FrenchFrench president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte have filed a US defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens, a rightwing influencer and podcaster who has said France’s first lady “is in fact a man”, reports the Financial Times. The 218-page lawsuit, filed in Delaware on Wednesday, accuses Owens of publishing “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions”, chief among them that Brigitte Macron was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux. Owens has also said the French president and his wife were blood relatives and that Emmanuel Macron was a product of a CIA human experiment or “a similar government mind control programme”, according to the Macrons’ court filing. The suit is a rare case of a serving world leader personally suing an online influencer over their content, though it comes days after Donald Trump sued The Wall Street Journal and its parent companies over a report of a letter that the US president allegedly wrote to Jeffrey Epstein. The Macrons face a high legal bar, since US defamation laws require public figures to show “actual malice”, meaning that the person knew the information was false or had a reckless disregard for the truth. The Macrons are seeking a jury trial and punitive damages.
