts, gathering to celebrate joy and love felt not only right, but necessary.”
The post Alex Soros and Huma Abedin Share Their Love Story and Wedding appeared first on New York Times.
