The Macrons, the Maga influencer and the ‘trans’ Brigitte conspiracy: US judge to hear lawsuit

And yet he is also fighting a more personal battle on another front. In the US state of Delaware, he is suing a conservative influencer in what is either the strangest legal case in political history, a last-ditch attempt to uphold the rules-based order or an unseemly legal brawl.

He will be facing Candace Owens, a rightwing Maga – Make America Great Again – commentator who courts controversy in a way that makes US podcaster Joe Rogan seem like a BBC Radio 2 presenter. The central allegation? Owens has been spreading a conspiracy theory to her more than5 million YouTube subscribers alleging that Brigitte, Macron’s wife, is transgender.

Owens’s rise through the pro-Donald Trump media has long ruffled feathers. She made her name as a black woman opposing Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement and with her campaign for “Blexit”, a call for black Americans to stop voting Democrat and support Trump.

She later joined the pro-Trump Daily Wire, a media company run by rightwing activist Ben Shapiro, hosting an eponymous chatshow from 2021, before Shapiro fired her three years later over antisemitic comments. Soon after, she launched her own YouTube show and started building a business based on interviews with “cancelled” names.

There was an apparent financial motive to her courting of controversy. “Candace Owens realised she was going to get fired from the Daily Wire a month or two earlier, and she was casting around for a big storyline on her new YouTube show,” said Will Sommer, a journalist at the US centre-right news website The Bulwark.

“She dug up old claims about Brigitte Macron being trans. She realised there was this rising tide of trans panic in the United States, particularly in 2024, and she latched on to it.”

The Brigitte story begins with two curious fringe conspiracy theorists in France: Amandine Roy, a self-proclaimed spiritual medium, and Natacha Rey, who left her job selling essential oils to become an “independent investigative journalist”. In a four-hour YouTube video posted in 2021, they discussed the theory that the “real” Brigitte Macron had died young, and her identity was taken by her older brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, who allegedly underwent extensive surgery to become a woman, and then married the future French president.

It is a bizarre distillation of social media rumours from the far-right fringe – similar to trans disinformation stories about former first lady Michelle Obama and ex-New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

The phenomenon is known as “transvestigation”, which US-based LGBTQ organisation Glaad describes as “maliciously targeting cisgender public figures – from Madonna to Melania Trump to [Algerian] Olympic boxer Imane Khelif to [US teenage double killer] Kyle Rittenhouse – and then ‘investigating’ them, offering fake pseudo-scientific ‘evidence’ with the underlying bigoted and ignorant implication that being a transgender person is a bad thing.”

In 2022, Brigitte Macron sued the French duo and eventually won the case in 2024, but lost on appeal earlier this year. “The core argument of the judges was that it’s not derogatory to claim that someone is transgender,” said French journalist Jules Darmanin. “It is not shameful, it is not criminal, so calling someone that is not defamatory in and of itself.”

Owens, who saw the French case reported in English-language media, took the transgender accusation and ran with it, adding her own flourishes to the allegations: that the president and his wife are blood relatives, that Macron is in power as part of a CIA-backed mind-control programme and that Brigitte participated in the controversial 1971 Stanford prison experiment, while also linking the couple to other unfounded conspiracies involving incest and paedophilia.

In July the Macrons decided to sue Owens in Delaware, where her company is registered. The prosecution has to prove not only that the claims are untrue, but that the accused –Owens – knew they were untrue and spread them anyway – known as “actual malice” under US law. In their filing in July, the Macrons set out to do this. “The filing suggests that for the last year, every few months, [the Macrons] have been working to send information, take down notices and demands for retraction to Candace Owens that included evidence of the falsity,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah. “Their complaint to the court is that she not only didn’t stop, but weaponised those responses from the Macrons and mischaracterised them.”

After Owens attempted to have the case dismissed, the Macrons countered with a 241-page amended complaint that details what they describe as Owens’s continuing “vitriolic” attacks, repeatedly recycling the false trans claim and even selling merchandise mocking the French first couple.

Owens is a curious figure on the Maga right – a black conservative woman who began her career running a liberal-leaning marketing agency and backing progressives during the “Gamergate” conspiracy, arguably the ground zero of contemporary US politics, where misogynist gamers harassed female game designers and reviewers. But later, she changed tack.

She joined the recently assassinated rightwing activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA as director of urban engagement, after Kirk’s organisation was accused of racism; befriended the disgraced rapper Kanye West and wore a White Lives Matter T-shirt at his Paris fashion show in 2022; and moved into anti-Jewish conspiracies after the 7 October attacks by Hamas in 2023. After liking antisemitic posts on X, she was fired by the Daily Wire in March 2024.

Before then, Owens’s YouTube videos were pulling in between 30,000 and 300,000 views. After this, she published her first Macron video in March 2024, since deleted, followed by the series Becoming Brigitte, which has proved by far her greatest moneymaker.

Other videos, featuring controversial guests such as Russell Brand, Harvey Weinstein and Piers Morgan, have attracted about 1 million viewers, while “ragebait” takes on Hitler, 9/11 and the satanic origins of Nasa have stayed firmly in six figures. The 11-part Becoming Brigitte series, however, banked her an average of 3m views an episode, with the most watched instalment racking up almost 6m.

No one knows for certain how much Owens is earning from her social media accounts. Sommers of The Bulwark estimates that, alongside media appearances and sponsorship, her income could be as high as $8m (£6m) a year, while other influencer analytics estimate she could be earning anything between $14,000 and $423,000 a month from YouTube and about $50,000 a month from Instagram. Macron, meanwhile, has fought to preserve her privacy. She met her now husband in 1993 when she was a drama teacher at his school, the Lycée La Providence in Amiens. He was 15 and she was 39 and married to banker André-Louis Auzière. The Macrons maintain – and their filing to the court in Delaware insists – that the relationship was platonic. The couple waited until 2006 for her divorce and were married a year later. During that wait, she told Elle magazine, she tried to ensure her three children were not troubled by the gossip.

Journalist Darmanin believes Macron is preparing for his post-presidential role – his second and final term ends in 2027 – and feels that playing a Tony Blair-style international statesman will be tricky if rumours around his wife persist, especially in the US. But Utah University’s Andersen Jones points to the rise in libel actions used to silence conspiracists in the US, and believes the libel courts are becoming the main battleground in the post-truth age.

“Both the Alex Jones case – where Jones was bankrupted for continuing to claim the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting was fake and the parents involved were ‘crisis actors’ – and Dominion Voting Machines suing Fox News for libel over claims of election fraud in 2020 saw huge, punitive damages,” said Darmanin. “I think we’re meeting a moment in the US where defamation law is increasingly used as a deterrent to large-scale, public-damaging lies.”

For the Macrons the stakes are high; US libel cases are hard to win, and 72-year-old Brigitte will have to submit to medical tests to prove to the court she was born female. The details of the couple’s lives will be picked apart on the witness stand and the so far only casually interested world will become painfully aware of the strange conspiracy.

The Observer contacted the Macrons and Owens about the details of this story and in both cases were sent copies of their legal filings– in the case of the Macrons, more than 240 pages long. The Macrons’ lawyers have set out three goals: to set the record straight, to minimise harm and to hold Owens accountable.

Owens’s lawyers sent the influencer’s motion to dismiss the case – arguing on the ground that it breaches the first amendment.

The judge in Delaware is pushing for the first stage – a back and forth over whether the case should be dismissed – to be resolved by 30 October. At that point, depending on the skills of both legal teams, the case will proceed.

In the meantime, Owens is trying to find her next moneymaker and has settled on a conspiracy theory that there is something fishy about Kirk’s assassination.

Photographs by Jason Davis/Getty, Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto/Getty