adminWhen Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron hauled Candace Owens into a Delaware courtroom this summer, they did more than file a defamation suit — they escalated a transatlantic culture war into American legal turf. The 22-count complaint accuses Owens of peddling a long-debunked conspiracy that Mrs. Macron was born a man and of mobilizing that lie for clicks and cash, a charge that landed the case squarely in U.S. headlines.
The accusations Owens amplified trace back to 2021, but the Macrons say the podcast series and social posts that followed turned rumor into a global smear campaign with real consequences for a private family. The lawsuit argues Owens ignored repeated retraction demands and pressed on with an eight-part series called “Becoming Brigitte,” alleging actual malice — the legal standard public figures must meet to win defamation claims.
Now the First Lady’s camp says it will meet those lies head-on by submitting “photographic and scientific evidence” in court to prove Brigitte Macron is biologically female, including expert testimony and family photos showing pregnancy and motherhood. For anyone who still thinks online rumor-mongering is harmless theater, the Macrons’ decision to produce tangible evidence in a U.S. court should be a wake-up call.
Candace Owens, predictably, has pushed back hard, invoking the First Amendment and filing for dismissal on jurisdictional grounds — a familiar defense when speech and commerce cross borders in the digital age. Whether American courts should become the referee in a feud sparked in Europe is a serious question, and Owens’ lawyers are betting that jurisdiction and free speech will shield her from liability.
Don’t let anyone dress this up as merely an academic spat about identity politics; there’s a string of prior French court rulings and appeals tied to the same rumor, and those mixed outcomes show the tangled mess when law, journalism, and online mobs collide. The Macrons won a symbolic case in France before an appeals court reopened the matter on free-speech grounds, which is precisely why they’ve taken the unusual step of suing in Delaware where Owens’ entities are incorporated.
From a conservative standpoint, two principles pull in opposite directions: protect free speech and hold people accountable for deliberate defamation. Americans who cherish liberty should worry when powerful institutions punish speech without due process, but we should also reject the nihilism that treats character assassination as just another business model for click-hungry influencers. This case forces a reckoning about where our lines are drawn in the digital commons.
If the Macrons are serious about evidence, then let the proof speak in an open court and not in the rumor mills and late-night takes. Hardworking Americans know the difference between principled free expression and cash-driven smear campaigns, and they’ll be watching whether U.S. courts serve as a bulwark for truth or a tool for silencing critics with transnational lawsuits.
