“Stupid bitches”. The phrase immediately spread across the internet. And the outrage it has stirred up matches the contemptuous nature of the remark.
A backstage video shot on Sunday December 7th at the Folies Bergère theatre in Paris shows Brigitte Macron giving support to the comedian and actor Ary Abittan, who had been targeted the day before by feminist campaigners. The French president's wife, who had come to see the show with her daughter Tiphaine Auzière, was seeking to reassure the comedian before he stepped on stage for his stand-up routine.
“How are you, how do you feel?” asks Brigitte Macron in the video clip. “I’m scared,” Ary Abittan replies. “If there are any stupid bitches we’ll throw them out,” France's First Lady continues, adding: “Especially any masked bandits.”
The day before, four campaigners from the #NousToutes ('All of us') collective, wearing masks of the performer with the word “rapist” on them, had disrupted the comedian's Saturday show, shouting “Abittan rapist!” The masks and chant referred to the criminal proceedings that were launched against the comedian in 2021, when he was accused of rape by a 21-year-old woman.
The young woman says Ary Abittan forced her into anal sex during an evening at his home in Paris, after the pair had been seeing each other for several weeks. Several bruises and wounds were found the next day by forensic medical staff, according to Mediapart's information.
Having first being put under formal investigation for rape, Ary Abittan – who denies the charges – was later placed under the intermediate status of assisted witness in 2023. The investigation ended with the case being dismissed in 2024, a decision that was upheld on appeal in January 2025. Back on stage since the spring, the actor has seen his shows disrupted by groups of feminists.
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Officially, the Élysée and Brigitte Macron fully stand by the words used. Asked by news agency AFP, those close to the President’s wife justified what they called a “criticism of the radical method used by those who, wearing masks, had disrupted Ary Abittan’s show on Saturday night to stop the performer from going on stage”.
“Madame Macron's only aim was to reassure an artist who, in his dressing room before going on stage, had just told her ‘I'm scared’ because his show had been disrupted the day before. She's in no way attacking a cause. What she does condemn are the radical methods used to stop an artist from performing, as happened on Saturday night,” those close to Brigitte Macron also told Mediapart.
Yet the video was swiftly taken down from the website of the publication Public where it had appeared. Was this self-censorship by the celebrity magazine, or censorship at the request of the Élysée or Brigitte Macron’s office? Contacted by Mediapart, the publisher and the editor-in-chief of Public did not reply. The Élysée also made no comment.
Brigitte Macron’s entourage told Mediapart that “no request to take down the video was made by the presidency of the Republic, directly or indirectly, to the outlet that posted it”.
According to Mediapart's information, it was Bestimage, the agency run by Mimi Marchand, a friend of Brigitte Macron, who were behind these images. The “queen of the celebrity press”, who in recent years has done public relations work for both the presidential couple and Ary Abittan, had gained exclusive access behind the scenes at the comedian’s show.
But the video of Brigitte Macron leaked by mistake: the agency sent Public a batch of images that included those of the president's wife, without noticing the comments caught on tape. Did Mimi Marchand herself then ask Public to take the video down? Contacted by Mediapart, the head of Bestimage simply said she was “not up to date” with things as she “wasn't working until the end of the week”.
The presidency's flagship cause in tatters
Beyond this farcical blunder, the episode shows how the Élysée keeps undermining the battle against female-male inequality and sexual violence, even though this was held up as a flagship cause for both of Macron's terms of office.
The #NousToutes collective says that Brigitte Macron’s words represent “yet more venom aimed at victims and feminist groups”. “The words she used say a lot about her way of looking at things, the political message is extremely shocking,” said a #NousToutes Paris Nord campaigner who took part in the action, speaking to AFP.
Since the start of the #MeToo movement, Emmanuel Macron has himself used similar language to condemn what he sees as excesses when it comes to the freedom to speak out on this subject; in 2017 he referred to a “society of denunciation”; in 2018 he talked about a “Republic of suspicion” ; while in 2021 he spoke of a “society of inquisition”.
When three of his ministers were accused in rape cases (Nicolas Hulot, Gérald Darmanin, Damien Abad - with the first two, the cases were dropped), the president always stuck to the same line. This was to keep ministers in place (Gérald Darmanin was even promoted to interior minister two years later), to dismiss questions raised by feminists as the minority view of some kind of “media trial” or a trial in the “court of public opinion”, and to be guided solely by the processes of the criminal justice system.
But though he has left such matters to the courts, the head of state has also on each occasion publicly backed his ministers. He called Gérald Darmanin a “political leader who is intelligent and committed, who has also been hurt by these attacks”, and said he had had a “man to man” talk with him “about the reality of these events and what followed”.
He painted the then-environment minister Nicolas Hulot as a “man clearly hurt”, who “denied with much force” the claims when they talked, saying that “none of this happened”. And Emmanuel Macron said he still trusted Damien Abad when Mediapart revealed the allegations against him, and hoped he might “carry out his work” as a minister despite an investigation having been launched over attempted rape.
In 2023, Emmanuel Macron again abandoned neutrality during the Depardieu case. Despite fourteen witness statements accusing the actor of sexual violence and stark images showing him making obscene sexual remarks, the head of state said Gérard Depardieu made “France proud”, and he condemned what he termed a “manhunt” and a “moral agenda”. As for the accounts by complainants, they were dismissed in one sentence: “Maybe there are victims, and I respect them greatly and want them to be able to defend their rights, but there's also a presumption of innocence.”
Reality of judicial handling of sexual violence cases is swept aside
Brigitte Macron’s words fit this pattern. Their vulgarity adds to the violence of the episode, a sign of a presidential palace out of control, marked by disdain for the feminist movement, for its radicalism and its youth. They also highlight how long the couple at the Élysée have been living inside their own bubble.
This disconnection with wider society has been shown many times over the years in public comments made by Emmanuel Macron both as economy minister and then as president. Talking about workers at the Gad abattoir workers in Brittany in 2014 he declared that “many of them are illiterate”; “The best way to pay for a suit is to work” he noted in 2016; in 2017 he said: “A train station is a place where you see both people who succeed and people who are nothing”; in the same year he said :“I won't yield any ground, not to slackers, nor cynics, not to the extremes” ; in 2018 the president told a jobseeker: “I can find you a job just by crossing the street”; while in 2019 he described people protesting against the cost of living as “scallywag[s] in a yellow vest”.
By giving unqualified backing to Ary Abittan, Brigitte Macron also forgets that a court ruling does not silence speech. Judicial outcomes must not block the right of citizens - in this case feminist campaigners - to voice their views on a matter of public interest.
This is what the general secretary of the CFDT trade union, Marylise Léon, said on France Info radio on Tuesday December 9th. “There's a court ruling. Then, if there are campaigners who want to show their dissent, so be it. But for the president of the Republic's wife to make such remarks, I find that absolutely misplaced and crude,” she said, pointing to the “role she has in relation to the nation”.
Brigitte Macron also fails to take into account the reality of how sexual violence cases are handled by the judicial system. In France, the vast majority of complaints are dropped: between 73% (according to Ministry of Justice figures published in 2018) and 86% (according to a study by the research institute the Institut des Politiques Publiques covering 2012-2021). Two thirds of these dropped cases are due to the alleged offence being “insufficiently established”, in other words, often for lack of evidence.
This high rate is not unique to sexual violence - it is up to 85% for other offences against the person. But unlike other offences, the perpetrator is identified in nine out of ten sexual violence cases.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter