Brigitte Macron will present evidence in a US court to counter a conspiracy theory about her gender. Photo / Getty Images
Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, is taking the extraordinary step of presenting evidence to a United States court that she is a woman.
It comes as part of a defamation suit filed by the Macrons in July against far-right US commentator Candace Owens, who has been fanning a bizarre conspiracy theory that Brigitte was born male and has been concealing her transgender status.
The Macrons’ lawyer, Tom Clare, said yesterday that the couple would present “expert testimony” that was “scientific in nature”.
He added: “It is incredibly upsetting to think that you have to go and subject yourself, to put this type of proof forward.”
But Brigitte, he noted, “is firmly resolved to do what it takes to set the record straight”.
The Macrons’ claim against Owens alleges that she “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favour of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers”.
Trump-supporting Owens is one of the most prominent proponents of the outlandish rumour about Brigitte Macron’s gender status, along with fellow conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who supercharged the gossip after claiming it was true in a video posted on YouTube in March.
Owens first latched on to the rumour last year, posting a video to her YouTube channel titled “Is France’s first lady a man?” Promoting it on X, she wrote: “Stop everything and watch this! Not a joke or an exaggeration to say that, barring political assassinations, this is likely the biggest scandal that has ever happened in politics in human history.”
Since then, the story has become a popular topic in the parts of the internet frequented by followers of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
In her March 2024 video (since deleted), Owens referred to the likely source of the rumour: a 2021 article in right-wing French journal Faits et Documents, which claimed that Brigitte, 71, and her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux were the same person.
The story posited that Jean-Michel doesn’t exist: Brigitte was born Jean-Michel, then transitioned from male to female at the age of 30.
“I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” announced Owens in a follow-up post on X.
“Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment.” She added: “The implications here are terrifying.”
This episode is blowing up so I just want to say—After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man. Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as…
— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) March 12, 2024
The video, in Owens’ words, “blew up”, which perhaps explains why this became her pet topic. She has since treated her 4.07 million YouTube subscribers to numerous posts about the French first lady, including a multi-part video series called Becoming Brigitte.
Owens is undeterred by critics of her campaign, including Piers Morgan. On his show in June 2024, Morgan – who called her claims “very offensive, very wrong” – bet Owens $100,000 (to be donated to charity) that Brigitte Macron was a woman.
Then, in a January 2025 video titled “I Got A Legal Threat From A Sitting President…”, Owens said she was contacted by a law firm representing the Macrons. She shared a section of that letter, which read: “This disinformation campaign is almost entirely based on a negative – Mrs Macron has not provided definitive proof that she is a woman; therefore, she must be a man.”
The letter argued that Brigitte Macron did not owe Owens proof – “frankly, it is none of your business” – and claimed that Owens was being “defamatory”.
Attracting the attention of France’s first family has only fuelled Owens’ campaign. In February, she posted a video interview with French journalist Xavier Poussard, editor of Faits et Documents and author of the book Devenir Brigitte, or Becoming Brigitte, which subsequently shot to the top of the Amazon charts. That video has clocked up 2.6 million views to date.
It’s exactly the outcome Poussard was hoping for, according to Emmanuelle Anizon, a journalist at French weekly Le Nouvel Obs and author of a book about the conspiracy, called L’affaire Madame – Anatomie d’une fake news, or The Madame Affair – Anatomy of Fake News.
She told Agence France-Presse last year that Poussard started translating his Macron articles into English in 2023 and sent them to Trump associates. It was his dream, Anizon added, “to export this rumour across the Atlantic”.
The claim had initially been a homegrown obsession. Self-described journalist Natacha Rey amplified the Faits et Documents story via a four-hour YouTube video in December 2021, in which she was interviewed by spiritual medium Amandine Roy, and called Brigitte Macron’s identity a “state lie”.
She claimed that Brigitte’s first husband, André-Louis Auzière, never existed, and that Auzière’s uncle had forged documents to hide the fact that his wife had given birth to Macron’s three children.
The video spread widely in the build-up to France’s 2022 presidential election, garnering half a million views before YouTube removed it for violating its guidelines around fake news.
But the genie was out of the bottle. The hashtag #JeanMichelTrogneux, referring to Brigitte’s alleged male name, was trending on Twitter (now X) in France in the days after the video was posted.
In total, it was used on the platform more than 66,000 times while being spread by accounts including those administered by anti-vaccine groups and followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement, which claims the world is run by a cabal of cannibalistic paedophiles.
Speaking at an event in Paris in March 2024, the French President said of the rumour: “The worst thing is the false information and fabricated scenarios. People eventually believe them and disturb you, even in your intimacy.” The same month, Brigitte’s daughter, Tiphaine Auzière, told broadcaster BFMTV that the rumours were “grotesque” and “a form of harassment”.
The first lady filed a successful libel complaint against Roy and Rey. In September last year, the defendants were ordered to pay her the equivalent of about NZ$15,500 in damages, as well as about $9600 to her brother Jean-Michel. Macron’s lawyer, Jean Ennochi, commented: “The prejudice is massive, it exploded everywhere.”
However, the Macrons’ spirited public defence has, ironically, kept the story alive. Owens heard of the rumour thanks to an article about the couple’s response.
Then Carlson picked up the baton. In a YouTube video, he backed the claim made by “my friend Candace Owens”. He said he had initially dismissed the rumour as a “flat Earth” conspiracy. “Then it turns out she’s right – my mind is blown!” he declared, offering no justification for his assertion.
Russian state media also picked up Owens’ coverage – to her evident pride, as demonstrated in a video in which she watches herself in a Russian TV report. “I didn’t realise how amazing my name sounds in a Russian accent,” she remarks.
For others, the “truth” is even stranger. Owens fan Gabby Garcia took to TikTok in February with a bizarre Oedipal plot twist. She claimed that the president wasn’t just married to a trans woman; Macron was actually his own father. “I know that it sounds insane,” said Garcia, in arguably the understatement of the year. “My brain is melting.”
She was not alone. But how on earth did this absurd accusation gain global traction? Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology in society at the University of Cambridge, points out that we live in an increasingly fragmented media environment. “We don’t have central dissemination of news. Instead, people are in tiny echo chambers, slavishly trusting their chosen sources of information.
“It’s hard for us to share the same reality. Those are ideal conditions for conspiracy theories to thrive. Even if people don’t fully believe in a rumour, they might share it as a symbol of their beliefs or the political group they support.”
Joseph Uscinski, professor of political science at the University of Miami, observes that the likes of Owens and Tucker have “a built-in, conspiracy-minded audience. Those viewers didn’t slip on a banana peel and end up here: they specifically chose a channel outside of the mainstream media. The broadcasters then have to provide the content they desire. The Macron story is ideal fodder. It feeds into their existing biases, plus it’s outrageous and fun.”
Such audiences might not even know who Brigitte Macron is, but this conspiracy relates to a larger narrative, says van der Linden. “It’s a combination of evil elites hiding stuff from us and not being who they say they are, and suspicion of trans people and gender ideology.
“It’s a more palatable version of the conspiracy that powerful leaders are actually lizards – that’s a bridge too far for most people.” Indeed, Owens often ticks off other culture war topics in her Macron videos, such as anti-vax sentiments.
The transgender accusation is clearly recycled, says van der Linden. “The exact same story was peddled about Michelle Obama and Jacinda Ardern.”
But even if it’s patently nonsense, the fact that many current world leaders, “especially Trump and his allies”, are engaging in conspiracy theory rhetoric means that it’s harder to dismiss it outright, says Uscinski. “Tucker and Candace are piggybacking on Trump.”
That points to the deadly serious part of this otherwise ludicrous saga. Relations between France and America are already much troubled, with one French politician, Raphaël Glucksmann, claiming in March that the country should take back the Statue of Liberty after what he characterised as President Trump deciding to “side with the tyrants” in the war on Ukraine. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt fired back, saying that, if it weren’t for the US, the French would be “speaking German right now”.
It’s not inconceivable that, if the rumour becomes associated with supporters of Trump, the issue could add further strain to an already tricky relationship between the US President and his French counterpart. Such an outcome would certainly be welcome in Moscow, says van der Linden: “Russia’s goal is to stoke division and chaos.”
In August, Emmanuel Macron told Paris Match magazine why it was so important to pursue legal action against Owens. “This is about defending my honour. Because this is nonsense. This is someone who knew full well that she had false information, and did so with the aim of causing harm, in the service of an ideology and with established connections to far-Right leaders.”
Unsubstantiated rumours, after all, can often have very real consequences.