French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a defamation lawsuit against American commentator Candace Owens, following a series of online claims suggesting Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman and that the couple are blood relatives.
The 218-page complaint was submitted Wednesday to the Delaware Superior Court. It names Owens as the defendant and seeks a jury trial, along with unspecified punitive damages.
Owens, who has a massive following across X and YouTube, ran an eight-part video and podcast series titled Becoming Brigitte, which the Macrons say spreads “verifiably false and devastating lies.” These include the claim that Brigitte Macron stole another woman’s identity and transitioned to female, as well as that the French first couple are committing incest.
In a statement issued through their attorney, the Macrons said they chose legal action after repeated private efforts to get Owens to retract her claims went ignored.
“Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” the Macrons said. “We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused. It is our earnest hope that this lawsuit will set the record straight and end this campaign of defamation once and for all.”
The complaint also goes into detail about the couple’s early relationship, when Emmanuel was a high school student and Brigitte a teacher, clarifying that “the relationship remained within the bounds of the law.”
Owens fired back during her Wednesday podcast episode, calling the lawsuit “littered with factual inaccuracies” and branding it an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy.”
She also claimed she was unaware the lawsuit was coming, though both parties’ legal teams had been in contact since January.
A spokesperson for Owens called the lawsuit “an effort to bully an independent American journalist” after Brigitte Macron refused interview requests.
“This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist,” the spokesperson said.
World leaders suing over defamation is pretty rare, but not unheard of. US President Donald Trump has also taken legal swings in this arena.
He’s currently pursuing a $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, accusing the paper of defamation over a claim that he helped create a crude birthday video for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
Public figures face a high bar in defamation suits in the US: they must prove “actual malice” — meaning the defendant knew what they said was false, or showed reckless disregard for the truth.
With input from Al Jazeera
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