Two women will be tried this Wednesday afternoon for defamation before the Paris Criminal Court. They are accused of having spread a falsehood on the internet according to which the First Lady, Brigitte Macron, was in fact a man.
Unsurprisingly, the First Lady will not come to the hearing and will be represented there by her lawyer Jean Ennochi. Neither he nor Brigitte Macron’s entourage wished to make any comment before the trial.
Who are the two women behind the fake news?
One, Amandine Roy, introduces herself as a “medium”. The other, Natacha Rey, as an “independent journalist”. Both had broadcast on YouTube, in December 2021, a theory according to which Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, would never have existed. She would in fact be her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, and would have changed sex. A thesis described as “completely far-fetched” by the First Lady.
In the four-hour interview broadcast on YouTube, the two women showed photos of Brigitte Macron and her family, talked about the surgeries she had undergone, claimed that she would not be the mother of her three children and giving personal information about his brother. Still according to this theory, a vast conspiracy would be at work to hide the change in Brigitte Macron’s marital status. This rumor also led to more serious accusations of child abuse brought against the First Lady.
International Echo
The false information had a significant 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.
Brigitte Macron 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.
Previous
Other female politicians have already suffered from transphobic misinformation. The former First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama, the current American Vice-President Kamala Harris, and the former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have already been victims.
Furthermore, the Macron couple had already been the subject of rumors about the president’s sexual orientation, at the time of the 2017 presidential campaign. Emmanuel Macron had thus had to deny allegations about his alleged homosexuality and an alleged affair with the former CEO of Radio France Mathieu Gallet.
