On their second date, Jenelle AnnMarie Hamilton chose a red dress with a high slit, a calculated gesture that revealed a toned leg the moment she slid into Bart H. Williams’s car.
“Mission accomplished,” she said later with a knowing smile.
Over dinner at Culina, an Italian restaurant in the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, he placed his hand on hers. For Ms. Hamilton, the simple touch landed with weight, confirming the spark she had felt a month earlier.
“I liked her from the minute I met her,” Mr. Williams said.
They first connected on the League dating app in May 2021 after Ms. Hamilton, 45, fresh from a long-distance breakup, narrowed her search radius to three miles from her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Williams, 62, who also lives in Beverly Hills, recognized her street immediately.
In theory, they lived minutes apart. In practice, their travel-heavy, time-intensive careers — hers running a bicoastal public relations firm and his leading the Los Angeles office of a top litigation firm — meant they might never have met without that algorithmic nudge.
Over the next several months, they saw each other regularly. Dinners and conversations layered into a steady rhythm that brought them to their first trip together, a December visit to the Bay Area for a Yale-St. Mary’s basketball game. Mr. Williams had played for and attended Yale, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in political science, before earning a law degree there.
What began as her first basketball game has since become one of their shared passions, from watching games on television to attending Los Angeles Lakers games together as season ticket holders.
“If Jenelle had been disinterested or disaffected by going to watch a college basketball game, I think it would have impacted me,” Mr. Williams said. She admitted she had been more “reluctant in the beginning,” but wanted to share in what mattered to him. “The word that really sums it up for me is the openness to acquiesce,” she said.
Mr. Williams admired the way Ms. Hamilton also poured herself into the things that mattered to her, career included, and saw in her the same discipline and high standards that drive his own work. Ms. Hamilton, who earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in media and communications from the University of Greenwich in London, is the founder and chief executive of Jenelle Hamilton PR, a bicoastal public relations firm. She represents clients like Bob Mackie, an Emmy- and Tony Award-winning fashion designer and costumer.
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A trial lawyer and equity partner at the global corporate law firm Proskauer Rose, Mr. Williams leads both the Los Angeles office and the litigation department.
“He gives his all to every single project or client, a 100 percent every single time,” Ms. Hamilton said. “That also attracts me to him. It’s sexy.”
From the start, Ms. Hamilton dated with marriage in mind and made that clear. Mr. Williams, whose previous marriage ended in divorce only six months before they met, told her he was open. By early December 2022, she decided to set a boundary: She wanted an engagement with a plan to marry within the year.
“As a woman approaching her mid-40s at the time, I didn’t want to prolong this unnecessarily,” she said. He consulted his “board of directors” — close friends and family — and heard a consensus. “They all adore Janelle and see the uniqueness and specialness, not just as a person, but for me as well,” he said.
That December, they traveled to London for a friend’s wedding and to meet her large Jamaican-British family. Delays, language barriers at a Paris layover, and missed connections could have soured the trip. Instead, humor and teamwork pulled them through. “It doesn’t really matter what’s happening,” Mr. Williams said. “You have your person there and you’re going to get through it.”
He proposed in August 2023, after a home-cooked dinner in Ms. Hamilton’s Beverly Hills apartment. Both in sweatpants, catching up on work and life, he kissed her, then asked, “Would you cook for me forever?” She laughed, saying of course. “No, I mean forever,” he said, opening an illuminated ring box that glowed from within.
On Aug. 9, as the Beverly Hills sun poured over the backyard of the home they had moved into together, the lush scene echoed a manicured English garden. Christopher Robinson, a Universal Life Church minister, officiated their outdoor ceremony.
The couple wanted an elegant, joy-filled dinner party for their 78 guests, who included legal colleagues, fashion insiders, and friends and family members. A Black tie dress code framed the contrast between his legal circle’s formality and her industry’s flair.
Ms. Hamilton’s longtime client and friend, Mr. Mackie, handpicked two archival runway dresses for the welcome drinks and reception and designed a bespoke champagne two-piece wedding gown, featuring a front-lacing corset bodice, floral appliqués, a crown, and a trailing tulle veil. “I’ve never done one exactly like this ever,” he said.
Ms. Hamilton, who will go by Hamilton Williams, says she treasures the pieces, which he gifted to her. “He rarely does this anymore, not even for celebrities,” she said.
At the reception at the Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, Trent Copeland, the best man, acknowledged a change in his best friend during his speech. “Janelle came into Bart’s life at a time when, frankly, he wasn’t the happiest,” he said. “She has made him a better man.”
Later, the D.J. dropped Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” Surrounded by friends from kindergarten through the present day, the couple rapped along and danced in the center of the dance floor. Ms. Hamilton’s shimmering, gold sequined cocktail dress caught the light, with each twist and dip, a flashing hint of leg.
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