Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a defamation lawsuit against a right-wing US podcaster who claimed the spouse of the French president used to be a man.<\/p>\n
The 218-page complaint against Candace Owens, who has millions of followers on X and YouTube, has been filed by the Macrons in Delaware Superior Court and seeks a jury trial and unspecified punitive damages.<\/p>\n
In a statement released by their lawyer, the Macrons said they filed the lawsuit after Ms Owens repeatedly ignored requests to retract false and defamatory statements made on an eight-part YouTube and podcast series called Becoming Brigitte.<\/p>\n
“Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” they said.<\/p>\n
“We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused.<\/p>\n
“It is our earnest hope that this lawsuit will set the record straight and end this campaign of defamation once and for all.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Candace Owens is a prominent right-wing American commentator. (Reuters: Jim Urquhart)<\/p>\n
The suit accuses Ms Owens of using her popular podcast to spread “verifiably false and devastating lies” about the Macrons, including that Brigitte Macron was born a man, that they are blood relatives and that Mr Macron was chosen to be France’s president as part of a CIA-operated mind control program.<\/p>\n
“If ever there was a clear-cut case of defamation, this is it,” Tom Clare, a lawyer for the Macrons, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“Owens both promoted and expanded on those falsehoods and invented new ones, all designed to cause maximum harm to the Macrons and maximise attention and financial gain for herself.”<\/p>\n
Brigitte Macron, 72, has also taken to the courts in France to combat claims she was born a man.<\/p>\n
Two women were convicted in September of last year of spreading false claims after they posted a YouTube video in December 2021 alleging that Brigitte Macron had once been a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux \u2014 who is actually her brother.<\/p>\n
The ruling was overturned by a Paris appeals court and Ms Macron appealed to the highest appeals court, the Court de Cassation, earlier this month.<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a defamation lawsuit against a right-wing US podcaster who claimed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18228,18229,1108,18231,4868,43,2462,44,41,39,42,40,18230],"class_list":["post-17055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-brigitte","tag-candace-owens","tag-court","tag-defamation","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-headlines","tag-lawsuit","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-us-podcaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}