Ten people accused of harassing Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, will stand trial in Paris today, as part of a case the couple brought against individuals who they claim spread false allegations that the French first lady was born a man.
The French trial — which pertains to a legal complaint filed by Brigitte in 2024 — is separate from a lawsuit the Macrons filed in the U.S. in July against right-wing political podcaster Candace Owens, who the couple claims used the rumour about Brigitte’s biological sex to bolster her popularity.
President of France Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron arrive in Downing Street, London, on day two of their state visit to the UK. Picture date: Wednesday July 9, 2025.
Photo cStefan Rousseau/PA Wire
The Macrons said in a lawsuit filed in Delaware Superior Court that Owens has waged a lie-filled “campaign of global humiliation” and “relentless bullying” to promote her podcast and expand her “frenzied” fan base.
Meanwhile, in Paris, eight men and two women between the ages of 41 and 60 began their trial in criminal court, all accused of online harassment targeting Macron.
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If found guilty, they face up to two years in prison.
According to The Guardian, prosecutors say the defendants — all of whom deny the accusations — made several malicious comments about Brigitte’s gender and sexuality, and allegedly said the age difference between her and her husband equates to pedophilia.
Brigitte is 72, and her husband is 47.
Brigitte Macron was known as Brigitte Auzière, a 39-year-old married mother of three, when she met a 15-year-old Macron while he was a student at the high school where she taught.
He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him, and divorced before they finally married in 2007, when he was 30.
The allegations about her sex date back to fringe online discourse from the COVID-19 pandemic, when French content creators Amandine Roy — who is among the defendants — and Natacha Rey made a YouTube video speculating about Brigitte’s sex.
In 2021, Roy posted the lengthy interview with Rey, a self-proclaimed independent journalist, alleging that Macron, whose birth name is Trogneux, was once a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux.
The couple won a defamation lawsuit in France against Roy and Rey in 2024, but the verdict was overturned in 2025 on grounds of freedom of expression.
A woman named Aurélien Poirson-Atlan, a publicist who goes by the name “Zoé Sagan,” is also among the accused.
In August, as part of the U.S. lawsuit against Owens, the Macrons said they would be submitting scientific evidence to a U.S. court proving that Brigitte was born a female.
In March 2024, Owens wrote on X, “I stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.”
FILE – Conservative commentator Candace Owens speaks at the Convention of the Right in Paris on Sept. 28, 2019. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File).
ME
In an interview with conservative influencer Tucker Carlson earlier this year, Owens said she did not want the case to be dismissed because it was about something “so much bigger.”
“It is incredibly upsetting to think that you have to go and subject yourself, to put this type of proof forward,” the Macrons’ lawyer, Tom Clare, told the BBC in September, in response to the case against Owens.
Brigitte has not spoken publicly on the allegation since 2022.
— With files from Global News reporter Katie Scott
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
