PARIS – French President Emmanuel Macron has talked about his legal fight with American conservative media figure Candace Owens in public. He said the action was required to prove that her “nonsense” claims about his wife, Brigitte Macron, were false. Macron told Paris Match recently that the bogus allegations that his wife was born a male had gotten “so widespread in the United States that we had to react.”
The Macrons sued Owens in Delaware state court last month for defamation, saying that he made 22 false allegations about them. The complaint says that Owens’s “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” has put the couple through a “campaign of global humiliation.” The suit points to Owens’ eight-part podcast series, “Becoming Brigitte,” as a way to promote the false claims.
The French president said that he and his wife were told not to go to court at first to prevent the “Streisand effect,” which is when trying to hide something makes it more well-known. But because the rumors were so big and spread so quickly in the U.S., they had to respond. Macron stated, “It’s a matter of respecting the truth.”
When asked about the backlash he and Brigitte have had from some people in the U.S. who say the case is a breach of free expression, Macron was very clear in his answer. He said, “Wanting to stop the truth from coming back is not freedom of speech.” He also said that the folks who make these kinds of arguments are the same ones who “ban journalists from the Oval Office,” and he doesn’t like this hypocrisy.
The lawsuit says that Owens’s statements have been “invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust,” and that they have turned the couple’s lives into “fodder for profit-driven lies.” The lawsuit also questions Owens’s reliability, saying that she has “built a brand on provocation, not truth,” by regularly spreading false information about things like Covid-19 vaccinations, which she has termed “pure evil.”