Macrons Take Candace Owens to Court in Tennessee Over ‘Outlandish’ Claim French First Lady Was Born a Man

President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, are seeking restitution from podcaster Candace Owens in a Tennessee court, accusing the controversial commentator of laundering the lie that the French first lady was born a man. The lawsuit underscores the aggressive legal stance assumed by the president of the Fifth Republic, whose term ends in May.The Macrons’ complaint, which runs to 409 pages, was docketed last week in federal court at Nashville. Ms. Owens, a Nashville resident who broadcasts from there, has declared that she “would stake her entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron, the First Lady of France, is in fact a man.” The Macrons have been married for 19 years. Brigitte Macron is 24 years older than her husband.Ms. Owens elaborated on that claim in a podcast series, “Becoming Brigitte,” on her eponymous show, “Candace,” and in posts on social media. She also sold merchandise promoting the claim, which she first advanced in 2024 and which rests on the theory that Ms. Macron assumed another person’s identity. The Macrons first sued Ms. Owens for defamation in Delaware last year, but Ms. Owens was removed from the case last month after a federal judge found that the court lacked jurisdiction over actions undertaken beyond the borders of the First State. The suit against two of Ms. Owens’s business entities remains pending in Delaware because they are headquartered there.When the Delaware dismissal was handed down, Ms. Owens declared that the “case represents one of the grossest legal overreaches by a foreign government leader in human history — a sitting President’s attempt to personally bankrupt a single podcaster from outside the nation in which he governs.”After her dismissal from the Delaware case, Ms. Owens reflected, “I am in the absolute best mood over this Macron dismissal. Feels like a year and a half of my family having to deal with psychotic lies regarding pending bankruptcies, secret accounts and plans to flee the country, has finally come to end.”The Macrons are seeking monetary damages from the Tennessee suit as well as an injunction barring Ms. Owens from republishing statements that the court determines are defamatory. The Macrons’ legal team notes that Ms. Owens “was adamant that Tennessee is where this case belongs because it’s where she lives. With this filing, we are giving her exactly what she has repeatedly demanded.”The complaint accuses Ms. Owens of propagating “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” and of using her podcast to “expand her lies about the Macrons, sell merchandise making fun of the Macrons, and collect donations based on her ‘reporting’ on the Macrons.” The French first couple write that this campaign was undertaken to satisfy Ms. Owens’s “frenzied fan base,” which amounts to “7.7 million followers on X and 6.1 million subscribers on YouTube.”Ms. Owens has hawked a T-shirt portraying Ms. Macron as Time magazine’s “Man of the Year” and described the French first lady’s gender as the “biggest scandal in political history.” The Macrons first met when the future president was 15 and Brigitte was 39, married, with children — and his teacher at Lycée La Providence, a Catholic school in Amiens.The Macrons’ complaint describes the toll of the allegations: “Every time the Macrons leave their home, they do so knowing that countless people have heard, and many believe, these vile fabrications. It is invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust.” The couple are seeking a “substantial” monetary award, while Ms. Owens dismisses the lawsuit as “an obvious and desperate public relations strategy.”The Macrons argue that Ms. Owens has defamed Ms. Macron because of the podcaster’s “disdain for Mrs. Macron’s perceived sex and gender identity, for President Macron’s perceived sexual orientation, and for what she perceives as the Macrons’ connections to Jewish people.” The lawsuit alleges that she indulges in a “range of conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine falsehoods, long-debunked antisemitic tropes such as blood libel, and Holocaust distortion.”The Macrons will have to clear a high legal bar for their suit against Ms. Owens to prosper. In 1964, the Supreme Court held in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that public figures seeking to prevail in defamation suits must prove “actual malice,” meaning that the defendant — here, Ms. Owens — either knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false. The sheer volume of Ms. Owens’s statements, combined with her refusal to disavow the ones at issue here, could help the Macrons clear the constitutional bar.

Macrons Take Candace Owens to Court in Tennessee Over ‘Outlandish’ Claim French First Lady Was Born a Man

Macrons Take Candace Owens to Court in Tennessee Over ‘Outlandish’ Claim French First Lady Was Born a Man

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