Candace Owens Doubles Down on Macron Claims, Despite Lawsuit
SINCE LEAVING THE DAILY WIRE in March 2024, Candace Owens has built much of her career as a right-wing media star on a bold claim: that French first lady Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman committing a host of crimes, and that she may be in an incestuous marriage to her “son,” French President Emmanuel Macron. Owens has repeatedly, almost monomaniacally, pushed this theory, even vowing to stake her career on the allegation. She went so far as to beg the Macrons to sue her if it wasn’t true, offering to pay their legal bills to do it.
Well, the Macrons did just that. Following an eight-part podcast series Owens produced laying out her claims, the French couple sued Owens for defamation in Delaware court last week.
And the Macrons aren’t kidding around. Their complaint is 219 pages long, and they’re represented by Clare Locke, the prominent libel firm famous for taking down Gawker.
But Owens isn’t backing down, either. Since being sued, she has devoted four episodes of her show to re-airing her allegations against the Macrons.
Along with having the potential that Owens will have to pay massive damages, the lawsuit is interesting for two reasons: the split it has exposed in the MAGA right between Owens and many of her compatriots, and the potential it has to cause real headaches for Donald Trump, who has had to tend to some awkwardly complicated diplomatic relations.
I recently had the displeasure of diving very deep into Owens’s allegations. And while they’re a little hard to sum up, in part because her story keeps shifting—as the Macrons’ lawsuit notes, Owens dropped some of her “evidence” as it has been disproven—to describe them as unhinged doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.
Essentially, Owens claims that Brigitte Macron is in fact her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, who transitioned into Brigitte in his thirties and committed plenty of identity fraud along the way. Owens goes on to allege that Emmanuel Macron is a victim of Jean-Michel’s grooming.
She gets more outlandish from there. The Macrons, she insists, are possibly linked to a centuries-old cult called the “Frankists,” devoted to undermining Western civilization at every turn. Emmanuel Macron is the victim of the CIA’s MKUltra brainwashing (just google it). Perhaps, Owens has said, Emmanuel is Brigitte’s (er, Jean-Michel’s???) son. Owens also alleges that both members of the presidential couple are being blackmailed by a sinister cabal. Who isn’t?
THERE’S A LOT OF EVIDENCE that Owens’s core claims are not true, including photographs and Brigitte Macron’s birth announcement in a local newspaper. Brigitte Macron also has adult children who look a lot like her. Owens explains that away by arguing that Jean-Michel actually had those children as a man with a woman who looks a lot like Brigitte Macron but is not Brigitte Macron. Like I said, this is hard to sum up.
As for Jean-Michel Trogneux, he’s still around! The Macron lawsuit provides pictures of him at Emmanuel Macron’s presidential investitures, sometimes even in the same frame as his sister, meaning no single transgender Macron could have done a quick outfit change to fool the camera (though, perhaps they pulled a Prestige-like trick, hmm). The lawyers also claim to have voting cards establishing that the brother and sister voted in the same election but in different cities, proving they are separate individuals.
The Macrons’ complaint lists many more pieces of evidence proving that Owens’s claims are wrong.
But those are pesky fact checks. The real legal problems for Owens come in a separate part of the complaint