Ten people have been found guilty of cyber-bullying Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, by a Paris court.
The defendants were accused of spreading false claims about her gender and sexuality, as well as making “malicious remarks” about the 24-year age gap between the couple.
Most of the defendants were handed suspended prison sentences of up to eight months, but one was jailed immediately for failing to attend court. Some had their social media accounts suspended.
The judge said the eight men and two women had acted with a clear desire to do harm to Brigitte Macron, making remarks online that were degrading and insulting.
Two of the defendants – self-styled independent journalist Natacha Rey and internet fortune-teller Amandine Roy – were found guilty of slander in 2024 for claiming that France’s first lady had never existed.
They said her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux had changed gender and started using her name.
They were later cleared on appeal. The argument used by the appeals court in clearing them was that saying someone had changed gender was not necessarily an “attack on their honour”.
The Macrons are now taking that case to the high court of appeal.
“The most important things are the prevention courses and the suspension of some of the accounts” of the perpetrators, Jean Ennochi, Brigitte Macron’s lawyer, said after the verdict was handed down, the AFP news agency reported.
Tiphaine Auzière, Brigitte Macron’s daughter from a previous marriage, previously told the trial that the cyber-bullying had negatively affected her mother’s health and living conditions.
She said her mother “has had to be careful about her choices of outfits, of posture… she knows perfectly well that her image will be used to back these theories”.
While her mother had “learned to live with it”, Auzière said, she suffered from the repercussions on her grandchildren who were taunted at school.
Monday’s ruling in France is a forerunner of a much bigger trial due in the US, where the Macrons have filed a defamation lawsuit against right-wing influencer Candace Owens, who has also voiced conspiracy theories about the first lady’s gender.
They alleged that she “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim in favour of platforming known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers”.
Owens has regularly repeated the claims on her podcast and social media channels, and in March 2024 stated that she would stake her “entire professional reputation” on her belief that the first lady “is in fact a man”.
The presidential couple were initially advised that the best course was to ignore the online gossip, because to go to law would simply amplify it.
But last year there was a radical change of course.
The Macrons decided that the scale of the online attacks was now too large to ignore. So, at risk of exposing their private selves in a US court, they determined to push back against the conspiracy theorists.
A conspiracy theory claiming that Brigitte Macron is a transgender woman has circulated since her husband was first elected in 2017.
Brigitte Macron first met her now-husband when she was a teacher at his secondary school.
The couple married in 2007, when the future French president was 29 and she was in her mid-50s.
