French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, are suing right-wing commentator Candace Owens for defamation. In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Delaware Superior Court, the Macrons accused Owens of repeating a number of false and defamatory statements, including a transphobic conspiracy theory that the First Lady was assigned male at birth, to “promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.”
Per the suit, Owens’s attacks on Brigitte started in March 2024, when she wrote on X that “I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.” She claimed in another post that Brigitte was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, which is the name of the First Lady’s older brother. After the couple demanded Owens retract her statements, the suit states, Owens also put out an eight-part podcast series, Becoming Brigitte, earlier this year, on which she claimed that the Macrons were blood relatives committing incest and that President Macron gained his title as part of a CIA-operated mind-control program.
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The Macrons refuted her claims and asked her to retract them, but rather than setting the record straight, the suit says, Owens mocked the Macrons and used them to feed her “frenzied fan base.” “These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were false when she published them,” the lawsuit states. “Yet, she published them anyway. And the reason is clear: it is not the pursuit of truth, but the pursuit of fame.”
During a 30-minute livestream Wednesday afternoon, Owens doubled down on her claims and repeated the conspiracy theory several more times. In a statement to the Cut, a spokesperson for Owens said: “Candace Owens is not shutting up. This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist … In France, politicians can bully journalists, but this is not France. It’s America.”
