Macrons file new defamation lawsuit against US podcaster over transgender rumours

What actually happened

Last week, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron filed suit in a federal court in Tennessee, where Owens resides. The 411-page complaint accuses her of continuing to spread false claims about Brigitte Macron's gender on her podcast, selling merchandise mocking the Macrons, and collecting donations on the back of her so-called reporting, all after a first lawsuit was already in motion. The Macrons say she has "unequivocally" doubled down rather than paused.

The earlier case, filed in Delaware in 2025, hit a jurisdictional snag: the judge dismissed it against Owens personally but allowed proceedings against her companies to continue. So this Tennessee filing is a fresh attempt, in the state where Owens actually lives, and it makes the accusation plainly: she knew the claims were false when she published them, and she has profited from them anyway.

This is not new territory for Brigitte Macron. Two women were convicted in France in September 2024 for spreading the original lie, which alleged she had once been a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux. Jean-Michel Trogneux is, in fact, her brother. The rumour has circulated on French social media since her husband's first election in 2017, but it found a much larger audience when Owens picked it up in March 2024 and built a whole video series around it, titled "Becoming Brigitte".

The line in the complaint that matters most

Buried in the legal filing is a sentence that deserves to be read. The Macrons wrote: "There is nothing shameful or defamatory about being a man, being transgender, or being gay. Owens' statements are defamatory because they accuse the Macrons of lying to France and to the world, for decades, about who Mrs. Macron is."

That is the right frame, and I am glad they put it there. The harm is not in the suggestion that Brigitte Macron is trans. The harm is in the accusation of a sustained, criminal deception. Owens is not spreading a neutral piece of information she honestly believes to be true; she is deploying trans identity as evidence of fraud, as proof of a hidden and shameful secret. The smear only functions as a smear if you already think being trans is something that must be concealed.

What this tells us about how trans identity is still weaponised

This is what I keep coming back to. The rumour has nothing to do with trans people, except that it uses transness as the instrument of attack. It says: imagine if she were trans. Wouldn't that be devastating? Wouldn't that prove something was rotten at the heart of their marriage, their public life, the French state?

The answer, of course, is no. Trans women are women. If Brigitte Macron were a trans woman, she would still be Brigitte Macron, still be married to the French president, still be the person France has watched for nearly a decade. Nothing would need to have been hidden, because nothing would be shameful. The entire logic of the smear collapses the moment you actually believe that.

But Owens does not believe that, and she is counting on a large enough portion of her audience not believing it either. That is what makes it effective as a tool of harassment. It reaches into the parts of the culture that still treat trans existence as inherently fraudulent, inherently deceptive, inherently something to be exposed. And it uses that prejudice to damage someone who is not even trans.

The people who are harmed most directly by that kind of thinking are not the Macrons, who have the resources to fight back through the courts. They are the trans people who live every day in a world where their identity is treated as a possible insult, where "you might be trans" is delivered as a threat rather than a fact, where the mere suggestion is meant to destabilise and humiliate. Every time a public figure uses transness as a smear, it reinforces the idea that trans people have something to answer for simply by existing.

The legal fight is worth watching

Whether the Tennessee lawsuit succeeds will depend on questions of jurisdiction, evidence, and US defamation law, which sets a high bar for public figures. I am not going to predict the outcome. What I will say is that the Macrons are right to pursue it, and right to frame it as they have. Calling out deliberate falsehood matters. Naming the financial motive behind it matters. Making clear in a formal legal document, available to the public, that being trans is not shameful, that being accused of deception is the actual harm, that matters too.

Owens confirmed the new lawsuit on X, seemingly pleased by the attention. That tells you something about the calculation being made: the lawsuits may cost her legally, but they generate exactly the kind of controversy her platform runs on. That is a difficult problem for anyone trying to use the courts to stop this kind of content, and it is not unique to this case.

What I hope people take away from this story is not just the legal back-and-forth, but the sentence from the complaint. Nothing shameful about being transgender. That belongs in every conversation where trans identity is used as a weapon, in every comment section where someone deploys it as a gotcha, in every boardroom or classroom or courtroom where the suggestion is made that being trans is something to hide. It is not. It never was.