NASHVILLE, Tenn. (Nashville Banner) — This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner. Sign up for their newsletter.
Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, and his wife, Brigitte, are suing conservative podcaster and commentator Candace Owens for defamation.
In March 2024, Owens said that she “would stake [her] entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is, in fact, a man.”
Owens later advanced the conspiracy theory by claiming that Brigitte Macron participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment and that the Macrons are actually related. Owens moved to Nashville to work for The Daily Wire but was fired from the publication in 2024 and has also split from the larger MAGA movement.
According to the Nov. 4 complaint, after the Macrons sent Owens a retraction demand, Owens made a lot of her claims over a two-season podcast series titled “Becoming Brigitte.”
A Delaware judge dismissed a past version of the suit in October, ruling that her Delaware business connections weren’t enough to establish jurisdiction because she lives in Tennessee. Owens’ businesses are still defendants in that suit, but now the Macrons are suing her here.
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
North Nashville lost a passionate advocate and historian with the passing of Lorenzo Washington. I had the pleasure to get to know him while working on a story and left with a wealth of information and appreciation for how Jefferson Street shaped the sound of Music City. Aaron Cantrell shows us how Lorenzo will forever be part of that.
- Carrie Sharp
