Candace Owens faces a renewed defamation lawsuit from French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte Macron after the far-right podcast host “unequivocally doubled down” on her “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” accusing Brigitte of being transgender.
A massive 250-page complaint in Delaware state court was filed just two months after the Macrons filed an initial lawsuit accusing Owens of a “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” across her platforms, including in an eight-part podcast and on social media — all designed to feed a “frenzied fan base” in “pursuit of fame.”
Owens has “endorsed, repeated, and published a series of verifiably false and devastating lies” about the French president and his wife, according to the latest complaint.
After the initial lawsuit, Owens has “continued to use her podcast to expand her lies about the Macrons, sell merchandise making fun of the Macrons, and collect donations based on her ‘reporting’ on the Macrons,” the complaint says.
Owens has since alleged Brigitte “participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment” and “has gone so far as to suggest that the Macrons are involved in an alleged conspiracy to distract Owens from investigating Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” according to the lawsuit.
Her new claims have “only strengthened our case by doubling down on, and escalating, her knowingly false and defamatory rhetoric against the Macrons,” according to a statement to The Independent from counsel for the Macrons.
The latest complaint against Owens and her business entities — which are incorporated in Delaware — “captures the breadth of her continued vitriol and addresses her desperate attempts to have this case heard in what she perceives to be a more friendly forum,” Macrons’ counsel said.
Owens filed a 43-page motion to dismiss on September 12, arguing that Delaware courts do not have jurisdiction over the Macrons’ complaint, and that if it should be heard it all, the claims should instead be filed in France or Tennessee, where Owens lives.
Her lawyers called the lawsuit “quintessential libel tourism” intended to sidestep France’s three-month statute of limitations for defamation claims.
Brigitte Macron has already won defamation cases in France involving similar false allegations.
The French first lady is among the latest targets of years-long baseless conspiracy theories that accuse prominent women — from Former First Lady Michelle Obama to Taylor Swift — of secretly being transgender.
Those so-called “transvestigations” thread anti-trans rhetoric into a web of other far-right conspiracy theories that proliferate across social media.
The episodic nature of Owens’s Becoming Brigitte series resembles serialized true crime investigations, lending themselves to remixes across other platforms like TikTok, where Owens’s claims have racked up tens of millions of views.
In claims about the Macrons on her podcast since the initial lawsuit was filed, Owens suggested Brigitte Macron, under the name Jean-Michel, participated in 1971’s Stanford Prison Experiment, in which university students were assigned roles of guards and prisoners in a study shut down after only six days — a landmark case of unethical research.
Owens’s latest claims on her podcast also sought to link Brigitte Macron to the CIA’s MKUltra mind control program and to a “criminal syndicate engaged in identity theft, forgery, fraud, abuses of power, and even murder,” according to the Macrons’ latest complaint.
“These claims are demonstrably false, and Owens knew they were false when she published them,” it states. “Yet, she published them anyway. And the reason is clear: it is not the pursuit of truth, but the pursuit of fame.”
Owens has “built a brand on provocation, not truth,” racking up millions of followers and views on X and YouTube while “routinely peddling misinformation under the guise of legitimate reporting,” the complaint states.
“Her content is not intended to inform but to inflame and attract attention through sensationalism and conspiracy theories,” the filing adds.
The Macrons have argued that Owens’s statements have subjected the pair to a “campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies.”
“Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history — twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade,” according to the filing. “The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale.”
The Independent has requested comment from a representative for Owens.
