How Candace Owens Converted A Bizarre Conspiracy About Brigitte Macron Into A Global Business

PARIS — When Xavier Poussard landed in Nashville, Tennessee, on Jan. 20, 2025, he didn’t come empty-handed. The little-known French author arrived with what he would later describe as a “gold mine” — a draft of his 340-page book promoting a bizarre conspiracy theory about Brigitte Macron: the false claim that France's first lady was born a man.

He was there to share it with Candace Owens, the American far-right influencer who had reached out with an offer to transform the book’s central thesis into an international phenomenon.

Owens had already discussed the conspiracy theory on her YouTube channel, which hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, and had been struck by her audience’s appetite for the story, Poussard recalled in an interview with POLITICO. Now she was ready to go big with it.

The two made an odd but complementary pair. Poussard — camera-shy with bookish good looks offset by thick plastic-framed glasses — had laid out the intricacies of the theory in dense, sometimes dizzying prose. Owens, a media sensation with a massive YouTube following, had the platform and instincts to package it for a global audience. It was Owens, Poussard said, who suggested drawing on Michelle Obama’s bestselling memoir, Becoming, for the project’s title and visual inspiration.

Less than three weeks after his arrival, Poussard released Becoming Brigitte, a self-published book “presented” by Owens and launched alongside her eight-part video series, which has since racked up more than 30 million views on YouTube. In the interview, Poussard declined to disclose an exact sales figure but said the book had sold between 50,000 and 100,000 copies — a range he has not previously made public.

There was, however, a fundamental problem with the story: It was false. And Brigitte Macron and her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, were determined to take it to court. In a 250-page complaint filed in Delaware, the couple accused Owens of spreading “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” and “verifiably false and devastating lies about the Macrons.”

The high-profile defamation lawsuit, filed in July 2025, marked a new escalation in a years-long battle waged by the Macrons to combat a conspiracy theory that sputtered to life in rural France as far back as 2018 before spreading through far-right media platforms and finding a vast new audience in the U.S.

The Macrons’ case against Owens, along with a series of legal battles in France, offers a window into how conspiracy theories catch fire in the age of YouTube and social media, where attention can be turned into profit and commercial incentives reward those who keep even the most outlandish claims alive. It is also a story about the limits of political influence in the digital age, in which even some of the most powerful people in the world can do little to stop a falsehood from spreading.

On Dec. 10, 2021, a local psychic and aspiring influencer who goes by the name Amandine Roy introduced a special guest to her small YouTube audience from her apartment in Angers, a city in France's Loire Valley. Her guest was Nathalie Rey, a 51-year-old woman who had already spent three years trying to uncover what she believed to be a vast deception involving France's first lady.

Roy, whose real name is Delphine Jegousse, is a self-described “medium, whistleblower and journalist” with bleached hair and large hoop earrings. She was trying to build an online following for an eclectic business spanning psychic consultations — including a five-session training course called the “crystal skull workshop” — and what she described as “authentic news.” She introduced the interview from her makeshift home studio as Rey, joining remotely, appeared to struggle with her iPhone.

Rey was eager to publicize her research but reluctant to show her face. Using the alias “Natacha,” she spoke with her camera off, represented on the livestream by a small profile picture in which she wore sunglasses and a large black hat. Her thesis was that the “official version” of Brigitte Macron’s life was a lie. She insisted that the first lady was in fact her own brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, who had transitioned to become a woman. (Trogneux has been photographed alongside his sister, including at Emmanuel Macron’s inauguration ceremonies in 2017 and 2022.)

Rey's theory, as recounted in the video, rested largely on Brigitte Macron's appearance — “the strangeness of her physique that bugged me from the start” — and speculation about the first lady's family history, in which she claimed to have identified “a great number of anomalies.”

She had begun looking into Brigitte Macron's life in 2018, shortly after Emmanuel Macron's first election as president. After she lost her job at a small business, her growing doubts about the couple's official biography became her primary occupation. A supporter of France’s Yellow Jackets protest movement, Rey already harbored a deep suspicion of political elites, which was only reinforced by her social isolation and online wanderings during the Covid era, according to a book about the conspiracy theory by journalist Emmanuelle Anizon.

One reason for her interest, Anizon recounted, was Rey's conviction that the rich and powerful enjoyed “impunity,” even when it came to the most horrendous crimes. She closely followed the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender with deep connections to the global elite.

Over three years, Rey pieced together an amateur investigation. But the journalists she approached showed little interest in her findings. One exception was Poussard, who had begun investigating Brigitte Macron for “Faits et Documents,” a fringe publication then backed by Alain Soral, a far-right polemicist with multiple convictions for hate speech and Holocaust denial.

Poussard put Rey’s suspicions into words on paper, added a touch of storytelling and supplemented them with his own research. He published a series of articles full of what-ifs and question marks in 2021. In them, he implied that the supposed deception surrounding Brigitte Macron’s identity was part of a broader cover-up. Rey’s theory, amplified by Poussard, alleged that the media had concealed not only the first lady’s purported past but also what they claimed was the grooming of Emmanuel Macron by his future wife, who was his teacher in secondary school. Poussard described the Macrons as a “pervert couple.”

Poussard's provocative writings remained confined to a fringe far-right readership. It was Roy’s YouTube broadcast that propelled the theory to a much wider audience.

For four hours during the broadcast, Rey railed against the “political caste” and the “manipulative and propagandist media.” Both women appeared convinced that journalists were either complicit or had been threatened into silence.

Within days, the video had attracted more than 500,000 views, helping to drive the hashtag #JeanMichelTrogneux into the top 10 trending topics on French Twitter. What had begun as one woman's obsession was suddenly a viral phenomenon.

And it caught the attention of Brigitte Macron.

The first lady moved swiftly. Less than a week after Roy and Rey's video went viral, her lawyer announced that she would sue the promoters of the false allegations. A few weeks later, she addressed the controversy publicly during a television interview with the French TV channel TF1.

“Of course it's fake,” the first lady said, while discussing her longstanding fight against cyberbullying. "I fear violence. I fear hatred. This kind of constant escalation," she said, referring to the political climate in France at the time. "We haven't done enough to protect ourselves from it. We've let a lot of things slide.”

Brigitte Macron, who declined to be interviewed for this article, framed her decision to fight back as both a matter of personal integrity and an extension of a cause she had championed for years: stronger regulation of social media and better protection against online abuse.

“If I don't do anything after having fought against cyberbullying for four years ... I am not credible,” she told French radio RTL.

Her intervention had an unintended consequence: The French suit gave the conspiracy's promoters fresh fodder and the opportunity to reinforce their claims that the country's most powerful couple had something to hide. Years later, a similar dynamic would unfold with the U.S. complaint against Owens, which is still in the early stages of the judicial process.

"The engine of the story is Brigitte Macron," Poussard said. "She is a boomer who doesn't understand the Streisand effect."

The Streisand effect refers to the phenomenon whereby attempts to suppress information end up drawing greater attention to it. Mike Borowski, the host of an alternative talk show that became a key platform for the conspiracy theory, agreed that the Streisand effect took hold.

“They're the ones who actually created the buzz,” he said in an interview. “I mean, Natacha Rey, Amandine Roy, myself, all the others, Xavier [Poussard] — without Brigitte Macron and Emmanuel Macron's interventions, it would just have been an internet thing.”

By the time Becoming Brigitte was published, the Macrons had been fighting the conspiracy for more than three years. The presidential couple filed their first suit in France in January 2022.

That first suit was a defamation case by Brigitte Macron and her brother, Trogneux, against Nathalie Rey and Amandine Roy, the two women behind the viral YouTube broadcast. Separately, French authorities pursued cyberbullying charges against people accused of spreading malicious allegations about the first lady online. Poussard, who lives in Italy, was interviewed by police in relation to Brigitte Macron’s complaint, but he has not been charged or put on trial.

For the Macrons, the allegations had particular sensitivity. They exploited a delicate chapter in their personal history: the origins of their romance.

Emmanuel first met Brigitte when he was a high school student in the northern French city of Amiens. She was 24 years his senior and married at the time. She was also his teacher. The pair "formed a deeper intellectual connection" in the school's drama class, which Brigitte taught, according to the lawsuit the Macrons filed against Owens. Macron developed "strong feelings for his teacher."

Their romance, which developed over several years as Macron left Amiens for Paris to study, tore both families apart and ended Brigitte's first marriage to a local bank executive, André-Louis Auzière, the father of her three children.

In a rare interview, Brigitte Macron's daughter Tiphaine Auzière recalled the time as "painful" for her family. Macron was a classmate of her sister, Laurence. "We weren't yet in the social media era, but it was a small town. Word gets around," she told French magazine Paris Match in 2024.

The Macrons have offered only carefully selected details about that period of their lives. Believers in the conspiracy, whether in good or bad faith, have eagerly filled in the gaps. Photographs from Brigitte Macron's early life and first marriage became objects of speculation, with conspiracy theorists commenting on everything from the shape of her ears to her resemblance to her brother. (A central element of Poussard's book is a visual analysis by a Chinese facial recognition tool purporting to document changes in Brigitte Macron's physical features over time.)

"That's what characterizes conspiracy theories: They make something out of nothing," said Eric Dupond-Moretti, a prominent lawyer and politician who served as Emmanuel Macron's justice minister when the allegations began circulating.

Auzière, Brigitte Macron's daughter, testified in one of the French trials about the impact the allegations had on her mother's well-being. "She has to be careful about what she is wearing, her poses, because she knows her image can be misrepresented," Auzière said. Social media posts promoting the conspiracy frequently feature close-ups of the first lady's body, inviting speculation about her figure or the way she moves.

"You can tell that they have been deeply wounded as individuals," said a prominent French politician close to the couple, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about a sensitive subject.

In January 2026, a Paris court convicted 10 people, including Amandine Roy, of cyberbullying Brigitte Macron by spreading malicious claims about her gender and sexuality. The defendants received sentences ranging from compulsory awareness training to prison terms, most of them suspended.

But the separate defamation case against Roy and Nathalie Rey backfired. After an initial ruling found the women guilty, an appeals court reversed the decision, ruling that while they had relied on sources "whose impartiality and reliability are questionable," they acted in good faith and their allegations fell under free speech protections.

Just as importantly, the ruling found that some of Roy and Rey’s allegations could not have defamed Brigitte Macron because they had not accused her of doing anything wrong. In the ruling, seen by POLITICO, the judges argued that alleging Brigitte Macron had transitioned, or concealed her birth identity, was not defamatory because being transgender was not wrongdoing in the first place. Similarly, even if Brigitte Macron had transitioned, concealing her transition wouldn’t be considered wrongdoing, the judge argued, as it would fall under a person’s right to privacy.

The court did find that the accusation that Brigitte had groomed Emmanuel when he was a minor had harmed the first lady’s reputation, but it concluded the accusations had been made in good faith. Publicly available information about the early days of the Macrons' romance constituted "a diverse and sufficient factual basis" for Rey's allegations regarding the potentially unlawful nature of their relationship when they first met, the decision read.

(In their complaint in the U.S., the Macrons' lawyers state that "at all times, the teacher-student relationship between Mrs. Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law.")

The decision caused consternation in the Macron camp. "This is a fairly extensive notion of free speech," said Dupond-Moretti, the former justice minister. "Imagine people say you are a man and those who say that are ruled innocent. Wouldn't that leave a weird taste in your mouth?"

Brigitte Macron and her brother have challenged the appeal decision before France's highest court. A ruling isn’t expected before the end of the year.

Rey died of cancer in September 2026. Borowski, the host of the alternative talk show, remembered her as “a frail, shy woman, who was transformed when she talked about her case.”

Candace Owens first introduced the theory to her American audience on March 11, 2024, in a podcast episode where she urged her followers to pay attention to what she called “the biggest political scandal in human history.”

Her broadcast came just a few days after Emmanuel Macron first commented publicly on the subject. Asked about it on International Women’s Day, on March 8, 2024, he described the conspiracy theory as one of his worst experiences in politics — kicking off a fresh wave of news coverage.

Owens, once a prominent figure in the MAGA movement, had clashed with fellow conservatives over accusations that she was spreading antisemitic tropes and promoting baseless conspiracy theories. In 2023, YouTube demonetized several of her videos for violating its policies against hateful and derogatory content, including a ban on deliberately misgendering transgender people.

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2024, Owens, who declined to comment for this article, published various posts about the Macrons. But her interest really flared after she watched the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics, according to Poussard.

An extravagant affair, the ceremony featured a banquet scene with a bearded man, nearly naked in blue body paint, surrounded by dancing drag artists and representing the ancient Greek god Dionysus. The performance was interpreted by many religious viewers as a mockery of Jesus Christ and his Last Supper.

In the wake of the ceremony, Owens, a devout Catholic, shared the outraged messages she received from across the globe. She would later tell her followers that the scene was one of many signs that "something very dark and very demonic is going on" in France.

Shortly afterward, she contacted Poussard. “She told me, ‘Listen, I am getting a lot of mails, emails, messages on social media’,” Poussard told POLITICO. “People were asking her, ‘Can we buy the Brigitte investigation? Is there something in English?’”

The two decided to join forces. They met in London, where Owens rented a place for the 2024 Christmas holidays (Owens’ husband George Farmer is a British businessman and right-wing activist), then in Owens’ Nashville mansion in January.

Poussard kept Owens updated on his work, sending her chapters of his book as he wrote them. He briefed her on the Macrons and their acquaintances among the French elite, giving her plenty of material for her podcast. “She discovered a gold mine,” Poussard said.

In return, Owens introduced the French writer to the American way of making money with online content; Poussard said he was impressed by how much she was able to achieve with a small team operating out of her Nashville mansion. His book, he said, became a “publishing success” that paid the mortgage for his family home in Milan, where he lives. He now sells the book in four languages through his website.

Poussard denied being primarily driven in his investigation by ideological or financial incentives. His motivation, he said, is journalistic: “The story exists, and it’s being pursued.”

As Poussard and Owens polished their publishing plans in late 2024, the Macrons were ramping up the legal fight. In December, they sent a demand that Owens retract her previous comments on the subject.

That only encouraged her further. “The funny thing is, if Emmanuel Macron had not sent me that letter threat, we were only going to do one episode,” Owens later said on fellow conservative Tim Dillon’s podcast. “I was so angry…. I was like, okay, like now we’re really doing this thing.”

In their Delaware suit, the Macrons describe multiple attempts to debunk Owens’ earlier claims, only to find their messages weaponized in new posts in which she framed herself as the victim and “continued to mock the Macrons’ attempt to correct the record,” their U.S. complaint reads.

In their complaint, the Macrons allege Owens knowingly spread falsehoods to build her audience and make money. “The clicks kept coming, so Owens kept going, seizing every opportunity to promote her salacious claims,” reads the defamation complaint the presidential couple filed in July 2025 against Owens and her media companies.

Owens' video series is part of a sprawling media business. In addition to advertising, she sells premium subscriptions to her “Club Candace,” merchandise and public speaking engagements. The AAE speakers bureau, which advertises Owens as a speaker, lists fees ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 for in-person events.

“She is getting viewers, she is selling merchandising. We live in a world where notoriety sells things,” said Dan Nardello, a prominent New York-based private investigator hired by Clare Locke, the high-profile law firm engaged by the Macrons, to investigate Owens' activities and potential motivations.

Nardello, gray-bearded and bespectacled, was also involved in the lawsuit against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his false claims about the Sandy Hook school shooting. He spoke to POLITICO in the bar of a discreet Paris hotel. On the green velvet couch beside him lay a copy of “Regime Change,” a book on Trump’s second term.

He pointed out that Owens reads approximately three advertisements per episode of Becoming Brigitte. He quoted a Fortune estimate of her podcast’s annual sponsorship revenues at between $2 million and $10 million. This estimate has not been independently verified by POLITICO, and how much revenue can be attributed specifically to coverage of the Macrons is unclear.

For the Macrons, the decision to sue in the U.S., with the grueling process and associated costs, was far from obvious, said Nardello. The Macrons “are acting on principle,” he added. "To put yourself at the mercy of the U.S. judicial process, it takes a lot of guts.” "I’m sure the political advice was ‘Don’t do it,’” he said.

Owens has stood by her allegations and sought to have the case dismissed. Last month, a Delaware state judge narrowed the scope of the lawsuit, ruling that because Owens lives in Tennessee, the Macrons could only target her businesses, which are registered in Delaware. Shortly after the ruling, Owens cheered the decision, describing the case as “one of the grossest, legal overreaches by a foreign government leader in human history — a sitting President’s attempt to personally bankrupt a single podcaster from outside the nation in which he governs” in a X post. She also accused the Macrons of “forum shopping,” arguing that it would have been too late to file a claim under French defamation law.

The first couple’s legal team said in a statement after the ruling they were “keeping all options open” to ensure that “she is held accountable personally.” On Nov. 4, they filed a new defamation complaint against Owens in Tennessee.

The Macrons areprepared to provide scientific evidence disproving the allegations, Tom Clare, their American lawyer, has said. But winning a defamation case in the United States against a public figure presents a formidable legal challenge. The Macrons must establish malice: that Owens made defamatory statements knowing they were false or with reckless disregard for the truth.

That is why Nardello was brought in. He was hired by Clare to document Owens' statements and investigate her potential motivations. His team has been looking into Owens' background, her business interests and the financial rewards she may have reaped from spreading the allegations. The goal is to establish not simply that Owens benefited from promoting the conspiracy, but that she knowingly or recklessly disregarded evidence contradicting her claims.

"It is all pretty straightforward. The mystery to me is how she thinks she is going to get away with this," Nardello said.

Yet the years of litigation also illustrate the difficulty of extinguishing a conspiracy theory once it has taken hold. At a small Duquesne bookshop, in Paris' posh 7th arrondissement, Jean-Christophe Gruau, 63, and Alain Vauthier, 76, have followed every twist and turn of the saga.

The shop, where Gruau works and Vauthier is a regular customer, sells ultra-conservative authors and far-right pamphlets.

Both men are familiar with Poussard's work. They have watched the allegations go global and applaud Owens for her “interest in the truth,” in Gruau's words. "As a 63-year-old man, I just can't believe in a lasting love story between a woman pushing 40 and a 17-year-old man," said the grey-haired bookseller, growing increasingly animated as the conversation progressed.

Neither the Macrons' public denials nor the evidence they have released appears to have shaken his convictions that the first couple’s darkest secrets have yet to be exposed. "If they wanted to solve the issue, they just had to show a few pictures. Why have they not?" Gruau asked.

"There are unanswered questions, dodgy things,” he said. “Nothing is clean here."