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French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte
This will come in a defamation suit Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron filed against right-wing influencer Candace Owens, who claimed Brigitte was born with male sex characteristics and is therefore transgender.
French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, will present scientific evidence in court that Brigitte is a cisgender woman, their lawyer says.
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The evidence will come in a defamation suit the Macrons filed against far-right influencer Candace Owens, a transphobe who has baselessly claimed that Brigitte Macron was born with male sex characteristics and is therefore transgender. They filed suit in July in Superior Court in Delaware over allegations that Owens has made since March 2024.
Owens has “endorsed, repeated, and published a series of verifiably false and devastating lies about the Macrons, on which this complaint is based,” the suit says. “These outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions included that Mrs. Macron was born a man, stole another person’s identity, and transitioned to become Brigitte; Mrs. Macron and President Macron are blood relatives committing incest; President Macron was chosen to be the President of France as part of the CIA-operated MKUltra program or a similar mind-control program; and Mrs. Macron and President Macron are committing forgery, fraud, and abuses of power to conceal these secrets. These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were false when she published them.”
Related: Beyond the Macrons' lawsuit: Why do people accuse powerful women of being men?
In court, there will be “expert testimony that will come out that will be scientific in nature,” Tom Clare, the Macrons’ lawyer in the case, recently said on the BBC’s Fame Under Fire podcast. He declined to reveal specifics but said Brigitte Macron is committed to openness in the matter, even though it will be uncomfortable for her.
“It is a process that she will have to subject herself to in a very public way,” Clare said on the podcast. “But she's willing to do it. She is firmly resolved to do what it takes to set the record straight. If that unpleasantness and that discomfort that she has of opening herself up in that way is what it takes to set a record straight and stop this, she's 100 percent ready to meet that burden.”
Owens has responded to the suit by saying Brigitte Macron “is definitely a man” and that the couple filed the suit just to get publicity. Owens has sought to have the suit dismissed. In a recent filing, she and her lawyers said the suit is “a ‘politically motivated’ attempt to suppress free speech and punish an American journalist for commentary protected under the First Amendment,” the Daily Mail reports.
Related: Candace Owens claims Donald Trump asked her to stop calling Emmanuel Macron’s wife transgender
No court date has been set for the suit.
The claim that Brigitte Macron is a man “originated in fringe online spaces years earlier, notably through a 2021 YouTube video by French bloggers Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey,” the BBC notes. The Macrons sued the bloggers for defamation and won in 2024, but the ruling was overturned on appeal this year “on freedom of expression grounds, not on the basis of truth,” according to the broadcaster. The Macrons have appealed that ruling.
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