France1st Lady Sues RightExtremist CandaceOwen For Conspiracy Accusing Her of Transgenderism
 |
| (Our Left) Mrs.Macron (Our right) Extremist Candace Owens |
Them
Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron, the president and first lady of France, filed a lawsuit against far-right pundit Candace Owens this week for spreading a conspiracy theory based on the false claim that Brigitte is secretly a transgender woman.
The lawsuit, filed in Delaware on Wednesday, alleges that Owens has spread “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” about Brigitte Macron since March 2024, culminating in Owens’ eight-part podcast series “Becoming Brigitte” earlier this year. In that time, the suit contends, Owens repeatedly insisted to her audience that Brigitte was “born a man” named Jean-Michel — in reality, the name of her older brother — secretly underwent a gender transition after “fathering” her three children, and conspired to kill at least one journalist to cover up her supposed “secret.” The Macrons are seeking damages for 22 charges of defamation, defamation by implication, and “false light” (a charge similar to defamation, alleging that a false statement was made with “reckless disregard” for the subject).
Owens’ false claims, per the lawsuit, stem in large part from similar statements made in 2021 by journalist Natacha Rey and “spiritual medium” Amadine Roy, who were found to have slandered the Macrons in 2024; a French appeals court dismissed the fines against both women earlier this month, finding that Rey and Roy made the statements in “good faith.” Brigitte Macron and her brother both reportedly plan to appeal the dismissal with France’s highest appeals court. Those allegations — including the claim that the Macrons’ marriage is incestuous, that Brigitte stole her brother’s name, and that the French government has carried out assassinations to cover up the supposed “state secret” — were widely circulated in the years since, thanks in part to the efforts of right-wing conspiracists like Owens, a staunch ally of French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
The concept of digging for “clues” to determine if certain public figures are trans has exploded on the far right over the past several years, now colloquially dubbed “transvestigation.” As author and gender theorist Julia Serano noted last year, attempting to discern someone’s gender from physical characteristics is a habit most humans pick up early in our cognitive development (and one she argues can and should be unlearned). But some right-wingers go far beyond that basic tendency by intensely scrutinizing people they believe are trans — an attempt to “ungender” them, in Serano’s terms — and for people like Owens, that hyperscrutiny is often linked to broader conspiracies that allege LGBTQ+ people are child abusers and/or part of a Satanic plot to control the world. (Others targeted by such “transvestigation” conspiracies include Michelle Obama, whom far-right figures have claimed is named Michael and serves as former president Barack Obama’s “beard,” based mainly on racist perceptions of her physical features.)
As the Macrons’ new lawsuit notes, Owens’ false and unsupported claims about Brigitte Macron are far-ranging, even accusing the Macron family of being connected to the CIA’s notorious MKUltra mind control experiments as part of what Owens publicly alleged was a “demonic state secret.” In a July 2024 episode of Owens’ podcast — while discussing that year’s Olympic Games in Paris, at which the political right relentlessly “transvestigated” Algerian boxer Imane Khelif — Owens claimed that the Games’ opening ceremony featuring drag performers was orchestrated to “honor Brigitte Macron” as a trans woman; she then went on to situate Brigitte Macron’s alleged transness as part of a global Satanic conspiracy that has “mass poisoned” the public with “atheism.”
“We’re now at a point where science is instructing children that they can just choose their own sex [...] And still, people did not believe that we were fighting Satan,” Owens said, as the watchdog group Media Matters noted at the time. Owens went on to claim that “this world is being run by a very small group of elite oligarchs who routinely practice homosexuality and pedophilia and who believe in Baphomet as a deity and who worship a transgender deity,” which she claimed was part of a pattern that had played out across “every modern society and ancient society.”
Wild, anti-LGBTQ+ claims like these have become the backbone of Owens’ media career since she publicly denounced liberal politics in 2017. In the years since, Owens emerged as a major figure in the right-wing “groomer” smear campaign against trans people, leading her to accuse Disney of being complicit in the “sexualization of our children in the classroom” and call LGBTQ+ people generally a “sexual plague” on society. Owens has even denied that Nazi scientist Josef Mengele performed experiments on concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust, falsely claiming that documentation of the experiments is anti-Christian “propaganda.” The Trump administration announced in February that it would make “eradicating anti-Christian bias” a major priority.
Comments