PARIS (AP) — Ten people will go on trial on Monday over cyberbullying of Brigitte Macron after they allegedly made “malicious” comments online spreading claims that President Emmanuel Macron 's wife is a man.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said the eight men and two women are accused of spreading “numerous malicious comments" online about the first lady's gender and “sexuality” and of mentioning her age gap with her husband as “paedophilia.”
Aged between
41 and 60, some of the defendants are very active on the social media, with posts sometimes cumulating dozens of thousands of views. A woman presenting herself as a medium and an advertising executive, whose X account has since been suspended, are considered as having played a major role in spreading the rumor.
Others include an elected official, a teacher and a computer scientist.
The Macrons have for years been dogged by conspiracy theories that Brigitte was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux, who supposedly then took the name Brigitte as a transgender woman. Jean-Michel Trogneux is the name of Brigitte’s brother.
The two-day trial in Paris comes after the Macrons filed a defamation suit in July in a Delaware court as their lawyer said they’ll be seeking “substantial” damages from U.S. conservative influencer Candace Owens if she persists with claims that Brigitte is a man.
Owens is a right-leaning political commentator whose YouTube channel has about 4.5 million subscribers. In 2024, she was denied a visa from New Zealand and Australia, citing remarks in which she denied Nazi medical experimentation on Jews in concentration camps during World War II.
A verdict in the Paris case will likely be issued at a later date.
In September 2024, Brigitte and Jean-Michel Trogneux won a defamation suit against two women who were sentenced by a Paris court to fines and damages for spreading the claims about the first lady online. A Paris appeals court overturned the ruling in July. Brigitte and her brother have since turned to France’s highest court to appeal that decision.
The Macrons, who have been married since 2007, first met at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher. Brigitte Macron, 24 years her husband's senior, was then called Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three.
Emmanuel Macron, 47, has been France’s president since 2017.
