French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, filed a lawsuit Wednesday against conservative commentator Candace Owens for alleging France’s first lady is a man.
The complaint says Owens used her statement to “promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.”
Owens wondered whether she’d be sued in a social media post on Tuesday and posted right-wing personality Milo Yiannopoulos’s reaction to the case: “The Macrons just made the most spectacular PR blunder I’ve ever seen — in my entire life. Maybe the worst ever,” he said.
The 22-count complaint was filed in the Delaware Superior Court and seeks damages from Owens. She was given three separate opportunities to retract her statements but declined and continued to push “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” about the couple.
Owens went as far as to publish an eight-part series of several allegations about the Macrons, including that “Mrs. Macron was born a man, stole another person’s identity, and transitioned to become Brigitte; Mrs. Macron and President Macron are blood relatives committing incest; President Macron was chosen to be the President of France as part of the CIA-operated MKUltra program or a similar mind-control program; and Mrs. Macron and President Macron are committing forgery, fraud, and abuses of power to conceal these secrets.”
Owens’s representatives insist she will not be silenced, citing the First Amendment as a defense, though neither defamation nor libel is protected under it.
“Candace Owens is not shutting up,” a spokesperson for Owens told CBS. “This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist. Candace repeatedly requested an interview with Brigitte Macron. Instead of offering a comment, Brigitte is resorting to trying to bully a reporter into submission. In France, politicians can bully journalists, but this is not France. It’s America.”
In a statement, the Macrons said they filed the lawsuit because Owens doubled down on her claims.
“Ms. Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” they said. “We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused. It is our earnest hope that this lawsuit will set the record straight and end this campaign of defamation once and for all.”
Owens once said she “would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.”
BRIGITTE MACRON TAKES LIBEL CASE ABOUT TRANSGENDER CLAIMS TO HIGHEST COURT
Brigitte Macron petitioned the nation’s highest appeals court earlier this month, the Court of Cassation, to rule on a separate libel complaint against two women who said she is a biological man.
The two women alleged that Jean-Michel Trogneux transitioned into Brigitte Macron through a series of surgeries before marrying the future French president, who is 25 years younger than his 72-year-old wife.