Conor Kennedy had instinctively started introducing Giulia Be as his girlfriend by their third date. But he hadn’t formally asked her to make their relationship official.
When Be, a Brazilian pop star and actress whose legal name is Giulia Bourguignon Marinho, questioned him about it, he explained that he would be going away soon — perhaps for several months, or longer — and that he couldn’t tell her where he was going or why. He didn’t think it would be fair to ask her to make it official, only to disappear from her life almost immediately afterward.
Be had just one request: that he let her know when he was leaving. He said he would.
“She said, ‘OK, then that’s fine. I’ll wait,’” said Kennedy, whose legal name is John Conor Kennedy.
A week before he left in June 2022, he told her — and only her — that he would be going to Ukraine to fight against the Russian invasion, a decision he had made shortly after the war broke out. Be was proud of him, but she was also torn.
“I knew that if I was going to tell him, ‘Don’t go, this is a bad idea,’ that I was not the right girl for him,” Be said. “Because I feel like he needed the person that was going to be very supportive through this time there.”
That was just five months after they first met in person in January 2022.
Their story began a year before that, when Be went on a girls’ trip to Tulum, Mexico, in early 2021. She met Kyra Kennedy, Conor’s younger sister, at a party.
“She was like, ‘Oh, you’re Brazilian. That’s so cool.’ And then we started talking,” recalled Be, who is 27. They traded stories about their brothers.
“My sister, who very rarely does this, talked me up to Giulia and was like, ‘I have a brother who would love you, and I think you’d love him,’” Kennedy, 32, said.
So Kennedy and Be connected on Instagram. Though she sent him her WhatsApp number, he didn’t reach out to her there until several months later, in September 2021, when she suffered a fall and fractured her skull before shooting her Netflix movie “Beyond the Universe.” On Instagram, she shared that she was in the hospital recovering.
“Hi, it’s Conor Kennedy and I hope your head is OK,” she recalled him messaging her.
They started exchanging text threads that gradually got longer and longer, until they were sending dozens of messages. They referred to their exchanges as love letters, concluding each one with their daily horoscopes from the Co-Star astrology app.
“Conor and I, we’re both writers at the end of the day,” said Be, who has been signed to Sony Music since 2025. “He became my favorite writer before he was my favorite person.”
“It was almost like writing in a journal,” Kennedy said. “We were talking about our whole lives: good stuff that had happened, bad stuff, stuff from when we were little kids, what we wanted to do in the future. And I just had never connected with somebody that quickly or that deeply.”
Indeed, the two do have a lot in common, both coming from high-profile families with political ties in their respective countries. Kennedy is the son of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died in 2012.
Be is the daughter of Adriana Marinho, her manager, and Paulo Marinho, a businessman who once supported Brazil’s former conservative president Jair Bolsonaro but switched to the leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the 2022 election. (The couple’s celebration happened to fall in the midst of a tense presidential election cycle in Brazil, with a runoff between Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of the imprisoned former president, and the incumbent Lula taking place later this month.)
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In January 2022, after months of exchanging messages, they finally met in person in Los Angeles. Be, who lived in São Paulo, had a photo shoot for Galore magazine. Kennedy was living in Los Angeles when he wasn’t taking classes at Georgetown Law, so it was the perfect opportunity for the two to meet.
She traveled to Los Angeles with some friends a few weeks before the shoot. When Kennedy picked her up for their first date, “I saw her friends, like five of them stuck their heads out like Scooby-Doo, all of them kind of a line around the corner,” Kennedy recalled, laughing.
The two had a drink at the Ivy and dinner at Fia, both in Santa Monica. “We were both so nervous,” Kennedy said, because of “the amount of pressure on that after, like, six months of talking.” He noticed that she was playing it cool at first, which was how she coped with her nerves: “Not saying too much, being laid back, making looks. Just, you know, sipping her glass,” he said. It was a contrast to the vulnerability, transparency and silliness she displayed through text.
But after they kissed for the first time in his backyard, where he set up the fire pit, they both felt like they could finally relax. He said he realized, “The person in front of me is the person I’ve been falling in love with.”
“For me it was just like fireworks,” Be said about their kiss. “I was already in love with him before we met, but seeing him in person, I think that was like ‘OK, this is real, I’m not crazy.’”
Fresh off a nomination for best new artist at the Latin Grammys in 2021, Be moved to Miami shortly after to record a Spanish project. The two visited each other in Miami and Washington, filling their time together with the small rituals of a new relationship: riding bikes through the city, wandering around monuments and lingering beneath the cherry blossoms.
For four months, they were a three-hour flight apart, close enough to make frequent weekend trips. Then, from June through October in 2022, they couldn’t see each other at all. Before Kennedy left for Ukraine, they got matching tattoos on their forearms of the immaculate heart of Mary, a nod to his mother’s name and their shared Catholic faith.
“Anytime I missed him, I would hold the tattoo, and it was almost like this little beacon that connected me to him,” Be said. “And just feel like I was protecting him in some way.”
In October, the couple reunited at the airport in Paris, where Be, who was there for fashion week, picked him up. “He was still with dirt on his face, walking into this very nice hotel,” she recalled. “Paris is like the dream romantic place that you want to have this kind of re-encounter, so it was just like a movie.”
Be moved back to São Paulo, and they were long-distance between the United States and Brazil until August 2024, when he proposed in the Los Angeles home they had just started renting with plans to live there together.
“She really made me think much more about my future, and being inspired, happy and optimistic about it and wanting to build something with her,” Kennedy said. “It felt really natural, just like, this is the person I want to build a life with and be with for the rest of my life.”
They moved in together in Los Angeles, where Kennedy now works as an associate attorney at Wisner Baum. He received a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center and graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature.
The couple married in March 2026 in a private ceremony. Their friend Max Loeb officiated in the backyard of his home in Los Angeles with his wife present. Be wore one of her mother’s dresses that she passed down to her.
But the real party was in October in Rio de Janeiro, where Be grew up.
Though they considered a wedding celebration in Hyannis Port, Mass., where the Kennedys have a compound and Conor, who was born in New York, spent much of his childhood, they ultimately decided on a more lively backdrop. Be wanted to introduce their friends and family to her hometown.
“All the respect to Massachusetts, but Brazil — we know how to party,” said Be, who was juggling wedding planning with two major projects in the midst of it all: a movie, “The Ten Advantages of Dying After You” (in theaters in Brazil on Oct. 29), and her self-titled trilingual album.
The couple kicked off the weekend on Oct. 8 with a welcome party at Mansão do Alto, a wedding venue nestled in the forested hills of Rio’s Alto da Boa Vista neighborhood. The day after, they held a beach volleyball competition at Ipanema Beach with close friends. Hosting some kind of game is a longstanding Kennedy wedding tradition, and the couple decided to put a Brazilian spin on it.
Later that day, they received a blessing and exchanged vows at the Christ the Redeemer statue. A dinner with immediate family and the wedding party followed.
On Oct. 10, they held a Catholic ceremony at Igreja Nossa Senhora do Carmo da Antiga Sé, one of the city’s oldest churches. A reception at Instituto Brando Barbosa, a historical house in the Jardim Botânico neighborhood, followed with 400 guests in attendance.
Kennedy said he knew he wanted three things for the wedding: speeches, singing and dancing.
During the large reception, Be’s brother, André Marinho, and Kennedy’s father gave speeches, and guests participated in group rugby songs that Kennedy and his college friends love.
And as far as dancing goes, Kennedy said, “I’ve got a hundred cousins. We love dance circles.” He added, “None of us can actually dance very well. We’re Irish, not Brazilian.”
On This Day
When Oct. 10, 2026
Where Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Fashion Throughout the wedding weekend, Be wore custom outfits by Calvin Klein, the Spanish brand Yolancris and the Brazilian brand PatBo. Harris Reed, a British American designer, created her looks for the church ceremony and reception. Kennedy wore suits that were made for him by a tailor in São Paulo named Vasco Vasconcelos.
Musical Fusion At the reception, where the couple crowd surfed through the venue, a D.J. ensemble named Syon Trio played American classics blended with Brazilian Baile Funk. That way, Kennedy’s family would know the songs, but the Brazilian flavor was still there for Be’s side. “I know some of my friends are going to be shaking their booties to ‘Sweet Caroline,’” she said jokingly.
At the welcome party, one of Be’s favorite samba groups, Unidos de Vila Isabel, performed in sequined costumes complete with elaborate headpieces. “It’s like we’re making our own little carnival,” she said.
Who’s Who of Brazilian Society Alongside members of the Kennedy family and close friends, many Brazilian artists, influencers and socialites were in attendance, including the singer and actress Any Gabrielly, who served as a bridesmaid. The Brazilian singers Gabi Melim and Nattan, the television personality Rafa Kalimann and the socialite Narcisa Tamborindeguy joined the celebration.
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