French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have sued Candace Owens for defamation after claiming as truth that the first lady is a man.
In March 2024, Candace Owens, a right-wing podcaster, told the world she “would stake [her] entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron [the First Lady of France] is in fact a man.” Since then, Owens has used this false statement to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money. Owens disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favor of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers. And rather than engage with President and Mrs. Macron’s attempts to set the record straight, Owens mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base.Owens did not stop there. Retaliating against the Macrons for the “audacity” of sending her a retraction demand, Owens helmed an eight part podcast series entitled “Becoming Brigitte” (the “Series”) and accompanying X posts. Throughout the Series, Owens and her entities, Candace Owens LLC and GeorgeTom, Inc., endorsed, repeated, and published a series of verifiably false and devastating lies about the Macrons, on which this complaint is based. 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.
Remember, public figures have a higher standard to prove defamation. They have to prove “actual malice.”
1. Knowledge of Falsity of a Statement
2. Reckless Disregard for the Truth
The Macrons have a case against Owens.
“These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were false when she published them,” the Macrons claimed in the lawsuit. “Yet, she published them anyway.”
I agree:
For the reasons set forth in detail above, Defendants made the defamatory Statements with actual malice, including with actual, subjective awareness of their falsity, as evidenced by the facts that Defendants:(a) Made the Statements despite having actual knowledge that they were false, including based on evidence in their possession and available to them that they actually reviewed;(b) Relied on sources who were obviously biased against President and Mrs. Macron and whom Defendants knew to be biased against President and Mrs. Macron;(c) Made the Statements as part of a preconceived narrative that President and Mrs. Macron have lied to the public about Mrs. Macron’s identity, perpetrated abuses of power, and engaged in physical violence toward individuals investigating them;(d) Deliberately ignored voluminous evidence in their possession and available to them—as detailed above—that contradicted the preconceived narrative they wanted to tell about President and Mrs. Macron;(e) Made the Statements for the purpose of generating and obtaining media attention for themselves and their business, to enrich themselves at the expense of the truth; and
Here’s some of the evidence.
In 2024, Brigitte won a case against Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy, named as nonparties in the lawsuit, after a court found that they defamed her “for spreading false rumors that Mrs. Macron was born Jean-Michel Trogneux and later stole the identity of Brigitte Trogneux.”
“The defamation suit confirmed that Rey’s and Roy’s claims that all documents related to Mrs. Macron’s birth, marriage, divorce, and childbearing were forged to conceal her actual sex were false,” the lawsuit explained.
The Macrons claim Owens digested all the debunked information to bolster her story and continued as it gained more attention.
The Macrons began attempting communication with Owens in December 2024, including reports proving Brigitte is a woman:
The December Retraction Demand reminded Owens that in addition to a first communion photo and family photo, there are additional publicly available photos of Mrs. Macron as a child. In one such photo, Mrs. Macron is playing in a garden as a young girl. This photo was mentioned in the 2021 Daily Mail debunking article and the December Retraction Demand, but Owens never shared it with her viewers because it does not fit her preconceived narrative.
I’d say that’s definite reckless disregard for the truth, especially with this part:
Rather than reconsider her false claims, Owens doubled down, blaming the Macrons for her content being removed from YouTube and vowing not to retract what she “deems to be the truth.”
That is no different than people saying “my truth.” Facts don’t care about your feels or thoughts.
The Macrons also noted Owens’ past behavior peddling conspiracy theories, concentrating on her antisemitic statement: “She has promoted a range of conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine falsehoods, longdebunked antisemitic tropes such as blood libel, and Holocaust distortion—going so far as to dismiss the atrocities of Josef Mengele’s medical experiments as mere ‘propaganda.'”
The Macrons said Owens’ statement “have caused tremendous damage” to them, subjecting them “to a campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies.”
This case is one of the most clear-cut defamation suits I’ve seen.
I’m still ticked Sarah Palin got nowhere with her lawsuit against The New York Times because that’s another obvious defamation case.
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