French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed a defamation lawsuit in the US yesterday against right-wing influencer and podcaster Candace Owens, centered on her claim that France’s first lady is male.
The Macrons said in a lawsuit filed in Delaware Superior Court that Owens has waged a lie-filled “campaign of global humiliation” to promote her podcast and expand her “frenzied” fan base.
The Macrons said the lies included that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, the actual name of her older brother.
“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 complaint said. “The result,” the complaint added, “is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Owens called the lawsuit itself an effort to bully her, after Brigitte Macron rejected Owens’ repeated requests for an interview.
“Candace Owens is not shutting up,” the spokesperson said. “This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.”
In a joint statement released by their lawyers, the Macrons said they sued after Owens rejected three demands that she retract defamatory statements.
“Ms Owens’s campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” the Macrons said. “We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused.”
To prevail in US defamation cases, public figures must show defendants engaged in “actual malice,” a tough legal standard requiring proof the defendants knew what they published was false or had reckless disregard for its truth.
Owens has more than 6.9 million followers on X and more than 4.5m YouTube subscribers.
The Macrons’ lawsuit focuses on the eight-part podcast Becoming Brigitte, which has more than 2.3m views on YouTube, and X posts linked to it.
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