Two French women who falsely claimed that the country’s first lady, Brigitte Macron, was transgender have been found guilty of defamation.
In December 2021, Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy spread unsubstantiated rumors 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 Ms Macron and €5,000 to her brother.
Ms Macron had filed a complaint against the women after their claims went viral and sparked conspiracy theories among the far-right.
The duo – Roy, an internet fortune teller, Rey, a self-proclaimed independent journalist – discussed at length in a YouTube video the unfounded rumor that Brigitte Macron had at some point undergone a sex change.
They spoke for four hours on Roy’s YouTube channel, where Rey explained what she called the “state lie” she said she had discovered.
The claim went viral in the run-up to the 2022 French presidential election.
It was spread through messages targeting Ms Macron’s husband, President Emmanuel Macron, including those from far-right parties, anti-vaccination groups and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy movement.
Ms Macron’s lawyers quickly took action and a month after the video was posted online, the women were sued for defamation.
“The prejudice is enormous, it has erupted everywhere,” Macron’s lawyer Jean Ennochi said at the time.
“It is not a victory, it is a normal application of the law,” he told AFP news agency on Thursday.
It was not the first time that Mrs Macron had been targeted since her husband took office in 2017. But online trolling had previously focused on the couple’s nearly 25-year age gap.
