Candace Owens responds to defamation lawsuit filed by French president, first lady
Candace Owens, a right-wing podcast host, is responding to the defamation lawsuit filed against her by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over the media figure's claims that the French first lady is male.
The Macrons said in a lawsuit filed in Delaware Superior Court on July 23 that Owens has waged a "campaign of global humiliation" and engaged in "relentless bullying" against the 72-year-old Brigitte to "promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money." The 219-page lawsuit details dozens of the podcaster's claims made over several months, and includes corresponding photographs, screenshots and archived newspaper clippings.
Owens responded to the lawsuit in her July 24 episode of her eponymous podcast "Candace," spending more than 30 minutes criticizing the legal action, the Macrons and doubling down on her claims.
"I think you're sick," Owens said, addressing France's first couple. "I think you're disgusting, and I am fully prepared to take on this battle."
The Macrons are suing Owens, her media company and the company that runs her website for 22 counts of defamation and defamation-related claims, seeking an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages. They are represented by Clare Locke and Farnan LLP, well-known firms specializing in high-profile defamation cases, who helped win a $790 million defamation lawsuit against Fox News brought by Dominion Voting Systems in 2023.
Owens has been repeating false claims over the first lady's identity for more than a year, the lawsuit alleges, starting in March 2024 when the podcaster stated she stakes her "entire professional reputation" that Brigitte Macron "is in fact a man.” In January, Owens released the first episode in an eight-part podcast series entitled, "Becoming Brigitte," in which the lawsuit says she presented various "outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions." The filing says they include allegations by Owens that Brigitte was born a man and stole someone's identity, that Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron are blood relatives and that they have committed "forgery, fraud and abuses of power to conceal these secrets."
The filing alleges that Owens ignored the Macrons’ requests to retract the allegations.
"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 said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Owens said the filing represented a "foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist."
Owens has attracted criticism for years over her commentaries on a range of topics, with a history of spreading antisemitic rhetoric, including Holocaust denial and revisionism. She was suspended from YouTube for a week in September after videos of several of her interviews were deemed as hate speech by the Google subsidiary. In the following two months, authorities in New Zealand and Australia rejected her visas to visit the countries ahead of her speaking tour in February and March 2025. Local media reported Australian Immigration Minister Tony Burke mentioned her rhetoric "downplaying the impact of the Holocaust with comments about (German SS officer Josef) Mengele through to claims that Muslims started slavery," as reasons for her visa denial.
Wednesday's lawsuit is a rare case of a world leader suing for defamation. To prevail in U.S. defamation cases, public figures like the Macrons must show defendants engaged in "actual malice," meaning they knew what they published was false or had reckless disregard for its truth.
Kathryn Palmer is a national trending news reporter for Paste BN. You can reach her at kapalmer@usatoday.com and on X @KathrynPlmr.