Taking to X to make an “urgent” statement, US conservative influencer and podcaster Candace Owens alleged that French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte had “paid” for her assassination.
Her X post from 22 November has garnered more than 40 million views.
Although internet users have gone wild for her claims, Owens — who has been at the helm of a fake news campaign which purports that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man — provided no credible evidence to uphold her statements.
According to Owens, a “high-ranking employee of the French government” contacted her.
“The green light was given to a small team in the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group,” she said. “I am told there is one Israeli that is on this assassination squad and the plans were formalized.”
The National Gendarmerie Intervention Group, also known by its acronym GIGN (Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale), has told French media these allegations are fake news, stating that their operations focus on counter-terrorism operations, fighting crime and rescuing hostages.
Owens also purported that Xavier Poussard — former editor of the far-right magazine “Faits et documents” and a key figure peddling conspiracy theories about Brigitte Macron being a man — was also at risk of being assassinated.
False claims about Brigitte Macron being a man first went viral in 2021, when self-proclaimed journalist Natacha Rey alleged that France’s First Lady was assigned male at birth.
“From then on, the conspiracy theory went international in 2024 when Candace Owens picked up on it, joining forces with one of the major players in spreading this conspiracy theory: Xavier Poussard”, Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, an organisation which tracks conspiracy theories, told The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team.
In July, the Macrons filed a defamation lawsuit against Candace Owens.
“Candace Owens’ headlong rush into the most radical conspiracy theories is probably linked to the legal proceedings brought against her a few months ago by Mr and Mrs Macron in a Delaware court in the United States for defamation”, Reichstadt said. “She started out as a figure of the American conservative right, but then began to adopt increasingly controversial positions, peddling conspiracy theories and antisemitic claims.”
“She has claimed that dinosaurs never existed, that humans never walked on the moon. She has also spread a range of crazy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Jeffrey Epstein case,” he added. “Today, she has been abandoned by one arm of the conspiracist sphere.”
Charlie Kirk suspect didn’t train with France’s Foreign Legion
In the same X post, Owens also alleged that the supposed French government employee who got in touch with her revealed that Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin — Tyler Robinson — trained with the 13th brigade of the French Foreign Legion.
Charlie Kirk — one of US President Donald Trump’s staunchest allies and a prominent conservative activist — was fatally shot at a campaign event at Utah Valley University.
The allegation gained further traction after Telegram’s controversial owner Pavel Durov qualified these declarations as “plausible”. Durov is currently under investigation in France over Telegram’s alleged complicity in criminal activity.
However, a spokesperson from France’s Ministry of Armed Forces told The Cube that Robinson was never a member of the Foreign Legion.
“If he did not serve in an American military unit, he could not have been trained by the French Foreign Legion,” the spokesperson said.
Running with the claim, a day after her initial post, Owens posted a screenshot from Google showcasing details of a joint training exercise carried out by the US Marines and the French Foreign Legion at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Centre in California from 4 to 25 August.
Commenting on the screenshot, Owens stated that it was “not a coincidence that the French legionnaires were in the United States training with our marines for three weeks”.
“When those 3 weeks ended in California, another military training exercise began alongside civilians at Camp Riley in Minnesota,” she said. “French foreign legionnaires were involved in Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Armed Forces told The Cube that “there was no Foreign Legion training at Camp Riley in Minnesota between 25 August and 10 September 2025. The training that took place in California ended on 25 August 2025.”
Payments funnelled through a private French members’ club
In a separate X post, Owens claimed that “payments for assassinations are running through the Club des Cent in France”, calling on “the patriots of France” to trace the paper trail.
However, the influencer provided no evidence for these accusations, while the Club des Cents — an exclusive private members’ gastronomic club which is exclusively for men — declined to respond to our request for comment.
“People who are intellectually fragile could believe these claims, but there are other people who know these claims are false or, at the very least, that there is insufficient evidence,” Reichstadt said. “They relay them for political or ideological reasons, because they feel that they are annoying their political opponents by doing so.”
