When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, took the rare step this week of filing a US defamation lawsuit against the rightwing podcaster Candace Owens, it marked a new phase in a legal battle on both sides of the Atlantic against the false claim that Brigitte Macron is a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux.
The Macrons’ US lawsuit attacked what it called the “verifiably false and devastating lies” being repeated online by Owens that Brigitte Macron, 72, was born a man. The lawsuit said evidence clearly disproved this “grotesque narrative”, which had become “a campaign of global humiliation” and “relentless bullying on a worldwide scale”.
