French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte filed a defamation lawsuit in the U.S. on Wednesday against right-wing influencer and podcaster Candace Owens, centered on her claim that France’s first lady is male.
The Macrons said in a complaint filed in Delaware Superior Court that Owens has waged a lie-filled “campaign of global humiliation” to promote her podcast and expand her “frenzied” fan base.
These lies included that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, the actual name of her older brother, the Macrons said.
“Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history — twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade,” the complaint said.
“The result,” the complaint added, “is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”
In her podcast on Wednesday, Owens said, “This lawsuit is littered with factual inaccuracies,” and part of an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy” to smear her character.
Owens also said she did not know a lawsuit was coming, though lawyers for both sides had been communicating since January.
A spokesperson for Owens called the lawsuit itself an effort to bully her, after Brigitte Macron rejected Owens’ repeated requests for an interview.
“This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist,” the spokesperson said.
In a joint statement released by their lawyers, the Macrons said they sued after Owens rejected three demands that she retract defamatory statements.
“Ms. Owens’s campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” the Macrons said. “We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused.”
