French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a US defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens, a rightwing influencer and podcaster who has said France’s first lady “is in fact a man”.
The 218-page lawsuit, filed in Delaware on Wednesday, accuses Owens of publishing “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions”, chief among them that Brigitte Macron was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux.
Owens has also said the French president and his wife are blood relatives and that Emmanuel Macron is a product of a CIA human experiment or “a similar government mind control programme”, according to the Macrons’ court filing.
The suit is a rare case of a serving world leader personally suing an online influencer over their content, though it comes days after Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and its parent companies over a report of a letter that the US president allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein.
The Macrons face a high legal bar, since US defamation laws require public figures to show “actual malice”, meaning that the person knew the information was false or had a reckless disregard for the truth. The Macrons are seeking a jury trial and punitive damages.
“The principle here is truth,” the Macrons’ lawyer Thomas Clare, co-founder of defamation specialist firm Clare Locke, told the Financial Times. “They believe it’s important to stand up for themselves . . . Owens has had multiple opportunities to do the right thing and in response she has only mocked them.”
He said the French president and first lady were willing to travel to Delaware to appear in person for the trial.
“Because Ms Owens systematically reaffirmed these falsehoods in response to each of our attorneys’ repeated requests for a retraction, we ultimately concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue,” the Macrons said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Owens said she would respond on her podcast on Wednesday.
Owens, who is married to George Farmer, the former boss of social media platform Parler, has millions of followers on Instagram and YouTube and made her name as a conservative activist.
The lawsuit says the Macrons have “suffered substantial reputational damage” and have spent “considerable sums of money to correct the public record”.
The defamation case centres on Becoming Brigitte, an eight-part series that Owens released this year, and social media podcasts linked to it. In their filing, the Macrons say Owens has “used [a] false statement” about Brigitte’s gender “to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety and make money”. They say she “ignored multiple attempts by the Macrons to engage”.
Becoming Brigitte has more than 2.3mn views on YouTube.
“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 Macrons said in their filing. “The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”
The theory about Brigitte Macron started in France in 2021, but has since been discussed by US media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan.
Initially the Macrons did not take action so as not to amplify what they have called “toxic” rumours, but in 2022 Brigitte Macron filed a defamation lawsuit in France against a blogger and self-proclaimed clairvoyant who relayed the claims. She initially won the case, but it was overturned on appeal and she is now challenging that decision.
Last year, Emmanuel Macron reacted publicly for the first time, saying: “The worst thing is false information and fabricated scenarios, with people who end up believing them — including in the most private aspects of your life.”
Owens, 36, was once a staunch Trump supporter. She and Farmer, the son of the British life peer and former Conservative party treasurer Michael Farmer, married in 2019 at Trump’s winery in Virginia. But the podcaster has since broken with the president and said she is “embarrassed” that she once campaigned for him.
The Macrons’ filing includes a description of the circumstances in which they met. The president was a 15-year-old student at a Jesuit high school in Amiens when he first encountered Brigitte, then a 39-year-old married teacher with three children.
According to the filings, they “formed a deeper intellectual connection” when she directed a production of the 1971 Milan Kundera play Jacques and His Master in which Macron played the lead role, and later “the two began meeting regularly to collaborate” on another play.
Their relationship “remained within the bounds of the law”, the filings say. But when the teenager’s parents found out about his “strong feelings for his teacher”, they moved him to a different school. Before he left he told her that “whatever you do, I will marry you”.
The lawsuit says the Macrons wrote to Owens in December in a letter that “pointedly denied that the president was statutorily raped”.
Owens mentioned in her series the idea that the French president was connected to MKUltra, a “secret CIA programme that conducted human experiments to develop mind control techniques using drugs, psychological manipulation, and torture”, or “a similar government mind control programme”, according to the document.
It says: “President Macron has not participated in, nor is he the product of, any government mind control programmes.”
Read the full article here
