Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a defamation lawsuit against a right-wing US podcaster who claimed the French president’s spouse was formerly a man. The 218-page complaint against Candace Owens, who boasts millions of followers on X and YouTube, was submitted by the Macrons in Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday, seeking a jury trial and unspecified punitive damages.
In a statement released by their lawyer, the Macrons asserted that they filed the lawsuit after Owens repeatedly ignored requests to retract false and defamatory statements made in an eight-part YouTube and podcast series titled ‘Becoming Brigitte’. According to the Macrons, the series disseminated “verifiably false and devastating lies,” including allegations that Brigitte stole another person’s identity and transitioned to female, and that the Macrons are blood relatives engaged in incest.
Their complaint details the circumstances surrounding the Macrons’ initial meeting, when the now 47-year-old president was a high school student and Brigitte was a teacher. It stated their relationship “remained within the bounds of the law.” “Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” the Macrons declared. “We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused. It is our earnest hope that this lawsuit will set the record straight and end this campaign of defamation once and for all,” they added.
In her podcast on Wednesday, Owens countered, “This lawsuit is littered with factual inaccuracies” and is part of an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy” to smear her character. Owens also claimed she was unaware a lawsuit was imminent, despite lawyers for both sides having communicated since January. A spokesperson for Owens characterized the lawsuit itself as an effort to bully her, following Brigitte’s rejection of Owens’s repeated requests for an interview.
The spokesperson stated, “This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.”
Have World Leaders Sued for Defamation Before?
Wednesday’s lawsuit is a rare instance of a world leader suing for defamation. United States President Donald Trump has also pursued legal action in the courts, including a $10 billion lawsuit accusing The Wall Street Journal of defaming him by alleging he created a lewd birthday greeting for the disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The Journal has stated it will defend against that case and has full confidence in its reporting.
Meanwhile, in December, Trump reached a $15 million settlement with Walt Disney-owned ABC over an inaccurate claim that a jury found him liable for rape, rather than sexual assault, in a civil lawsuit. To prevail in US defamation cases, public figures must demonstrate that defendants engaged in “actual malice,” a stringent legal standard requiring proof that the defendants knew what they published was false or showed reckless disregard for its truth.
