Becoming Brigitte

Becoming Brigitte is a conspiracist tract made infamous by the pro-Kremlin antisemitic and anti-French online entrepreneur and hate peddler Candace Owens. Released in February 2025. and presented as an “investigation” by the French conspiracy theorist Xavier Poussard, the book-length document recycles and expands a defamatory rumor first circulated in France in 2021 by the Youtuber Natacha Rey. The claim falsely alleges that Brigitte Macron, née Trogneux, is hiding her “true” identity and was born male under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux, who is in fact her brother, before becoming a transgender woman.

Poussard claims that Jean-Michel Trogneux assumed the identity of his younger sister Brigitte from the 1980s onward. To support this claim, the book relies on approximate comparisons of archival photographs, decontextualized quotations and the misuse of a Chinese facial-recognition tool, Face++. It treats similarity scores as proof of identity, rather than as probabilistic outputs.

The lack of tangible evidence is incorporated as proof of the narrative: Poussard argues that a state conspiracy erased traces of Brigitte Macron’s past, including school photographs and civil records. He also claims that André-Louis Auzière, Brigitte Trogneux’s first husband, was either a fictional character or a “ghost” whose death was staged.

The book goes beyond the original transphobic rumor. It contains unfounded allegations of pedophilia and incest against the Macron couple and attempts to connect them to a supposed “pedophile nebula” and an “LGBT lobby” involving French public figures. Becoming Brigitte hues to a broader conspiracist pattern in which gender identity, sexuality and child-protection rhetoric are fused into a single moral panic storyline.

Becoming Brigitte also incorporates familiar antisemitic conspiracy claims about finance and hidden power. It insinuates that Emmanuel Macron is a puppet of the Rothschild bank and part of an eschatological project allegedly directed by networks of influence. In this respect, the book connects a local French rumor to more widely circulating conspiracist motifs about elites, banking and secret control.

The book reached the Amazon best-seller lists in France shortly after its release in February 2025 and was briefly removed from the platform before being reinstated. The book was central to the calculated operation of exporting defamatory claims about Brigitte Macron’s sexual identity into the Anglophone conspiracist ecosystem through Owens and her audience.

The affair has also had legal consequences. In 2024, Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy were convicted of defamation before being acquitted on appeal in July 2025. The appeal court did not validate their claims: it held that some statements were not defamatory and that, where statements were defamatory, the defendants could benefit from the so-called “good faith” exception. Brigitte Macron and her brother appealed to the Cour de cassation, France’s highest court for civil and criminal matters.

In January  2026, the Paris criminal court found ten internet users guilty of cyberharassment against Brigitte Macron and imposed sentences of up to several months in prison. In the United States, Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron have also filed a defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens in Delaware.

(Last updated on 07/17/2026)