Two women convicted of defamation

Two women who had spread the rumour on the Internet in 2021 that Brigitte Macron was a transgender woman, a disinformation that went viral even in the United States, were convicted on Thursday 12 September by the Paris criminal court for defamation.

They were sentenced to a suspended fine of 500 euros and ordered to pay a total of 8,000 euros in damages to Brigitte Macron and 5,000 euros to her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, both civil parties in the trial, which was held last June. Brigitte Macron, absent during the trial, was also not present at the decision.

The wife of the President of the Republic filed a complaint for public defamation with the filing of a civil suit on January 31, 2022, which led to the referral (almost automatic under the press law) of the two women to the criminal court.

False information that has gone viral internationally

“It is not a victory, it is a normal application of the law”reacted to Agence France-Presse M^my Jean Ennochi, Brigitte Macron’s lawyer. During the June hearing, he insisted on the damage ” enormous “ caused by this fake news, which had “called everywhere” in the world. “Given all these covers”From now on, “We are systematically pursuing” in court. “Legal proceedings are underway in France and abroad”he clarified.

At the heart of the issue is a theory that has periodically resurfaced on social media since Emmanuel Macron’s election in 2017, according to which Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, never existed, but that her brother Jean-Michel assumed this identity after changing sex.

The two women contributed greatly to spreading the theory in 2021, conducting a long “interview” of more than four hours in which the first, the “medium” Amandine Roy, interrogated the second, Natacha Rey, on her YouTube channel, presented as “self-taught freelance journalist”, on the discovery of this “deception”, ” scam “of this “state lie”.

In the four-hour interview broadcast on YouTube, the two women shared photographs of Brigitte Macron and her family, talked about the surgeries she had undergone, said she would not be the mother of her three children and gave personal details about her brother.

The false information had a greater impact after the YouTube video, even reaching the point of being exported internationally, especially and recently also to the United States, where it went viral on the far right, in the midst of the presidential campaign.

Several female politicians around the world have already experienced transphobic messages, such as former US First Lady Michelle Obama, current US Vice President Kamala Harris and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.