French President Emmanuel Macron finally broke his silence about his defamation lawsuit against controversial media personality Candace Owens, who has repeatedly claimed that the First Lady of France, Brigitte Macron, is a man.
Speaking to French outlet Paris Match, Macron explained why he and his wife decided to take legal action against Owens following her numerous claims that Brigitte is actually a man named “Jean-Michel Trogneux.”
“This has become such a big issue in the United States that we had to respond,” Macron told the outlet in a piece published Tuesday, according to Politico. “It’s a question of having the truth respected.”
“[Owens] is someone who knew very well that she was spreading false information and did so with the aim of causing harm, in the service of an ideology and with established connections to far-right leaders,” he added, per the outlet.
Macron admitted that when Owens’ accusations first surfaced in France, they opted to ignore them so as not to have the opposite effect of drawing more attention to the claims by shutting them down. But he said that after the podcaster’s accusations spread in the United States, they had no other choice.
As my RedState colleague Streiff reported in July, Macron filed a defamation suit against the podcaster.
He wrote: