Suing US influencer could backfire for the Macrons as conspiracy theory grows

Case marks a sharp turn in French domestic politics, where the private lives of leaders were once shielded from prurient scrutiny.

- Jonathan Eyal

PARIS — Tourists usually take over the French capital during August. True Parisians — those who run France as well as a large share of the city's ordinary residents — decamp to their holiday homes elsewhere in the country.

Politics stops, and political controversies are frozen.

Yet throughout this August, one French political saga refused to go away: the unprecedented decision of France's President Emmanuel Macron and his wife to file a defamation lawsuit in the United States against the American social media influencer Candace Owens.

For months, the far-right blogger has been spreading scurrilous allegations that Mrs Brigitte Macron was "born a man", that her marriage to the French President was a sham, and that she became a woman only at a later stage in her life.

This story is so preposterous that most French politicians were initially inclined to ignore it.

But the Macrons have decided that the time has come to put an end to a "grotesque narrative" that has turned into "a campaign of global humiliation" and "relentless bullying on a worldwide scale", as they put it in their US legal filings.

Their battle in the American courts marks a new phase in the global fight against the spread of conspiracy theories.

But it also marks a sharp turn in French domestic politics, where the private lives of leaders were once shielded from prurient scrutiny.

WHAT HAPPENS IN THE BEDROOM STAYS IN THE BEDROOM

France used to pride itself on ignoring the private lives of its key politicians, even though, when it came to dalliances, French presidents were always in a class of their own.

Former French president Francois Mitterrand, who ruled France throughout the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, conducted a 30-year affair with Ms Anne Pingeot, 26 years his junior, whom he first met when she was just 13.