This Thursday, the Paris Criminal Court sentenced two women to financial penalties for having spread transphobic hoaxes on a social network about Brigitte Macron, wife of French President Emmanuel Macron.
The two women will have to pay Brigitte Macron, 71, 8,000 euros in compensation and 5,000 euros to her brother, Jean Michel Trogneux. They were also fined 500 euros, exempt from payment under certain conditions.
The sentence came after the trial hearing, which took place last June, for a series of statements leaked in 2021 in which they claimed that Brigitte Macron was a transgender woman and that her original name was Jean Michel Trogneux, the identity of her brother.
Brigitte Macron’s lawyer, Jean Enocchi, told BFMTV that “these totally fanciful claims” have been taken up “all over the world”, so he has been instructed to take action against them “in France and abroad”.
The incident occurred during a four-hour conversation on the YouTube platform between a supposed media outlet and a self-proclaimed “self-taught independent journalist.”
Last March, Macron himself denounced the spread of this type of hoax about his wife. “The worst thing about false information and invented scenarios, with people who end up believing them, is that they also affect your private life,” he said.
