Amal Clooney, the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt's constitution: A controversial video resurfaces

An old clip of George Clooney on "The Drew Barrymore Show" has been circulating widely online since it resurfaced on Thursday.

In the video, Clooney, who is married to Amal Alamuddin-Clooney, recounts the beginning of his relationship with the Lebanese-British international human rights lawyer, and casually mentions she met with the Muslim Brotherhood when they came to power in Egypt in 2012, following the revolution that toppled then-President Hosni Mubarak.

According to George, Amal helped them draft the country's new constitution, however some inconsistencies in the timeline make his statement difficult to place in accordance to regional events.

But his humorous story, shared as part of Drew Barrymore's inquiry into how he won over the high-profile lawyer, is all it took for a slew of internet users from Israel and Egypt to misleadingly frame the clip as being about Amal Clooney writing the Egyptian Constitution for the group, which was recently added to the terrorism list by the U.S. Treasury. A jurist involved in the constitution's drafting denied Clooney had such a role.

'She was trying to make a constitution for the Egyptians'

The clip, which dates to 2022, starts with George Clooney joking with Barrymore about how he tried to impress his future wife after their first meeting.

"She was living in London and I went to London to score a movie," he recalls. "And I thought, if you're ever going to impress anybody, it's at Abbey Road [the famous London recording studio] with a 150-piece orchestra. So I called her up and said, 'Do you wanna come visit over at Abbey Road?' and she's like, 'Yeah, I'm at a meeting [with] the Muslim Brotherhood right now and I'll come right over,' because she was in the middle of trying to redo a constitution for the Egyptians."

The two met in July 2013, by which time Mohamed Morsi, elected president a year earlier after the Muslim Brotherhood's victory in the June 2012 elections, had been overthrown by the coup led by Egypt's current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

So, it's difficult to align their Abbey Road moment with her alleged involvement in the constitutional process that followed Egypt's January 2011 revolution, which came at the onset of the Arab Spring.

Moreover, in 2018, in another segment recorded for David Letterman 's Netflix show, George Clooney gave a slightly different version of the purported meeting, saying she had instead "held the Muslim Brotherhood to account for something."

“So she left this meeting," he says, recounting the same phone call from Abbey Road, "where she was trying to hold the Muslim Brotherhood to account for something and we’re here just doing a dumb movie score.”

'During all that time, I never saw Amal Alamuddine'

Apparent confusion, or lack of research, has prompted an array of misleading responses from internet users.

"George Clooney said yesterday in an interview that his wife, Amal Alamuddin, wrote the Muslim Brotherhood's Constitution in 2012, while those hypocrites were making us believe they were drafting the text with the national forces, when in fact it was written in America," said one Egyptian user, sharing the clip in question, initially unearthed by an Israeli account.

"Who dares to drop such a bomb, just like that, on the Drew Barrymore show? How can her [Amal's] advocacy for the Palestinians be credible?" another Israeli user posits, referencing the recent work by the lawyer with a group of experts mandated by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants for the Israeli perpetrators of war crimes in Gaza.

In response to the uproar, an Egyptian jurist, Amr Abdel Hady, who introduces himself as "one of the drafters of the 2012 Constitution," stated on Friday that Amal Clooney had no involvement in drafting the Egyptian Constitution.

"During all this period, I never saw Amal Alamuddin in Egypt, and her name was never mentioned," he states.

"Amal Alamuddin's participation in writing the Constitution would not have been a negative thing, quite the opposite," he adds. "We called on professors specializing in comparative constitutional law from around the world to produce a consensus Constitution worthy of the revolution."

Less than a year after its adoption, that same Constitution was abolished by the coup led by Sisi.

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Now banned in Egypt and considered a "terrorist" group by the U.S., the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organization founded by an Egyptian scholar in 1928, was treated quite differently by Washington at the start of the Arab Spring.

Following his election in June 2012, Morsi spoke on the phone with then-U.S. president Barack Obama and received Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, in Cairo.

Amal has worked extensively in Egypt, including drafting a 2014 report for the International Bar Association criticizing the authoritarian tendencies of the judiciary after Sisi took power.

She also defended Al Jazeera journalist Mohamed Fahmy, who was convicted in the post-Morsi repression in Egypt for allegedly "helping the Muslim Brotherhood." That case was widely condemned internationally by press freedom organizations. L'Orient Today was unable to reach her for comment.