Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron are suing Candace Owens, the former Maga influencer, after she falsely claimed France’s first lady was a man.

The French president and his wife are willing to travel to the US for the case, should it go ahead, to end what their lawyer described as a “relentless and unjustified smear campaign”.

The 218-page lawsuit, filed in Delaware on Wednesday, accuses Ms Owens of publishing “outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions”, chief among them the conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux.

In March last year, Ms Owens insisted in a post on X: “After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man. Any journalist or publication that is trying to dismiss this plausibility is immediately identifiable as establishment.

“I have never seen anything like this in my life. The implications here are terrifying. I do not intend to let up on this story and I am calling on other journalists to look into this explosive story and report accordingly.”