As you may recall, Candace Owens ran a series of podcasts earlier this year in which she claimed the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, was actually a trans woman. A couple weeks ago, the Macrons sued Owens in a US court, seeking damages for 22 separate counts of defamation. There’s no dollar amount in the complaint but it’s presumably going to run into six or seven figures.
For the record, Owens doesn’t deny that there was a person named Brigitte Trogneux who was born a woman. Her story is that at some point, for unknown reasons, Brigitte disappeared and her identity was taken over by another person, her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux who then married Emmanuel Macron.
So now, according to Candace Owens, Brigitte Macron was born a woman, died, and with her dying wish passed on her identity to her brother.
There’s no way anyone still believes this crap right?
Come on guys…
You all got taken for a ride by an insane grifter. pic.twitter.com/ASSwUqpOAn
— Shawn Farash (@Shawn_Farash) July 30, 2025
There are really two big problems with Owens’s theory. First, Jean-Michel Trogneux is still around and has been seen at public events including Macron’s inauguration. The other is that Brigitte was previously married and had three children with her first husband. Obviously a trans person can’t have children so you have to somehow extend the conspiracy theory to the idea that the kids either aren’t really Brigitte’s children or that they know their real mom is dead and are pretending their uncle is their mother. It’s pretty far out there.
And yet, Owens is still doubling down on this whole story. She appeared on Piers Morgan’s show the other day and said she was willing to up a previous bet with Morgan to $300,000.
Candace Owens accepts a $300,000 bet with Piers Morgan over the biological gender of Brigitte Macron.
Full interview now available! 👇
📺 https://t.co/tTTUW6Yfey@piersmorgan | @RealCandaceO pic.twitter.com/IgdkRsIlIp
— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) August 5, 2025
That’s quite a lot of money but it’s still probably only a fraction of what’s on the line in the lawsuit itself. And that may be why Owens is now wondering aloud why the Trump administration is not speaking up and trying to defend her from the lawsuit.
“If you are Trump, the first thing you should have done if you purport to care about America and our Constitution…you would come out and you would say ‘I don’t even know whether I believe that she’s a man or a woman’…but you should say ‘I’m a leader of this country and it’s unacceptable that this leader would threaten the First Amendment in anyway,'” Owens said. She added, “The job of the federal government is to defend us against foreign invaders and I would pretty much say Emmanuel Macron right now is being a foreign invader.”
Candace Owens appears PANICKED as she calls the Macrons’ lawsuit a “FOREIGN INVASION,” begging for Trump and J.D. Vance to intervene: “It’s CRAZY that Trump has been silent on this matter.”
She also claims the Macrons want to “impoverish her for speaking.” Candace and her… pic.twitter.com/E3OIjGcIvI
— Nathan Livingstone (MilkBarTV) (@TheMilkBarTV) August 7, 2025
She mentions that President Trump called and tried to warn her off this story. Here’s what she told Tucker Carlson.
Owens said the initial request to stop talking about the French first lady came from someone “pretty high up” in the White House. She said she found the demand insulting and refused to comply.
Trump later phoned Owens directly about the issue, she told Carlson, saying that the president told her Macron had pulled him aside to ask if he knew Owens. Owens said she was shocked by the request and stated that Trump had been confused as to why he was being asked to intervene.
“Emmanuel Macron personally flew to D.C. and asked Trump to ask me to shut up, to just stop speaking about his wife,” she told Carlson.
That’s evidence that Macron was unhappy about it but not evidence he’s lying about his wife. If Owens is in fact spreading a lie about Brigitte Macron, as the lawsuit claims, then it’s not surprising Emmanuel Macron would make efforts to get her to stop.
As for the “foreign invasion” claim, It probably goes without saying that defamation is a well-understood and widely acknowledged exception to free speech. Owens is being sued for allegedly making false and defamatory claims which, according to the complaint, she knew were false at the time.
As I said in my previous post, that’s going to be a high bar for statements about a public figure like Brigitte Macron, but that doesn’t mean some of the claims won’t pass that bar. And if they do, that’s not a foreign invasion or any kind of violation of US sovereignty, it’s just the application of US defamation law to Candace Owens.
