“This is about defending my honour!”, French President Emmanuel Macron told a French magazine when justifying his decision to go against the advice of others to sue Candace Evans over claims he’d previously reminded are “false and fabricated”.
The French President Emmanuel Macron filed a lawsuit over “substantial reputational damage” against activist and commentator Candace Owens in July over what he called repeated “falsehoods” that the French First Lady is in fact secretly a man. Owens hit back at the suit at that time, calling it an attempt to silence her and hide the truth.
Now President Macron has spoken out in detail for the first time on why he chose to sue Owens in the as-of-yet unresolved case, acknowledging that in doing so he went against advice to leave the matter alone and even that, in doing so, he would invoke the “Streisand Effect” and bring even greater global attention to his family life.
The French leader told Paris Match: “There was a tradition of saying: we have to let it slide. That’s what we did at the beginning.
“At first, it was in France. We were advised not to file a complaint. This risked provoking a ‘Streisand effect,’ which draws even more attention to these lies. But it became so widespread in the United States that we had to react. It’s about upholding the truth… We’re talking about the marital status of the First Lady of France, a wife, a mother, a grandmother.”
There is a deeply personal element for the President too. He told the magazine the falsehood impugns his reputation as a man: “This is about defending my honour! Because it is nonsense”.
The case against Owens was filed for the Macrons in the U.S. state of Delaware. As well as seeking to dispel the transgenderism claims, the suit is also challenging the claim that President Macron is the product of a CIA mind control programme and that he was statutorily raped as a youth by his now-wife when they first met and Macron was a teenager.
President Macron first spoke out on the claims his wife was born male last year. As reported in March 2024, the Macron family decried the allegations as “the same level as people who say the earth is flat or that we are governed by reptiles” and President Macron himself called the idea “false and fabricated” as well as “frustrating”.
The President said the worst part about his job were the “Macho and sexist attacks… false information and invented scenarios” against his “powerful woman” wife, saying these hurt him and his private life.
Those comments came shortly after a court found against two French YouTubers who were handed fines for making such claims in 2023. The court papers stated “two women falsely said Brigitte Macron was born a man”.
President Macron has developed a habit for personally intervening to deny rumours about him. As previously reported, these have included dismissing claims that he’d had a domestic spat with Brigitte in the eye of the public which saw him struck in the face, allegations that he’d shared a bag of cocaine with European leaders on a trip to Ukraine, and assertions that he is a crypto homosexual.
Macron linked these smears to Russian disinformation, saying he was aware those pushing videos online are linked to identifiable “networks” and “extremists in France”.
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