(Paris) Two women who spread the rumor on the internet that French first lady Brigitte Macron was a transgender woman will be judged for defamation on Wednesday afternoon in Paris.
Unsurprisingly, the wife of the head of state will not come to the hearing and will be represented by her lawyer Jean Ennochi, the latter told AFP. Neither he nor Brigitte Macron’s entourage wished to make any comment before the trial.
These two women, one presenting herself as a “medium”, the other as an “independent journalist”, had posted on YouTube in December 2021 a thesis described as “completely crazy” by the first lady. A theory according to which Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, never existed, but that her brother Jean-Michel took this identity after changing sex.
According to this theory, which has regularly resurfaced on social networks since the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, a vast conspiracy is at work to hide this change in marital status. This rumor also led to more serious accusations of child abuse brought against the first lady.
The false information had a greater impact after the YouTube video, even being exported internationally – notably and again recently in the United States, where it went viral on the far right, in the middle of the presidential campaign.
In the four-hour interview broadcast on YouTube, the two women broadcast photos of Brigitte Macron and her family, discuss surgical procedures she had undergone, claim that she would not be the mother of her three children and give personal information about his brother.
Brigitte Macron had filed a complaint for public defamation with the filing of a civil suit on January 31, 2022, leading to the referral (almost automatic in press law) of the two women to the criminal court.
Another civil action, for acts of invasion of privacy and violation of image rights, was canceled in 2023 by the courts which considered that the facts denounced amounted to defamation.
Several female politicians around the world have already suffered from transphobic information, such as the former first lady of the United States Michelle Obama, the current American vice-president Kamala Harris or the former prime minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern.