Genevieve Anne Bentz and Samuel Jordan Lewis are to be married Feb. 17 at Bucks Fishing & Camping, a restaurant in Washington. Vincent Barbuto, a friend of the couple who was granted permission by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to officiate, is to lead the ceremony.
The bride, who is 28 and taking her husband’s name, is a third-year law student at Georgetown. In September, she is to begin working as a law clerk in the financial institutions group in the Washington offices of Davis Polk & Wardell, the New York law firm. She is also a Royal Society of Arts and Salzburg Cutler fellow.
The bride’s work, which began in June 2017, with Prof. John Mikhail on the dictionary definition of “emolument” was extensively cited by the judge in the ongoing emolument case against the Trump administration in Maryland federal court.
She is a daughter of Dr. Mary Ann Dionne Bentz and Bryan Alan Bentz of Stonington, Conn. The bride’s father owns an engineering firm that bears his name, in Stonington. Her mother is the chief of dermatology at Lawrence & Memorial and Yale New Haven Hospital in New Haven. She is also a member of the board of the CMIC Group, a medical malpractice company in Glastonbury, Conn.
The groom, 29, is a lawyer specializing in telecommunications law in the Washington offices of Wilkie Farr & Gallagher, a New York-based law firm. He received a law degree from Georgetown.
He is a son of Elise Jordan Hoffmann of Chevy Chase, Md., and Eric Leslie Lewis of Bethesda, Md. The groom is a stepson of Emily Jean Spitzer and Christopher Martin Niemczewksi.
The groom’s mother and stepfather are principals at Marshfield Associates, an institutional money manager and mutual fund company in Washington. His father is also a founder and a partner in Lewis Baach Kauffmann Middlemiss, an international law firm based in Washington. The groom’s stepmother retired as the executive director of the National Health Law Program, a Washington-based organization of lawyers seeking to advance access to quality health care for low income and underserved individuals.
Ms. Bentz and Mr. Lewis met in October 2011 at a Halloween party held in the Manhattan apartment of a mutual friend. Ms. Bentz was wearing a costume in tribute to the Oxford comma, which had just been struck from the University of Oxford Style Manual. “Yes, I was mourning the death of a comma,” Ms. Bentz said, laughing.
The groom was dressed as a hamster. “I’ve always loved small woodland creatures,” Ms. Bentz said, laughing a bit harder.
Though Ms. Bentz was not aware that Mr. Lewis was a fellow student at Princeton, he already had her in his sights on campus. “I recognized her from the art history library,” he said. “I thought she was absolutely beautiful.”
He finally introduced himself, and they chatted for five hours.
“He was handsome, sweet, engaging and had a very wry sense of humor,” Ms. Bentz said.
They learned new things about each other, including the fact that each had a grandfather who worked together as chemists at American Cyanamid, a small chemical company in Stamford, Conn.
They were just beginning to share a chemistry of their own when Mr. Lewis left Manhattan for Chicago in September 2012 to work on President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. At about the same time, Ms. Bentz went to Colorado to work at a ski resort. The kept in touch, and two months later, when Ms. Bentz accompanied a friend who was participating in the Chicago Marathon, she and Mr. Lewis had lunch together.
“At that point we really liked each other,” she said, “but we were in different places geographically, so getting together was really hard.”
In January 2014, Mr. Lewis sent Ms. Bentz an invitation, and a round-trip Amtrak ticket, to visit him in Washington for an official first date. “I went that weekend, and went back again and again, five weekends in a row,” said Ms. Bentz, who was living again in Stonington at that time.
On that fifth weekend, she decided to make getting together a whole lot easier.
“I just stayed,” she said. “I never left Sam, or Washington for that matter.”
After their ceremony, the couple are to hold their reception at Comet Ping Pong, the location of the “Pizzagate” conspiracy and shooting. The couple chose both restaurants as a show of support for the businesses, which are one door from each other on the same street. The groom has been going to both places since he was a child and the staff, which are interchangeable, are family friends.
“Every Christmas Eve, members of the staff go over to Sam’s mother’s house to celebrate,” Ms. Bentz said. “They really are like family, which is why it was so important for Sam to take me to both places early on in our relationship, as it was seen as a big step toward our getting married.”
