A Paris court has found 10 people guilty of online harassment of the French first lady, Brigitte Macron, by posting or reposting malicious comments on social media that claimed falsely that she was a man.
Eight men and two women, aged 41 to 60, including a school sports teacher, an art gallery owner and a publicist, were on Monday given sentences ranging from a compulsory course in understanding online harassment to an eight-month suspended prison sentence. One man, a property developer, who was absent from the trial hearings, was given a six-month prison sentence.
Some were also suspended from accessing the social media platforms on which they had made or reposted the comments.
All were found guilty of making or sharing malicious comments about Brigitte Macron’s gender and sexuality, saying she had been born a man. For some, this included equating her age difference with her husband, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, to paedophilia.
The Paris trial is the latest phase in a legal battle on both sides of the Atlantic by the Macrons against the false claim that Brigitte Macron is a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux.
The Macrons have also filed a US lawsuit for defamation against the conservative podcaster Candace Owens for amplifying and repeating the claim. The US lawsuit states that the accusation Brigitte Macron is a man called Jean-Michel Trogneux is completely false and that Trogneux is in fact Brigitte Macron’s older brother. Trogneux, 80, lives in the northern French town of Amiens, where he grew up with Brigitte and their siblings in a family famous for its chocolate business.
The false theory about Brigitte Macron’s gender spread in part because the Macrons’ relationship has long been a topic of comment online. Brigitte Macron, who is 24 years older than her husband, first met Emmanuel Macron when she was a French teacher at his Jesuit secondary school in Amiens, where she directed him in a school play.
The Macrons’ US lawsuit against Owens states: “Through the school’s theatre programme, President Macron and Mrs Macron formed a deeper intellectual connection.” It added: “At all times, the teacher-student relationship between Mrs Macron and President Macron remained within the bounds of the law.” Brigitte Macron, who has three children from her first marriage, divorced in 2006 and she and Emmanuel Macron married the following year, when he was 30.
Brigitte Macron’s daughter Tiphaine Auzière, 41, a lawyer, had told the court that false claims the French first lady was born a man had damaged her mother’s quality of life, leaving her worrying every day about the clothes she wore and how she stood.
Auzière, who is one of three children from Brigitte Macron’s first marriage, said her mother had been affected by social media posts that had caused a “deterioration of her health” and a “deterioration of her quality of life”.
She said: “Not a day or week goes by when someone does not talk about this to her … What is very hard for her are the repercussions on her family … Her grandchildren hear what is being said: ‘Your grandmother is lying’ or ‘Your grandmother is your grandfather.’ This affects her a lot. She does not know how to stop it … She’s not elected, she has not sought anything, and she is permanently subjected to these attacks. I – as a daughter, a woman and a mother – would not wish her life on anyone.”
Brigitte Macron told TF1 the night before the verdict that she would fight on. She said: “People are playing with my family tree, claiming I’m a man.”
She said her online abusers had ignored the strong evidence of her gender. She said: “A birth certificate is not nothing. It is a father or a mother who goes to declare their child, who says who he is or who she is.”
She said she wanted to be a role model for young people against bullying: “I want to help teenagers fight against bullying, and if I do not set an example, it will be difficult.”
