Right-wing podcaster Candace Owens claims President Donald Trump personally called her to ask her to stop questioning the gender of Brigitte Macron, the first lady of France.
Speaking with Tucker Carlson on his podcast, Owens, who is being sued by the Macrons for pursuing the story — which is based on a debunked conspiracy theory — said she was called by Trump in February, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron visited the White House.
Owens said the initial request to stop talking about the French first lady came from someone “pretty high up” in the White House. She said she found the demand insulting and refused to comply.
Trump later phoned Owens directly about the issue, she told Carlson, saying that the president told her Macron had pulled him aside to ask if he knew Owens. Owens said she was shocked by the request and stated that Trump had been confused as to why he was being asked to intervene.
“Emmanuel Macron personally flew to D.C. and asked Trump to ask me to shut up, to just stop speaking about his wife,” she told Carlson.
“He sounded very confused,” she claimed of Trump. “He said he was very confused when the leader of France took him aside during negotiations for Ukraine and Russia to inquire about whether or not he knew Candace Owens.”
Owens first spoke about the call from the president on her podcast, Becoming Brigitte, an eight-part documentary-style production about France’s first lady. She said that Trump was very flattering toward her.
“You must be a very powerful person, Candace,” Owens said Trump had told her, before adding that her claims were distressing to Macron’s wife.
“She’s old and this is really, really impacting her,” she said the president had said.
Trump then added: “I saw her up close and she looks like a woman to me, I had dinner with her at the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
Owens said she replied: “Respectfully, Mr. President, it’s not my fault that he married somebody with a penis,” repeating the type of false claim that has drawn the ire of the Macrons.
Trump allegedly countered that they were working to end the war in Ukraine, and it would be helpful if she stopped questioning the gender of Macron’s wife.
Owens said she agreed to dial back on pushing the story for a while but would not agree to anything more than that.
Last month, the Macrons filed a defamation lawsuit against Owens over the far-right influencer’s “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” falsely accusing Brigitte of being born a man.
The 219-page defamation complaint, filed in Delaware state court, accuses Owens of proliferating “demonstrably false” claims across her platforms, including in an eight-part podcast and on social media, designed to feed a “frenzied fan base” in “pursuit of fame”.
“These lies have caused tremendous damage to the Macrons,” according to the lawsuit, which names Owens as well as her business entities, which are incorporated in Delaware.
The false claims have subjected the Macrons to a “campaign of global humiliation, turning their lives into fodder for profit-driven lies,” the complaint says.
“Owens has dissected their appearance, their marriage, their friends, their family, and their personal history — twisting it all into a grotesque narrative designed to inflame and degrade,” the complaint alleges. “The result is relentless bullying on a worldwide scale. Every time the Macrons leave their home, they do so knowing that countless people have heard, and many believe, these vile fabrications. It is invasive, dehumanizing, and deeply unjust.”
The podcaster doubled down after the lawsuit was filed, outrageously claiming that Brigitte Macron’s death would be faked before the case reached the discovery phase, claiming that the hypothetical staged killing of Macron would shut down all discussion “about her being a man anymore.”
Brigitte Macron was previously awarded $9,149 in damages last year after two other far-right influencers falsely accused her of being a transgender woman.
In that case, Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey were ordered to pay damages to France’s first lady as well as her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, after the women amplified bogus claims that Brigitte Macron had never existed and that her brother had changed gender and assumed that identity.
For years, baseless conspiracy theories have proliferated across social media accusing prominent women — from Former First Lady Michelle Obama to Taylor Swift — of secretly being transgender, so-called “transvestigations” that thread anti-trans rhetoric into a web of far-right conspiracy theories.
The Macrons’ lengthy complaint in Delaware connects the case to Owens’s long history of far-right conspiracy theories — including debunked antisemitic tropes and attempts to minimize the Holocaust — to her attacks against the French first lady, which Owens has monetized on her YouTube channel, garnering millions of views.
With additional reporting from Alex Woodward
