Brigitte Macron to receive damages for viral false claim that she is actually a transgender man named Jean-Michel

French First Lady Brigitte Macron has been awarded damages for falsely claiming she is a transgender man named Jean-Michel.

A Paris court on Thursday ordered two women to pay £6,750 in damages to the 71-year-old woman after they made claims that sparked online rumours from conspiracy theorists and the far-right.

Macron filed a defamation complaint against the two women – self-proclaimed spiritual medium Amandine Roy and conspiracy theorist Natacha Rey – who posted a YouTube video in December 2021 in which she claimed to have once been a man named “Jean-Michel”.

The claim went viral just weeks before the 2022 presidential election.

Reports spread on social media claiming that the first lady, formerly Brigitte Trogneux, never existed and that her brother Jean-Michel had changed gender and assumed that identity.

A Paris court ordered the two defendants to pay a total of £6,750 in damages to the president’s wife and £4,200 to her brother Jean-Michel Trogneux. Macron had initially sought £8,400 in damages.

The pair were also given a suspended fine of £420.

Macron and her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, were not present at the trial and the verdict in June.

The medium, Roy, 49, had interviewed Rey for hours on her YouTube channel, during which she railed against the “state lie” and “scam” she claimed to have uncovered.

Rey “didn’t want to share” her work at all, according to Roy, who simply “complied with her request.”

Despite her claim that she had accepted Rey’s allegations, Roy said the conspiracy theorist had “done three years of research, it’s not like she just pulled it out of her hat.”

“I think it’s a shame that this hasn’t been picked up and investigated by the mainstream media,” said Roy, who said she couldn’t “hide” such a “serious” topic.

The disinformation even spread to the United States, where Brigitte Macron was attacked in a now-deleted YouTube video ahead of the November election.

“The prejudice is enormous, it exploded everywhere,” said Jean Ennochi, Brigitte Macron’s lawyer, at the time.

Rey was ill during the trial, but he was unable to get the trial postponed.

In March, the French president expressed his anger and frustration over the ongoing speculation about his wife, whom he married in 2007.

“The worst thing is the false information and the made-up scenarios,” he said.

‘Eventually people will believe them and they will disturb you, even in your intimacy.’

He said Macron’s claims about transgender people are typical of the misogynistic online attacks that women face on a daily basis.

Details of the bizarre case resurfaced after her own daughter spoke publicly about the allegations for the first time.

Tiphaine Auzière, 40, told Paris Match magazine: ‘I worry about the social level when I hear what is circulating on social media about the fact that my mother is a man.’

Auzière also spoke of her hurt after discovering, as a 10-year-old child, that her teacher mother was having an affair with teenager Emmanuel Macron.

The future politician was only 15 when he began a relationship with the then married mother of three, Brigitte Auzière, who was 40 at the time and taught drama at La Providence secondary school in Amiens, northern France.

Former US First Lady Michelle Obama, US Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have also been targets of misinformation about their gender or sexuality in an attempt to mock or humiliate them.

Also on Thursday, Brigitte Macron made her Netflix debut by playing herself in the hit series ‘Emily in Paris’.

Lily Collins, star of the show, told Elle magazine that she and show producer Darren Star came up with the idea when they met the first lady at the Elysee Palace in December 2022.