Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a US defamation lawsuit against the rightwing podcaster Candace Owens over the false claim that the French first lady was born a man. The lawsuit describes the allegations as “verifiably false and devastating lies” and part of a “campaign of global humiliation” and “relentless bullying on a worldwide scale”.
The claim, which Owens has repeated to her millions of followers, originated in France in 2021. It asserts that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux, who is in fact her older brother. Trogneux, 80, attended both of Emmanuel Macron’s presidential inaugurations alongside his sister.
The rumour first went viral after a YouTube interview with Natacha Rey, who described herself as an independent investigative journalist and claimed to have spent three years investigating the first lady. The interview came at a time of heightened distrust in French political and media institutions, following the gilets jaunes protests and the Covid pandemic, which killed more than 130,000 people in France.
The French journalist Emmanuelle Anizon, who published a book on the rumour, said it had become “one of the biggest fake news stories worldwide in terms of popularity – a billion people have seen it”. She noted that this was the first time Emmanuel Macron had joined his wife in legal action, marking a new phase in the battle against the conspiracy theory.
Owens said she stood by her narrative. The Macrons’ relationship has long been a subject of online comment; Brigitte, who is 24 years older, was Emmanuel Macron’s school teacher, and they married in 2007.
