Candace Owens Sued for Defamation by French President and Wife

Candace Owens Sued for Defamation by French President and Wife

Candace Owens has been sued for defamation by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over a yearslong campaign featuring assertions that the First Lady of France is male, marking the second time in as many months a right wing political commentator has been sued for allegedly false reporting.

Owens said last year that she “would stake [her] entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man.” Since then, she’s leveraged the statement to juice her online following despite evidence disproving the claim, according to a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in Delaware state court.

The filing of the complaint follows Gov. Gavin Newsom in June suing Fox News for defamation over its coverage of a phone call he had with President Trump. He claimed that the network deceptively edited the segment to suggest the governor lied when he said that Trump hadn’t called him about deploying National Guard troops during the L.A. protests.

After the Macrons sent her a retraction demand, Owens helmed an eight-part podcast series called “Becoming Brigette” that doubled down on the assertions, the lawsuit said. This included claims that Brigitte Macron was born a man, stole another person’s identity before transitioning and that she and her husband are blood relatives committing incest.

“Because Ms. Owens systematically reaffirmed these falsehoods in response to each of our attorneys’ repeated requests for a retraction, we ultimately concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue for remedy,” said the Macrons in a statement. “Ms. Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety. We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused.”

Tom Clare, a lawyer representing the Macrons of Clare Locke, which represented Dominion in a lawsuit against Fox, said the Macrons’ claims present a “clear-cut case of defamation.” He added, “Relying on discredited falsehoods originally presented by a self-proclaimed spiritual medium and so-called investigative journalist, Ms. Owens both promoted and expanded on those falsehoods and invented new ones, all designed to cause maximum harm to the Macrons and maximize attention and financial gain for herself.”

After her stint at the Daily Wire, Owens launched a podcast. She’s amassed a sizable online following, with roughly seven million followers on X and 4.5 million subscribers on YouTube. Brigitte Macron, who has prevailed in two defamation lawsuits in France against others who made similar claims, accuses her of peddling misinformation and promoting a range of conspiracy theories. In recent months, Owens has defended Justin Baldoni in his It Ends With Us legal battle with Blake Lively and attempted to exonerate Harvey Weinstein.