The Macron couple is pursuing an undisclosed sum in damages.
On July 23, conservative commentator Candace Owens found herself on the receiving end of a defamation lawsuit filed by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, following her assertion that the first lady is, in fact, a man.
The Macrons lodged a 22-count complaint in Delaware Superior Court against Owens, her business entity, Candace Owens LLC, and the operator of her website, GeorgeTom Inc., seeking damages that remain unspecified.
The lawsuit cites a March 2024 incident where Owens boldly proclaimed she would “stake [her] entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.”
According to the complaint, “Owens has used this false statement to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.” It continues to assert that Owens has chosen to ignore credible evidence that contradicts her claims, opting instead to amplify conspiracy theories and defamers. Instead of addressing the Macrons’ attempts to clarify the situation, she has purportedly mocked them, using their plight as additional content for her enthusiastic audience.
The lawsuit specifically targets Owens’s podcast series “Becoming Brigitte,” which has garnered over two million views on YouTube, along with related posts on X. The Macrons argue that the series is rife with “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions,” including allegations that Brigitte was born a man, assumed another person’s identity, and underwent a gender transition.
Additional claims within the series purport that the Macrons are “blood relatives committing incest,” that President Macron’s rise to power was orchestrated through a CIA-operated MKUltra program—or something akin to it—and that they are engaged in “forgery, fraud, and abuses of power” to conceal these supposed secrets.
The lawsuit emphasizes, “These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were false when she published them. Yet, she published them anyway. The reason is clear: it is not the pursuit of truth, but the pursuit of fame.”
Owens addressed the lawsuit during a podcast episode on July 23, claiming it is “littered with factual inaccuracies,” although she admitted she had not yet fully reviewed the document.
Interestingly, Brigitte Macron was a 39-year-old married mother when she met Emmanuel Macron—a teenage student—while teaching at the high school he attended. They wed in 2007.
The lawsuit notes that speculation about Brigitte Macron’s gender first surfaced on social media in 2021 and has been echoed by notable commentators, including Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
One particularly dubious allegation is that Brigitte was originally a male named Jean-Michel Trogneux, which is, in fact, the name of her older brother, according to the Macron family.
Owens is accused of perpetuating such “lies” in her series, which the lawsuit claims has inflicted significant harm on the Macrons. “Defendants have subjected the Macrons to a campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies. Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history—twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade. The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale,” the complaint states.
Faced with this “relentless and unjustified smear campaign,” the Macrons felt they had no option but to seek legal recourse “to set the record straight, prevent further harm, and hold Defendants accountable for their conduct.”
Responding to the complaint, Owens characterized the lawsuit as an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy,” remarking that she was being “sued by the first lady man of France.” She claimed her legal team had been in discussions with the Macrons’ lawyers since January but had received no advance warning regarding the impending lawsuit.
A spokesperson for Owens contended that the lawsuit represents an attempt to intimidate her, particularly after Brigitte Macron declined Owens’s repeated requests for an interview.
“This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist,” the spokesperson asserted.
This isn’t Brigitte Macron’s first foray into the legal realm concerning claims about her gender. In 2021, she took legal action against two women, Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, for spreading similar allegations on social media. A lower court found the women guilty of defamation in September 2024, ordering them to pay damages to both Brigitte Macron and her brother. However, a Paris appeals court overturned these convictions in July, determining that their comments did not amount to defamation and were made in good faith, thus representing free speech.
Currently, Brigitte Macron is appealing this decision in France’s highest court.
The French Embassy in the United States was unavailable for comment.
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