Podcaster Candace Owens explained to journalist Tucker Carlson that President Donald Trump personally called her to ask her to stop pursuing her story questioning the gender and identity of France’s first lady Brigitte Macron.
Owens continues to pursue reporting on her podcast that digs into a long-standing conspiracy theory that Macron’s wife was born a man under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux and then transitioned to become a woman.
‘I was called by Trump in February,’ Owens told Carlson in a podcast interview released Friday, noting that the phone call took place after Emmanuel Macron had visited Trump at the White House.
Owens said that the request first came from someone at the White House who was ‘pretty high up’ who urged her to stop talking about Macron’s wife.
She said she was insulted by the request, and told the person at the White House that she was not going to do it.
Trump later phoned her personally to talk about the issue, she said, and said that Macron pulled him aside on his way to his car to ask him about whether he knew Owens.
She expressed her shock at the request.
‘Emmanuel Macron personally flew to DC and asked Trump to ask me to shut up, to just stop speaking about his wife,’ she told an amazed Carlson during the interview.
Trump, she said, was confused by the request.
‘He sounded very confused. He said he was very confused when a leader of the leader of France took him aside during negotiations for Ukraine and Russia to inquire about whether or not he knew Candace Owens,’ she said.
Owens first revealed additional details of the call in a podcast episode of her own, reflecting that Trump was very flattering.
‘You must be a very powerful person Candace,’ Owens revealed that Trump told her, but said that her reports were distressing Macron’s wife.
‘She’s old and this is really, really impacting her,’ she said, Trump said. ‘I saw her up close and she looks like a woman to me, I had dinner with her at the top of the Eiffel tower.’
Owens said she expressed her trepidation to the president’s request and replied, ‘respectfully Mr. President, it’s not my fault that he married somebody with a p**is.’
Trump said he was working with Macron to end the Ukraine war and that it would be very helpful for him to bring peace if she agreed to stop talking about his wife’s gender.
Owens said she agreed to dial back her attention on the story for a while, but that the president seemed to want a bigger commitment that she could not give.
The White House declined to discuss private conversations with the president ‘that may or may not have happened,’ White House communications director Steven Cheung told the Daily Mail.
Macron and his wife filed a lawsuit against Owens in the United States in July, led by U.S. lawyer Tom Clare, criticizing Owens for her ‘outlandish, defamatory and far-fetched fictions’ that Brigitte Macron was born a man ‘to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety and make money.’
A representative for Owens said she would not back down to a pair of foreign leaders trying to ‘bully journalists.’
‘Candace Owens is not shutting up,’ the statement read. ‘This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.’
Owens first focused on the story when she was working as a podcaster for the Daily Wire media platform and pursued it further as the Macrons and their representatives continued to try and silence her.
After leaving the Daily Wire, Owens published a six-hour feature series detailing all of the evidence she and other journalists in France had gathered to question the gender and identity of Brigitte Macron.
The claims went viral and only grew more popular after it spread throughout the podcast community, including on podcaster Joe Rogan’s show.
‘Macron’s a man. Yeah, Brigitte Macron is a man, she got me hook line and sinker,’ Rogan said in March referring to Owens’ series.
Rogan revisited Owens’ claims in May after a video clip of the first lady shoving the French president in the face on their plane went viral.
‘I think she’s right, obviously I don’t know … Macron is married to a man, a man who bitch-slapped him in a private jet,’ he laughed.
