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Two French women who falsely claimed that the country’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, was transgender have been found guilty of slander.
In December 2021, Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy broadcast unsubstantiated rumours online that Brigitte had never existed, and that her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux had changed gender and started using that name.
The defendants were ordered to pay €8,000 (£6,750; $8,859) in damages to Mrs Macron, and €5,000 to her brother.
Mrs Macron had filed a complaint against the women after their claim went viral, sparking conspiracy theories among the far-right.
The pair – Roy an internet fortune-teller, Rey a self-styled independent journalist – discussed at length in a YouTube video the baseless rumour that Brigitte Macron had at some point undergone gender reassignment.
They spoke for four hours on Roy’s YouTube channel, where Rey outlined what she termed the “state lie” she claimed to have uncovered.
The claim went viral ahead of France’s 2022 presidential election.
It was spread by accounts opposed to Mrs Macron’s husband, President Emmanuel Macron, including those on the political far-right, anti-vaccine groups, and followers of the QAnon conspiracy movement.
Mrs Macron’s lawyers acted quickly and the women were sued for libel a month after the video was posted online.
“The prejudice is massive, it exploded everywhere,” Mrs Macron’s lawyer, Jean Ennochi said at the time.
“It’s not a victory, it’s a normal application of the law,” he told AFP news agency on Thursday.
This was not the first time Mrs Macron has been targeted since her husband entered office in 2017. But online trolling had previously been mainly about the couple’s near 25-year age gap.
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