Bad news for Owens: French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte, have filed a new defamation lawsuit against the podcaster, this time in Tennessee. The Macrons originally filed the lawsuit in July 2025 in Delaware. On Oct. 27, the judge ruled that the Macrons could not sue Owens personally for defamation in Delaware because she lives in Tennessee. But lawsuit is still going forward against her Delaware businesses: Candace Owens LLC and GeorgeTom, Inc.
Owens celebrated her personal dismissal. “Feels like a year and a half of my family having to deal with psychotic lies regarding pending bankruptcies, secret accounts and plans to flee the country, has finally come to an end,” Owens wrote on X.
But Owens spoke too soon (as she often does). The Macrons’ new lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, targets her personally, because the court there has personal jurisdiction over her. Owens now faces two lawsuits at once: one against her personally in Tennessee and the original case against her companies in Delaware.
The 402-page complaint alleges 88 counts against Owens, including defamation, false light and defamation by implication. That’s a lot of defamation!
Others lost in court but Candace ran with the torch
The conspiracy began in 2021 on fringe social media sites. Natacha Rey, a self-described “independent journalist,” posted on Facebook that Brigitte is a transgender woman with a stolen identity. Rey repeated the story on Amandine Roy’s YouTube channel. Roy claims she is a spiritual medium.
French writer Xavier Poussard later published a series titled “The Mystery of Brigitte Macron,” and Owens amplified the claims. The theory holds that Brigitte Macron was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux (who is actually her brother) and stole her identity, and that she never married her first husband or had three children.
In 2024, a Paris court found Rey and Roy liable for defamation, fined them 500 euros each and ordered them to pay 8,000 euros to Brigitte Macron and 5,000 euros to her brother. A Paris appeals court overturned that ruling in July 2025, and the Macrons appealed to France’s highest court.
The Macrons hoped the French case would put the false claims to rest, but their lawsuit alleges that “Owens turned this flame into a fire.”
In March 2024, Owens said on The Daily Wire: “I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.”
The conspiracy theory
Owens’ central claim is that Brigitte Macron was born male as Jean-Michel Trogneux and later stole the identity of a real woman named Brigitte Trogneux. Owens claims that all records of Brigitte Macron’s birth, marriage, divorce and three pregnancies were forged. She also claims that Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron are related, that Brigitte groomed the future president when he was a high school student, and that he was installed through a CIA mind-control program.
Debunked
In December 2024, the Macrons demanded that Owens retract the claims and gave her extensive evidence, including Brigitte Macron’s 1953 birth announcement in a daily newspaper and childhood photos. The lawsuit alleges that Owens knew the truth but continued to publish false information.
Emmanuel Macron, 48, was in high school when he met Brigitte, who was his French and drama teacher. She already had three children from her first marriage.
The Macrons first asked only for a retraction. Along with the birth announcement, they provided public childhood photos of Brigitte, including one of her playing in a garden that the Daily Mail published in 2021. “Owens never shared it with her viewers,” the lawsuit alleges.
The Macrons also gave Owens evidence that Brigitte’s brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, is alive, further undercutting her claim that the two are the same person.
The lawsuit alleges that Owens ignored the evidence and continued to spread false and defamatory statements.
If Candace Owens really wanted to prove Brigitte Macron was a man, she could have simply hired someone to illegally and surreptitiously obtain a DNA sample from something as simple as a discarded water bottle. That would have cost her about $100. And unless the Macrons will still accept a retraction and settlement, Owens could likely end up losing tens of millions of dollars. For what? Millions of followers who hate transgender people?
But Owens is driven by ratings—not truth. Her followers: none the wiser. She’ll likely pay tens of millions of dollars for having a jury tell her what we all know: Brigitte is a woman.
The original Macron v. Candace Owens complaint in Delaware, the ruling on dismissal, and new Tennessee federal complaint are posted below for paying subscribers. I provide the source documents I rely on to paying subscribers. Consider a subscription for only $8 per month.