PARIS — Brigitte Macron’s youngest daughter testified in court on behalf of her mother on Tuesday as part of the family’s effort to forcefully combat transphobic rumors that the French first lady was assigned male at birth.
“Not a week goes by without someone telling her about this,” Tiphaine Auzières told the court. “She cannot ignore all the horrible things people say about her.”
Auzières was the sole witness to take the stand in a two-day trial of 10 people charged with cyberbullying Macron by sharing messages on X promoting conspiracy theories that metastasized online. The claims included that her mother was assigned male at birth; is transgender; or was born under her brother’s name, Jean-Michel Trogneux, before assuming a new identity — an allegation first circulated by fringe French conspiratorial outlet Faits et Documents.
A verdict is expected later Tuesday evening.
Auzières said the conspiracy theories had made it “impossible” for her mother “to have a normal life.” When asked about her uncle Jean-Michel, she testified she had seen him “a few months ago” and that he was “doing very well.”
The 10 defendants — eight men and two women from their 40s to their 60s — cut an unlikely cross-section of France. They range from a well-off computer scientist working in Switzerland to a heavily disabled man “who spends a lot of time on Twitter,” a self-described spiritual medium crippled by debt and a soft-spoken deputy mayor in a rural town.
The messages read aloud in court swung between crude jokes about Brigitte Macron’s alleged gender identity, conspiracy theories about a media cover-up, and sneers at the 24-year age gap between her and the president.
Most cited free expression in their defense, invoking the legacy of Charlie Hebdo — the satirical weekly famed for its provocative cartoons and its defiance in the face of the 2015 terrorist attack on the magazine that left 12 people dead.
Auzières said the widespread rumors had led her mother to change her behavior, constantly worrying that the way she dressed or presented herself could be used by conspiracy theorists to attack her. She also said her mother had grown “anxious” that her seven grandchildren could face bullying at school.
While she was not on trial, the impact of American far-right influencer Candace Owens was palpable throughout the proceedings. Several defendants had shared videos about Macron by Owens, who is being sued by the French presidential couple in a separate case in Delaware, or said they had been influenced by her content.
Presented during the trial as a key node in spreading the rumor, Aurélien Poirson-Atlan also tried to shift responsibility onto Owens. Poirson-Atlan, whose X account, ZoeSagan, once counted hundreds of thousands of followers before being suspended last summer, claimed he was “being used as a replacement for Ms. Owens” in the proceedings. One of the cited posts he published was a translation of a post by Owens.
Brigitte Macron, 72, met her current husband Emmanuel when he was her teenage student at a private school in Amiens, a city about 1.5 hours north of Paris. The Macrons’ U.S. lawsuit states that “at all times, the teacher-student relationship between Mrs. Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law.”
The suit also provides pictures of Brigitte as a child and of her first marriage in 1974.
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