Two women who spread a rumor online that French First Lady Brigitte Macron was a transgender woman were ordered two women to pay damages on Thursday, September 12, by the Paris Criminal Court for defamation.
They received a suspended fine of €500 and were ordered to pay a total of €8,000 in damages to the wife of the French president and €5,000 to her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, both plaintiffs at the trial held last June. Macron, who was absent from the trial, was not present for the decision either.
The two women spear a theory that has resurfaced regularly on social media since the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, according to which Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, never existed, but that her brother Jean-Michel took on this identity after undergoing a sex change.
The claim went viral just weeks before the 2022 presidential election. Posts spread on social media claiming that the first lady, formerly Brigitte Trogneux, had never existed and that her brother Jean-Michel had changed gender and assumed that identity.
The two women played a major role in propagating the theory in 2021, conducting a long "interview" lasting over four hours in which the first, Amandine Roy, a self-proclaimed spiritual medium, interviewed the second, Natacha Rey, presented as a "self-taught independent journalist," on her YouTube channel, about the discovery of the "deception," "scam" and "state lie" they claimed to have uncovered.
In the four-hour interview broadcast on YouTube, the two women showed photos of Brigitte Macron and her family, talked about surgeries she had undergone, claimed she was not the mother of her three children, and gave personal information about her brother.
"It's not a victory, it's a normal application of the law," Jean Ennochi, Macron's lawyer, told Agence France-Presse (AFP). At the hearing in June, he had insisted on the "enormous" damage caused by this fake news, which he said spread "all over" the world. "In view of all these reprisals," from now on, "we are systematically pursuing" legal action he said, with legal proceedings underway "in France and abroad."
Following the YouTube video, their rumor reached a wide audience, going as far as audiences in the US, where the fake news went viral among the far right, during the middle of the 2021 presidential campaign. Several female politicians around the world have been the victim of transphobic rumors, including former US First Lady Michelle Obama, current US Vice President Kamala Harris and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Rey was ill during the trial, but did not manage to have it postponed.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.