• After Elon Musk’s disproportionate donation to support Reform UK (United Kingdom), his interventions in favor of the AfD (Germany), the declarations for the annexation of Greenland, one could legitimately wonder what the team of re-elected President Donald Trump had in store for France.
• American journalist Candace Owens received a legal letter from French president Emmanuel Macron’s lawyers in 2024 explicitly asking her not to spread “rumors about his private life”. Their client seemed concerned about the “rumor” that his wife, Brigitte, was in fact a transgender woman. The letter was accompanied by photographs of Brigitte’s brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, at the Élysée Palace, in order to dispel the theory that Brigitte Trogneux was actually her brother who had undergone a sex change. However, to this day, the person designated by the Élysée Palace as her brother persists in refusing any contact with the press.
Shocked by this letter, Candace Owens went to investigate in Europe, but not in France. She lived in London for a long time (in 2019, she married the son of Lord Farmer of Bishopsgate) and received various French journalists there, including the man at the origin of this “rumor”, the former editor-in-chief of Faits & Documents, Xavier Poussard.
To this day, several periods in Brigitte Trogneux’s life remain unknown to the public. Rumors circulate that during her stay in the United States, she became involved with a high-profile figure.
☞ During the US presidential campaign, Candace Owens appeared as a black personality questioning the woke rhetoric of Black Lives Matters. She managed to get a significant part of black men, until now loyal voters of the Democratic Party, vote for the Republican candidate. She is one of a number of high-profile influencers, like gay man Milo Yiannopoulos, who campaigned against LGTB woke speech and got some of the gay community to vote for the Republican candidate.
• After her stay in London, Candace Owens published several messages on X (where she has 6.4 million followers), including one for Emmanuel Macron: “Please instruct your lawyers never to tell an American what he can and cannot publish. You’ve kept many secrets in your life, but I’m not your personal diary – all correspondence between our legal teams will be available for the public to read. We’ll get back to your team tomorrow with specific questions to answer you ahead of the publication of our much broader review of Brigitte’s life. As we have said before, the minor factual errors we have made will be corrected… ». Her video on the issue, published on January 11, has been viewed more than 2 million times in France, while it received the support of Russian geopolitical scientist Alexander Dugin.
• Elon Musk has made the fight against the transgender woke ideology a personal matter after his son Xavier broke up with him and underwent surgery to become Vivian.
• If a transgender story is of great importance to Americans, it is not clear how it could play a role in France where questions of sexuality are considered a private matter. But those in the know on the matter assure us that the “Brigitte affair” is only the first blow in a much wider unpacking, some aspects of which are, themselves, politically charged.
This is the editorial from our paywalled “Voltaire, international newsletter”, n°116. For more information, do not hesitate to subscribe: 500€ per year.