Paris court convicts 10 for claiming French first lady was born a man

A Paris court on Monday found 10 defendants guilty of cyberbullying Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron - a victory in the couple’s ongoing legal battles against conspiracy theorists in France and the United States who have spread false claims about her gender and sexuality.

The trial in France is seen as a forerunner to a much bigger legal claim the Macrons are making in the US against MAGA influencer Candace Owens for promoting similar false allegations.

In a defamation suit filed last summer, they contend that Owens’s eight-part podcast series Becoming Brigitte and other posts asserting that Brigitte Macron was secretly born male were knowingly untruthful and part of a “campaign of global humiliation.”

The defendants found guilty Monday, (local time) eight men and two women ranging in age from 41 to 65, received sentences spanning from mandatory cyberbullying awareness training to eight-month suspended prison terms.

One was jailed for failing to attend the trial and five were restricted from posting on the social media platform X for six months, according to local media reports.

The court cited “degrading, insulting, and malicious” comments alleging that Brigitte Macron, 72, is transgender and connecting the 24-year age gap between her and her husband, 48, to paedophilia.

In posts and videos seen by tens of thousands, the defendants repeated claims that the French first lady had changed gender.

The Macrons first met at the high school where he was a student and she was his drama teacher and a married mother of three. They married in 2007 when she was in her mid-50s and the up-and-coming politician was 29.

Their age split has been a subject of salacious commentary since Emmanuel Macron was elected president in 2017, but the scrutiny has intensified in recent years with the spread of demonstrably false accusations about her identity.

Among those convicted was Delphine Jegousse, 51, who identifies herself as an internet fortune teller under the name Amandine Roy. Prosecutors identified her as instrumental in amplifying the conspiracy theory after she produced a four-hour YouTube video in 2021 about Brigitte Macron’s alleged gender switch.

Jegousse claimed to have uncovered a “state secret” that Macron was originally born Jean-Michel Trogneux, the name of her older brother.

The claims went viral in the run-up to France’s 2022 presidential election after they were picked up by far-right communities, including anti-vaccine groups, and followers of the extreme ideology QAnon.

The Macrons lodged a criminal complaint against Jegousse and another French participant in the video, Natacha Rey. The two were found guilty of slander in September 2024, but the verdict was overturned when an appeals court ruled they had spread the theories in “good faith.”

Monday’s verdict stems from a separate complaint against Jegousse and nine other defendants. Brigitte Macron did not attend the two-day trial held in October but in a televised interview Sunday said she launched the legal proceedings to “set an example” in combating harassment.

Her daughter Tiphaine Auzière testified during the trial that her mother’s quality of life had deteriorated since the harassment intensified. Ms Auzière told the court that her mother “cannot ignore the horrible things said about her” and that the impact has extended to the entire family, including Brigitte Macron’s grandchildren.

The Macrons’ lawyer hailed the guilty verdicts Monday, saying the penalties were a step toward stopping the torrent of disinformation about his clients.

“The most important things are the prevention courses and the suspension of some of the accounts” of the defendants, said attorney Jean Ennochi.

A similar victory might be more difficult in the US, where public figures must prove in court that commentators acted with deliberate malice or a reckless disregard for the truth.

The Macrons’ 22-count defamation lawsuit names Owens along with her business entities for allegedly conducting a “relentless year-long campaign of defamation” against the presidential couple, according to lawyer Tom Clare, whose firm previously represented Dominion Voting Systems in its landmark $787.5 million settlement against Fox News.

Owens repeated the baseless claim multiple times, according to the suit, including in a March 2024 YouTube video titled Is France’s First Lady a Man?

In her subsequent eight-part series for her nearly 4.5 million YouTube subscribers, Owens called the allegations potentially “the biggest scandal in political history.” Owens asserted that Brigitte Macron engaged in identity theft, incest, forgery, fraud and abuses of power, according to the suit.

Owens monetises such outrageous claims through ad and merchandise sales, the suit alleges, including T-shirts displaying Brigitte Macron on a fake Time magazine Man of the Year cover.

Mr Clare told CNN that the Macrons attempted for about a year to get Owens to retract her statements before taking legal action. “This was really a last resort,” he said. “We have attempted to engage with her for the last year - putting evidence in front of her, request after request after request that she just simply do the right thing.”

The Macrons were prepared to present biological and medical evidence to disprove Owens’s claims, Mr Clare said.

A spokesman for Owens dismissed the claims at the time the suit was filed, telling The Washington Post that Owens “is not shutting up” and describing the litigation as “a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.”