Macron Vows to Pursue Candace Owens Lawsuit Until Verdict: ‘It’s About Defending My Honor!’

(Photo by Dinendra Haria / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

French President Emmanuel Macron was adamant in an interview with a French magazine about the defamation lawsuit he and his wife Brigitte Macron filed against far-right podcaster Candace Owens for her repeated claims that the First Lady of France was secretly born male, vowing to pursue the litigation until a verdict was reached because it was a matter of defending his “honor.”

Brigitte Macron is currently 72 years old and has three children, and now seven grandchildren as well, from her first marriage, which ended in divorce in 2006. She is 25 years older than President Macron and controversially met him when he was a 15-year-old student (the age of consent is 15 in France) at the school where she was teaching, reuniting after he graduated and marrying in 2007, when he was 29 and she was 54.

In July, the Macrons sued Owens in the Delaware Superior Court, seeking compensatory and punitive damages in a 22-count complaint that lists Owens’ comments from social media posts, podcasts, television shows, and elsewhere insisting that Brigitte Macron was a man and stole another person’s identity to transition to a woman, that the Macrons are secretly blood relatives in an incestuous relationship, and other conspiracy theories about the couple.

“These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were,” the complaint argued, adding that the “lies” were “invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust” and “have caused tremendous damage to the Macrons.”

Since the complaint was filed, Owens has remained defiant, continuing to publicly attack the Macrons and insist that Mrs. Macron “has a penis” and claim they would fake her death in order to avoid discovery in the lawsuit.

Macron scoffed at Owens’ claims in a recent exclusive interview with Paris Match magazine that was published on Tuesday. The relevant section, translated from the French, is below:

American nationalist circles are hostile to you. You have decided to file a complaint against Candace Owens, the influencer who spreads the rumor that your wife is a man. This breaks with a widespread custom among heads of state, that of not reacting to this kind of attack.

Yes, there was a tradition of saying: we must let it flow. That’s what we did at the beginning. At first, it was in France. We were advised not to file a complaint. This was likely to cause a “Streisand effect,” which draws even more attention to these lies.

But it has been amplified so much in the United States that we had to react. It is a question of enforcing the truth. We are talking about the civil status of the First Lady of France, a wife, a mother, a grandmother. It is not freedom of speech to want to prevent the restoration of the truth. Those who talk to you about this alleged freedom of speech are those who prohibit journalists in the Oval Office. I don’t accept that.

So you will go all the way in this fight to get a conviction [verdict]?

Of course! It’s about defending my honor! Because it’s nonsense. She is someone who knew very well that she held false information and did so in order to harm, in the service of an ideology and with established connections with far-right leaders.

Owens may find it prudent to review the legal history of another ardent supporter of President Donald Trump: his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was himself sued for defamation by two Georgia election workers he accused of committing fraud in the 2020 election. Giuliani’s repeated public comments attacking the two plaintiffs were a significant factor in the stunning $148 million verdict (including $75 million in punitive damages) against him.