Ten people accused of sexist cyber-bullying of the French president’s wife, Brigitte Macron, are due to go on trial this week in Paris.
The defendants are accused of spreading unsubstantiated claims over her gender and sexuality, as well as making “malicious remarks” about the 24-year age gap between Brigitte and her husband, Emmanuel Macron.
If found guilty, the defendants face up to two years’ imprisonment.
Among the ten people due to appear in the dock on Monday and Tuesday are an elected official, a gallery owner and a teacher, according to French media.
Two of them – self-styled independent journalist Natacha Rey and internet fortune-teller Amandine Roy – were found guilty of slander last year for claiming that France’s first lady had never existed, and that her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux had changed gender and started using her name.
But a court of appeals later acquitted Rey and Roy on the grounds that their statements did not constitute defamation. Mrs Macron and her brother are appealing the decision.
A conspiracy theory centred around the notion that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman has been swirling since her husband won a first term in office in 2017.
The unsubstantiated claims over Mrs Macron’s gender have been gaining ground in the US, mostly promoted by right-wing influencer Candace Owens.
Last July the Macrons filed a lawsuit against Owens, alleging that she “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favour of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers”.
Speaking to the BBC’s Fame Under Fire podcast, the Macrons’ lawyer in the case, Tom Clare, said that Brigitte Macron had found the claims “incredibly upsetting” and they were a “distraction” to the French president.
“It is incredibly upsetting to think that you have to go and subject yourself, to put this type of proof forward,” he said.
Emmanuel Macron has said pursuing legal action against Owens was about “defending his honour” and that the influencer had peddled false information “with the aim of causing harm, in the service of an ideology and with established connections to far-right leaders.”
Mrs Macron first met her now-husband when she was a teacher at his secondary school.
The couple ended up marrying in 2007, when Mr Macron was 29 and Mrs Macron was 54.
While speaking at an International Women’s Day event in Paris on Friday after he guaranteed the right to abortion in France’s Constitution, Macron became emotional and angry as he addressed the rumors that are currently circulating about his wife, who he married in 2007 after carrying out an affair with her as a teenager when he was a student and she was his teacher.
Daily Mail reported that Macron defended his wife from the rumors while expressing his frustration that they continue to spread.
“The worst thing is the false information and fabricated scenarios,” he lamented. “People eventually believe them and disturb you, even in your intimacy.”
Macron went on to say that the transgender claims about Brigitte are typical of misogynistic online attacks that women are forced to put up with every day.
Brigitte’ lookalike daughter, the attorney Tiphaine Auzaine, 40, recently spoke out to defend her mother in a rare interview.
“I have concerns about the level of society when I hear what is circulating on social networks about my mother being a man,” Auzaine said last month, according to The New York Post. “The confidence of what is affirmed and the credit given to what is proclaimed. Anyone can say anything about anyone, and it takes time to get it taken down.”
Last summer, a court in Normandy handed down a defamation ruling against two French women, the psychic Amandine Roy, 52, and freelance journalist Natacha Rey, 48, after they alleged in a since-deleted four-hour YouTube video in 2021 that Brigitte was born as a baby boy named Jean-Michel Trogneux in 1953. This is actually the name of the French First Lady’s brother.
They also claimed that Brigitte’s first husband, André-Louis Auzière, had never actually existed before he passed away in 2019 at the age of 68. Rey alleged that Jean-Louis Auzière, André-Louis’ uncle, had forged official documents to hide that his wife had given birth to all three of Brigitte’s children. Roy was fined under $1,000 while Rey was fined $500.
Brigitte Macron had attacked the 2 journalists that claimed she was a man. French justice clearly stated that journalists had not breached French laws. Brigitte Macron NEVER attacked the journalists on their claim that she was a man but rather, attacked them on “violation of… pic.twitter.com/JsHk2cnqfm
— Angelo Giuliano 🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻🔻 安德龙 (@angeloinchina) March 15, 2024
Earlier this week, the American conservative media personality Candace Owens did a deep dive on the claims about Brigitte being born a man.
“I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” she said afterwards, according to Yahoo News. “Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment. I have never seen anything like this in my life. The implications here are terrifying.”
Owens believes that the Macrons are being blackmailed to keep Brigitte’s alleged history of being born a boy a secret, and that the blackmail includes pressure for the president to back certain policies. Check out her full comments on this in the video below.
In certain circles, rumors have spread for years that the American former First Lady Michelle Obama is actually transgender. It will certainly be interesting to see if more evidence comes out to back the claims that Brigitte Macron was born a male.
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DUNKIRK, France — Emmanuel Macron couldn’t have hoped for a more engaging crowd.
A group of women — workers with hard helmets and protective gear — were asking for a photo. “You’re being mobbed by the women of Aluminium Dunkerque!” they laughed.
Standing amid the crowd of factory workers in the port city of Dunkirk, the French president was in his element: shaking hands, fielding questions and taking selfies. “Any more questions?” he asked.
But he did not address the elephant in the room. And none of the blue-collar workers shouted about Macron’s unpopular, controversial pensions reform. It wasn’t that nobody dared ruin the unveiling of an electric battery giga-factory project; Rather these workers had been hand-picked by their employer.
In the past weeks, Macron has been hitting the road across France visiting towns big and small, in what he has called a bid to “engage” with the people after the bruising debates over his controversial pensions reform.
France has been rocked by weeks of protests in the wake of the French president’s decision to bypass parliament and push througha reform raising the age of retirement to 64 from 62. The forcing through of the reform was widely seen as yet another manifestation of Macron’s famously “Jupiterian” governance style — a vertical, top-down manner of running the country.
Though nationwide protests have ebbed since the reform became law in April, Macron’s initial visits had been dogged by ad-hoc demonstrations called casserolades [casserole protests], organized by trade unionists and protesters against his reforms. The tightly-controlled show in Dunkirk followed more tumultuous scenes during his initial visits. In the eastern region of Alsace, Macron faced booing crowds and power cuts during his visit to a local factory in April, which were claimed by the hard-line CGT trade union.
In Dunkirk, police secure the area ahead of the French president’s visit | Clea Caulcutt
For the French president, it has meant a clampdown on visits. Encounters with the public are minutely choreographed to avoid bad publicity, with details unveiled at the very last minute.
In Dunkirk, over 1,000 police officers were deployed to secure the area visited by the president, erecting barricades, closing streets and banning cars in the town center. Such scenes are unusual in France where successive presidents have enjoyed freely mingling with the people. On the sidelines of his visit, POLITICO caught up with the French president to ask him about his charm offensive.
“Of course, it’s great … I’m trying to reach out [to the people] … to explain the coherence of what we are doing. We get results when we are coherent and consistent,” he said.
On his difficulties in connecting with the public, Macron said: “My visits are simple … The overwhelming majority of the French may be against the pensions reform … But I do not confuse people who disagree with me with the small minority that are prone to disrespect and invective.”
Police surround a protestor during Macron’s visit to Alsace, April 2023 | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
Grabbing the limelight
In addition to touring the country in recent weeks, Macron has relentlessly blitzed the media sphere, granting multiple interviews to the French and international press, while putting forward a string of government proposals for improving education, tackling immigration and bringing back industry.
“In appearance, Emmanuel Macron and [his prime minister] Elisabeth Borne adopted a very efficient strategy. In drowning out the news, with their visits, their proposals and their new measures, they were able to impose a new agenda,” said Bruno Cautrès, a politics researcher at Sciences Po University.
“But the data shows that the public has not moved on,” he added. This month several polls showed a majority of the French still support the protest movement against the president’s centerpiece reform.
Even if nationwide protests over the pensions reform havetapered off, concerns are rising about increasing violence against elected officials and personal attacks against the president. In the southern city of Avignon, residents woke up last week to find dozens of posters depicting the French president as Hitler. That same week, Brigitte Macron’s great-nephew was assaulted in Macron’s hometown of Amiens in an apparent politically-motivated attack.
Fixing France
Beyond the accusations that Macron’s pensions reform push was too brutal, and too disrespectful of parliamentary democracy, the recent political turmoil has political commentators discussing a “democratic crisis” in France.
Some say France needs a constitutional reform, others that political life has become too polarized. According to Sylvain Fort, a former advisor to the French president, the mainstream left and right in France still haven’t recovered from his victory in 2017.
“My great surprise is that opposition parties are still shadows of their former selves. It’s not the president that is stopping the opposition from rebuilding itself. The president doesn’t want the democratic debate to be sterile, it’s the result of years of neglect,” he said.
Instead, the far-right and the far-left parties have dominated the political debate in France.
In Dunkirk, Macron eschewed ideology and hoped to make one point clear: his tough choices are bringing jobs and investment back to France. But by the same token, if Macron’s reform drive grinds to a halt, his government will face significant challenges.
“If after all the [recent] proposals he has made, we see that in a year’s time, nothing has progressed … then yes, he will find it very difficult to finish his mandate,” said Cautrès.
The government has already had to delay tackling a key issue — migration — because of a lack of consensus and parliamentary support. Depending on the evolution of Macron’s reconnect-with-the-people tour, his second-term agenda could be severely upended, rendering him a lame-duck president.
Fixing the economy may not be enough to rekindle trust between the French and their president.
