Why is American right-wing commentator Candace Owens so obsessive about French President Emmanuel Macron and his spouse, Brigitte?
“I’m disgusted by your relationship,” Owens mentioned in January, after the Macrons requested her to cease accusing the French first woman of being a transgender girl. “You make me sick, Brigitte.”
Positive, in our patriarchal world, it’s uncommon for a spouse to be 24 years older than her husband. However President Trump can also be 24 years older than his spouse, Melania.
So, severely, what’s the large whoop?
One reply might be discovered within the 219-page defamation lawsuit filed Wednesday towards Owens by the Macrons in Delaware Superior Court docket. In exhaustive element, the lawsuit lays out the preposterous claims made by Owens concerning the French first couple, subjecting them to “a marketing campaign of worldwide humiliation.”
The regulation agency representing the Macrons, Clare Locke, is similar outfit that gained a massive settlement against Fox News for defaming Dominion Voting Programs within the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.
Because the lawsuit recounts, in March 2024, Owens was dismissed by Ben Shapiro’s Each day Wire media operation after making a sequence of antisemitic feedback, together with repeating the “blood libel” that Jews drink the blood of Christian infants.
In June 2024, she launched her newly impartial YouTube channel and, based on the Macron lawsuit, was hungry for consideration and “looking for a salacious conspiracy idea to extend viewership.”
At one level on X, she described her wackadoodle claims concerning the Macrons because the “greatest scandal that has ever occurred in politics in human historical past.”
Oh, I dunno. So far as political scandals go, I believe actual ones like Watergate, Iran-Contra and the Jan. 6 riot have been a teensy bit extra impactful than a fantasy a couple of first woman’s intercourse change.
So how, precisely, did Owens land on a conspiracy idea targeted on the French president and first woman?
In keeping with the Macron lawsuit, in September 2019, Owens grew to become concerned in French far-right politics after she was invited to be the keynote speaker on the Conference de la Droite (Conference of the Proper) in Paris.
Her 15-minute speech was the standard Stephen Miller-esque litany of complaints acquainted to Christian nationalists: immigrants, political correctness, secularism and, in fact, the “pretend information media” are ruining America.
She made spectacularly asinine assertions about police killings of unarmed Black males, claiming that in 2016, “solely” 16 unarmed Black males have been slain by police and that Black males had the next probability of being struck by lightning than killed by cops.
She additionally endeared herself to her viewers when she accused Macron of being a weak chief and, horrors, a “globalist.”
In any case, it appears that evidently accusing high-profile girls of being a transgender has turn into trendy on the transphobic far proper.
As chances are you’ll recall, a few of this nation’s most heinous conspiracy theorists have leveled the identical weird cost towards Michelle Obama, whose husband, the Hawaii-born former President Obama, was repeatedly accused by Trump of not being born within the U.S. These outlandish accusations spring from the impulse to inflict as a lot political injury as potential.
In early 2025, Owens launched an eight-part sequence on her YouTube channel known as “Becoming Brigitte.” In it, she claimed the French president is homosexual. That his relationship with Brigitte is incestuous. That they interact in pedophilia and worship a satanic idol known as Baphomet.
She has cited a 2021 Daily Mail story as her supply, when actually that piece was a whole debunking of the very conspiracy theories she was selling.
The Each day Mail traced the origin of the conspiracy idea to a chunk revealed two months earlier in a French far-right publication, Faits et Paperwork (Information and Paperwork). The allegations, based on the Each day Mail, have been an try to break the 2022 reelection prospects of Macron, who confronted two right-wing opponents. Fait et Paperwork claimed no childhood pictures of Brigitte Macron may very well be discovered. However, because the Each day Mail — and the Macron lawsuit — observe, there’s a newspaper announcement of her 1953 beginning, pictures of her taking communion at 7, and pictures of her first marriage ceremony.
How probably are the French first couple to prevail in a defamation lawsuit?
The usual of proof in American courts, particularly for individuals as well-known as they’re, may be very, very excessive. The Macrons should show that Owens acted with “precise malice,” that she knew what she was saying is fake and mentioned it anyway, or that she acted with reckless disregard for whether or not it was true or not.
The Macrons, based on their lawsuit, despatched her three separate retraction calls for, explicitly stating that her claims have been false, and included proof comparable to beginning data, marriage data and pictures. They’ve requested for a jury trial and unspecified damages.
Owens has remained defiant, claiming to her practically 4.5 million YouTube subscribers that the Macrons try to silence her, and that their lawsuit is proof that her allegations are right. “I’m totally ready to tackle this battle,” Owens said. “On behalf of all the world, I’ll see you in courtroom.”
Personally, I believe she needs to be nervous.
Robert Barnes, the right-wing attorney who defended the loony conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, agrees.
“Owens advised a few of the dumbest, apparent lies one can inform,” Barnes wrote Thursday on X. “She has 0% probability of successful in courtroom.”
I can hardly wait.
Bluesky: @rabcarian
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