Will Brigitte Macron ever silence the conspiracy theorists?

0:01Sky News, the full story first

0:08Coming up, the French first lady, the conspiracy theory and the criminal convictions. A baseless claim that she's actually a man was pushed online and repeated by powerful voices. So what makes people choose to believe the unbelievable?

0:35That is Brigitte Macron fighting back against the trolls and conspiracy theorists, Francie's first lady, demonstrating she possesses just as much steel in her soul as any head of state. The reason? Well, for years, she's been the subject of one of the internet's most vicious falsehoods, that she is secretly a man, that her identity is a fraud and that the truth is being covered up. There is, of course, no real evidence. There never was. but repetition of the claim did the work that the absence of facts could not. The story spread far and wide, amplified by influencers, including the prominent US right-wing commentator Candace Owens.

1:16But yesterday, the internet fiction collided with the law. A French court handed down convictions, a rare moment where an online conspiracy theory was forced into contact with the real world. Emma Kate Simmons is a Paris-based journalist who writes for a variety of outlets, including Conspiracy Watch and The New World. Emma Kate, great to have you with us on the Sky News Daily. For those who haven't encountered this before, just explain, what exactly is it that Brigitte Macron is accused of? So Brigitte Macron, since about 2021, has been accused of being born male, which is a lie. But the accusation has gone beyond that to a whole conspiracy theory about her having been perhaps born her brother, who never existed, or perhaps she is the mother of Emmanuel Macron.

2:04But the main accusation, and that has been the subject of a few court cases, is that she was born a male and so basically she's transgender, but she's not really a woman. That's the main accusation, which has turned into a big conspiracy theory around that. Certainly it is felt like the Macrons have been becoming more litigious of late when it comes to these accusations. But very specifically, tell us, what do we know about the case that concluded in Paris yesterday? We know that for the first time, there's been a full conviction, including suspended prison sentences and fines for these 10 people who were accused of cyber harassment.

2:36There were eight yesterday. There's another two in a separate case. And they are among the ringleaders of this lie, slander, conspiracy theory that's been circulating online since two women started talking about it around 2021, and one of whom was in court yesterday, or at least judged yesterday, Amandine Roy. And since then, it's a lie that's gone on and on and on and spread around the world, including to the United States. Give me a little bit more detail about the origin of this conspiracy theory. I think the origin really comes with the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017, because as many people remarked, there was a big age difference between him and his wife, Brigitte, who today is 72.

3:14And they met when she was his teacher at school when he was 15. And so already there was a lot of commentary, particularly outside of France, about this. and already in his first term there was a lot of commentary around this age gap his sexuality a lot of it being pushed along with other conspiracy theories by russian associated accounts so disinformation coming out of moscow but not exclusively but really really picked up a pace after the yellow vest movement which was a big sort of popular but in the end quite far right movement against macron with many protests that shut down the country and this is before 2021 and And after that, some of the people who were involved in that started to really comment on the fact that Brigitte was actually a man.

3:54And it sort of appeared to come out of nowhere, but it didn't really. And similarly, it mirrors a lot the QAnon conspiracy theory that has circulated in the United States that started out with this idea that the Democrats, when Hillary Clinton was still in office and later when Barack Obama was president. And after that, that with Joe Biden, there was a kind of satanic conspiracy. And in any case, this idea was borrowed essentially by these people in France. And at first it was very fringe. And then it became more and more mainstream after Elon Musk bought X in 2022. I mean, you talk about conspiracy theories.

4:27You talk about the sharing of conspiracy theories. All of that seems to be happening on social media, but in your mind, very specifically X. Exactly. Now, conspiracy theories have existed for centuries. But with X in particular, once Elon Musk took it over and lifted the kinds of controls that they were on, hate speech and lies and slander and incitement to violence, and giving people a blue tick so they could, through the algorithm, grow their followers in an absolutely viral and massive way very quickly. This really helped and was seized upon by the Brigitte Macron conspiracy theorists, who were also starting to make money out of it.

5:03A name that continues to crop up in relation to this story, Candice Owens. She was quite a prominent figure on the US conservative right, wasn't she? Yes, she was and very important in the MAGA movement and still is for a section of the MAGA movement. But she really got global notoriety last year when a group of these French conspiracy theorists, several of them, went to her with their lie about Brigitte Macron being a man, specifically this book Becoming Brigitte, which was a, it's not a book, but a kind of document written by Xavier Poussard. And he and another conspiracy theorist who also got an eight-month suspended prison sentence, they actively sought out Candace Owens in particular on this subject, and they sold her the idea.

5:45And she took it global early in 2024, and she started to do her own Becoming Brigitte series. She gave credit to this French conspiracy theorist who's now based in Italy, associated with very far-right anti-Semitic conspiracist groups of conspiracies about masons, about everyone. And she really took it viral. And from that point, because of her audience and millions of views and people listening, it became one of the top three conspiracy theories of all time, and certainly of last year after COVID-19 conspiracy theories, which a lot of these people participated in spreading, you know, that it was all deliberate or a hoax, et cetera.

6:21And the Great Replacement, which is an anti-immigrant racist theory. Brigitte Macron, being a man, which is not true, was all up there with it, thanks to Candace Owens. And she keeps going on about it. and making a lot of money, and now she's being sued by the Macrons in the US. Just in terms of Candace Owens, very specifically, I mean, I remember her when she first emerged, because she was, I think, for the Republican right in America, a breath of fresh air, young, articulate, from a black background, speaking from the MAGA playbook. So what has changed there? I think we can see this in the evolution of many figures, conspiracist figures on the marker, far right, but not just in the US, particularly since January 6, 2021, when people associated with Trump stormed the Capitol, when Trump says he won the election in 2020, there's been a radicalization and an evolution towards more and more extreme rhetoric.

7:12And we can even see this in the United States, even with the Vice President J.D. Vance and Trump himself, other people around Trump. Now, Candace Owens followed that trajectory in her own manner. She has specific obsessions, anti-Semitic obsessions. She spreads Holocaust denial and blames Israel and Jews for everything. Recently, she blamed them and said that they and the Macrons were trying to assassinate her. She's accused the French president and his wife of a plot to kill her. Yes, it was only a month or two ago. She did a whole program, which I had the misfortune of having to watch and listen to, where she outlined these completely wild theories and mixing everything together.

7:50So she really blames them for everything. But yes, she's become more and more extreme. She's very close with the Tate brothers. She's interviewed Andrew Tate. So she's really got some really unfortunate and nasty associations. But yes, she makes a lot of money. And in their claim of libel and defamation in the United States, slander, the Macrons have talked about that. They mentioned conspiracy theories, which is what we track at Conspiracy Watch. But then they mentioned the monetization of these conspiracy theories because with her millions of followers, and you'll see if you listen to her show in the middle, she'll be advertising something a bit like an old-fashioned radio show with an ad for a random medical product in the middle.

8:27Seemingly benign, but that as well as all of the clicks she gets make her a very rich woman. What do we know about the effect that these allegations and the circulation of them have had on the French president and his wife? We know from the daughter of Brigitte Macron, Tiffin, who spoke during this case. She explained that her mother almost every week is confronted with more of these kinds of tales and how it affects her personally. It has a real effect on her psychologically, physically. And President Macron has also explained that even he has world leaders asking him whether or not these rumors are true or at least raising them.

9:07So even though Macron tries her best to keep away from social media, she knows everyone's talking about it. It's just getting worse and worse and worse. And there's all kinds of court cases going on, including her brother, who they claim is her or that he doesn't exist when, of course, he does, and claiming that she must produce evidence she's a woman. And this is where it resembles closely the birtherism conspiracy theory which surrounded Barack Obama. And maybe you know about that, but he was accused by Donald Trump more than a decade ago of not having really been born in the United States. He was born in Hawaii and constantly being called Barack Hussein Obama and asked to produced his birth certificate in the same way of Brigitte Macron being demanded.

9:50She produces physical evidence of her being a woman, which apparently the Macrons are going to do in the United States. But I keep coming back to the same question here, Emma Kate. Why? Why do people believe this stuff when, as you say, if you look at anything other than the surface, there is no evidence to back this up? I think it's a bit of the, you know, people think that where there's some smoke, there must be fire. And that's always been the kind of fuel that has fed conspiracy theories since time immemorial. But I think with social media, and really that underlying it, and maybe it's subconscious, but there's a clear misogyny, a hatred of women, of an older woman, an older woman who dares to breach a social taboo and marry her former student.

10:36It's been proven that they married obviously when he was an adult, that they did not have relations when he was a minor. And this is a kind of revenge, I think. But I also think it's like titillation. People think, well, she kind of looks like this. And that's the sad part is that deep fakes or even just doctored photographs are being used and spread online. She can't even go swimming in summer. And now, of course, as we know, photographs appear online. Everyone plays with AI and people are quite happy to consume that. And that's very disturbing. Not caring about the person who's being attacked, about the fact that it's their reputation, her being a woman.

11:11And of course, she's accused of being transgender. Okay. So as a French court said, that in itself is not a libel. However, when it's used by these sinister forces who themselves hate transgender people, right? So they are using it as an insult. And in the first case, Bridget Macron is a woman and should not have to defend herself and say that, you know, prove this fact. I mean, sharing theories, that is one thing. But then to take it, to weaponize it in the way, clearly, some of those, at least some of those convicted in Paris have done, is a different thing. To almost go on the offensive about a conspiracy theory.

11:46I mean, why does that happen, do you think? This is deliberate. It's strategic. It's calculated. There's a planned campaign. And that has what has been revealed in some of the reporting our reporters have done at Conspiracy Watch, but certainly through these court cases. And Brigitte Macron is not the only woman who's been the target of these ad hominem attacking her person conspiracy theories saying that she is a man. So before her, we've had Michelle Obama, the Williams tennis players, often successful and famous women are accused of being men. And, you know, these people make money from it.

12:20It's true, it's shocking, but I think people are more and more willing, according to the surveys in different countries, willing to believe these kinds of stories. Perhaps it confirms their idea that it's really weird anyway that this older woman would be with this younger man. Funnily enough, in France, that wasn't originally such a scandal. People commented on it internationally a lot more. And I would say there's also this strategic campaign that it's either linked to or echoed by Russian bots, pro-Moscow accounts. I would note that people close to Vladimir Putin, like his former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has pushed this on X.

12:56But there's this idea of an anti-Western, anti-French, anti-woman conspiracy theory kind of hate that comes together. Why do you think, Emma Kate, that in this age, when we are told to question everything, when we have access to all the information in the world, just one swipe away, why are people so quick to believe something that if you did just the barest of research, you would realize on the balance of probabilities was probably not true. Well, sadly, I think most of us without a lot of education and thought and reflection and sort of standing back and taking distance can be a little bit superstitious.

13:35I mean, it's age old, isn't it? Superstition surrounding all kinds of things. I mean, women were burnt at the stake hundreds of years ago in the United States and Europe accused of being witches. It's a similar kind of impulse. So evidently there is this dark human impulse that we all have. And if we don't educate ourselves and try to look at things and try to be, or at least look for good sources, reliable sources of news and information, well, we are going to be willingly manipulated, particularly in this social media world that we live in. And that's why I think it's important that we have these court cases, that the truth will out, even if it makes more people aware of the conspiracy theory.

14:16At the very least, there's a counter narrative, the narrative of truth and accuracy and decency. Well, you'd hope so. But look, where do you think this story goes next, Emma Kate? Because with all the best will in the world, Candace Owens is going nowhere. No, she's not. She didn't barely take a break over Christmas, New Year, unfortunately. Certainly she's already mentioned, at least on X, about the fact that this ruling was handed down in France. And obviously where it goes now, it goes to the United States. I mean, this is really a big deal. I mean, a French head of state has never taken defamation action with his wife in the United States.

14:55It's been filed in Wimlington, Delaware. And it's very interesting, like quite very detailed complaint. and it will be heard potentially in the coming months and there's the possibility evidently that the Macron's will, it's possible they will go or at least be heard as witnesses in this case. So it's a much bigger case and I think it's very important. Let's see what happens. There is a precedent, a libel case against a publication called Gorka that was funny and often satirical but extremely libelous and it was destroyed by I think around a$1 billion libel ruling. So if malice can be proved, well, the Macrons may have some justice in the United States, but it really remains to be seen because the bar is high and is a different legal system and approach to freedom of speech because this is not freedom of speech.

15:45And in fact, some of these defamers in the French court and the Paris court claimed that they were either joking or just exercising their freedom of speech. But it was clear from if you look at the content that some of their insulting and relentless campaigns against Brigid Macron that they had very malicious and deliberate intent to destroy her and to make money at the same time. Emma Kay, away from the Macron story just for a second. When I was a kid growing up, if one of my pals had suggested we didn't land on the moon, or that the earth was a disc balanced on the back of four massive elephants on the back of a tortoise travelling through space, we'd have told them to go away and shut up.

16:24What has shifted, do you think then? Well, there's definitely been a big shift in the move away from the belief in the science and the fact that facts and science, that we believe in science. I mean, we saw this and evidently COVID-19 was a huge change there. There's a sea change there because so many people didn't believe the science at the time. Okay, they found the measures of COVID a little bit draconian and masked and there were some mistakes made and we didn't know everything, but there was clearly a pandemic that was dangerous and that was killing people. That's something that's been going on much more profoundly in the past 20 or 30 years.

17:02And now when you see someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., health secretary of the United States, he is a spreader of health. The conspiracy theories against vaccines. Some people believe, and he also has even mentioned the idea that there's a kind of lizard elite controlling the world. Now that's a really out there conspiracy theory that's becoming more mainstream thanks to people like him. Well, look, with thanks to our reptilian overlords and yourself, Emma Cate, great to have you on the podcast. And thanks so much for your time. Thank you very much. And you can check out Emma Cate's Macron investigation over on the Conspiracy Watch website.

17:42Thanks for listening.