Face to face with the jolly clairvoyant who started the viral conspiracy that’s forced Macron to deny his wife Brigitte is really a MAN
IT ALL started in Angers, a medieval town in the Loire Valley two hours west of Paris. Or, to be more specific, in a small flat above a New Age bookshop and ‘healing crystal’ store just off the main square. This was the home of Amandine Roy, a professional clairvoyant whose services include conducting seances with a client’s dead relatives, hosting ‘crystal skull workshops’ to help sick people ‘repair themselves sustainably’ and selling packs of ‘oracle cards,’ used for a brand of fortune-telling vaguely similar to tarot.
Roy also runs Amandine La Chaine (the Channel), an online TV station. And that little venture has in recent months sparked one of the most surreal — and downright sinister — scandals in French political history.
It revolves around a bizarre — and, as we shall see, demonstrably false — contention: that Brigitte Macron, the 70-year-old wife of the country’s president, Emmanuel, is somehow a man. Evidence to prove this sensational claim is, allegedly, in the hands of an evil cabal of financiers and world leaders who’ve spent years using it to blackmail Macron into doing what they want.
That’s the big conspiracy theory, at least. And crazy though it sounds, people really do believe it. A fortnight ago, president Macron found himself having to formally deny the whole thing, at an official press conference. Last week, L’Affaire Brigitte went viral in America, after being endorsed by Candace Owens, a high-profile associate of Donald Trump.
So who, exactly, is behind the bonkers rumours? Why, that would be Amandine Roy.
The 52-year-old clairvoyant lit the spark that created this bonfire of lunacy back in December 2021, via her online talk show Mediumnisation, when she spent four hours discussing the First Lady’s biological gender with a ‘self-taught investigative journalist’ named Natacha Rey.
Their prurient conversation clocked up half a million views on YouTube before being kicked off the website for violating guidelines around ‘fake news’.
Surprisingly — or perhaps not — that sanction failed to stop it spreading virally on social media and conspiracist platforms. The fallout has seen Roy and Rey arrested and sued for defamation. More litigation is now on the horizon, via Brigitte Macron herself.
To hundreds of thousands of social media followers, many of whom pay to view her online material, Amandine The Oracle is therefore a heroic truth-seeker engaged in a David versus Goliath struggle against a powerful elite; to those of a more sceptical persuasion, she’s a deluded fantasist who has poisoned the public sphere. So which is true?
This week, I met Roy for coffee at a mid-market hotel in Paris. And perhaps the most extraordinary thing, given her role in this toxic scandal, was just how nice she actually was.
A bubbly, larger-than-life woman, with peroxide hair, thick-rimmed spectacles and a magnetic smile, she chatted amiably about her expat childhood in West Africa, previous jobs in tourism and wealth management, and the momentous evening when she first discovered — at a University ‘seance night’ — that she had a knack for clairvoyance. Amandine, whose real name is Delphine Jegousse (she switched after becoming a medium) talked about her extravagant tattoos (red roses on her forearms), her cat Eole (named after Aeolus, Greek God of Wind), and the years she spent honing her trade at the Librairie Chrysalide (Crystal Bookstore) below her flat in Angers.
It wasn’t until we ventured on to Brigitte Macron, about whom she speaks with unflinching conviction, that the tone became darker. ‘Since I began talking about this, I have lost everything,’ she said.
‘I today have no private life, no friends, no boyfriend, or family. I have given so many euros to lawyers . . . my goal is to rid France of Macron.’
Amandine’s hostility to the French president stretches back to just after his 2017 election.
Specifically to an incident when she claims to have experienced a psychic premonition that terror groups were going to attack a French nuclear power station.
The Elysee Palace was tipped off. But it failed to respond with sufficient respect. ‘I was not treated well,’ she tells me.
One year later, Amandine set up a YouTube channel devoted to mediumship, where she would occasionally spread odd rumours about the Macrons, often alleging that the president might be gay.
During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, when face-to-face work dried up, Amandine began broadcasting prolifically.
Around this time, she came across the aforementioned Natacha Rey, an internet sleuth who’d spent years compiling a ‘dossier’ of evidence purporting to show that Brigitte was male.
The duo soon became convinced Macron was in fact born Jean-Michel Trogneux (the official name of her elder brother). They concluded that Brigitte had lived as a Jean-Michel for around 30 years, fathering three children in the process, before transitioning via hormone therapy in the US. Having never undergone surgery, they argue that she remains biologically male to this day.
That’s their big theory, at least. And the proof? A mixture of conjecture, contemporary family pictures (which unsurprisingly reveal physical resemblances between Jean-Michel and Brigitte) and the fact that there are relatively few documents to prove the official narrative (French law does not, for example, make birth certificates publicly available).
Their aforementioned four-hour conversation on Amandine’s YouTube show went live in December 2021. Social media did the rest. She says: ‘The numbers went up and up. Around 20,000 watched live and then the number reached 480k in less than three days. We were phoning each other saying “can you believe it?”’
The Elysee Palace certainly couldn’t, especially when Rey
She was kicked off YouTube for her fake news
publicised an online contact form for the president’s office that helped viewers bombard it with hostile messages about Brigitte Macron and ‘her so-called brother Jean-Michel’.
By March 2022, false rumours were also at play in upcoming French elections. Analysis by La Monde suggested that out of the 50,000 Twitter accounts participating in a political conversation that month, nearly 7,000 mentioned or shared them.
At this point, Brigitte Macron went on the offensive, instructing lawyers to sue Roy and Rey for defamation (the case is due to be heard in Paris next spring). A second lawsuit was filed by one Jean-Louis Auziere, Brigitte’s uncle, and his wife Catherine who had been accused, in the YouTube film, of being the ‘real’ mother of Brigitte’s three children.
When the case was heard in Normandy last summer, Roy and Rey were found guilty of libel and fined. Today, Catherine declines to discuss the case.
Macron doubtless hoped that would be the end of things, but online rumour, once ignited, never quite goes away. Instead, recent months have seen it explode.
In February, Brigitte’s 40-yearold daughter Tiphaine Auziere told Paris Match: ‘I have concerns about society when I hear what is circulating on social networks
about my mother being a man,’ she said. ‘The confidence with which it is said and the credibility given to it is proclaimed.
‘How can we resist disinformation on social networks?’
Macron himself then raised the issue on International Women’s Day this month during a discussion about misogyny suffered by famous women: ‘The worst thing is the false information and fabricated scenarios,’ he said. ‘People eventually believe them and disturb you, even in your intimacy.’ Asked whether he was referring to people ‘who say your wife is a man?’ Macron replied ‘Yes, that’s it.’
The French press have duly weighed in.
Supermarket magazine Gala last week carried the front page headline: ‘Transphobic rumour about Brigitte Macron — why her daughter Tiphaine is worried.’
France Quotidien went with: ‘Brigitte Macron, transsexual?’
Satirical title Charlie Hebdo carried a vulgar cartoon of Macron pointing at his wife’s crotch, saying: ‘She isn’t transgender, she’s always been a man!’
Then petrol was last week chucked onto the flames by Candace Owens, a US commentator close to Donald Trump who boasts 4.8million followers on X and almost 3 million on YouTube.
She declared ‘this is the biggest political scandal that has ever happened in the history of the world’ saying she would stake her ‘entire reputation’ on Brigitte being a man.
Debunking any conspiracy theory is a fool’s errand. But it should be firmly stressed there is ample evidence to disprove this one. For example, in 2022 the Mail uncovered a copy of the Courrier Picard, a daily newspaper in Amiens, Brigitte’s home city. It records her birth on April 13, 1953.
Referring to the child’s three sisters and two brothers, it reads: ‘Anne-Marie, Jean-Claude, Maryvonne, Monique and Jean-Michel Trogneux have great joy in announcing the arrival of their little sister, Brigitte.’
By way of another example, Roy, Rey and now Owens have repeatedly claimed that official sources are ‘unable to provide a photograph of Brigitte as a child’. In fact there have been numerous published, in reputable French titles and on TV documentaries. They include a shot of Brigitte taking her first Holy Communion, aged seven, an image of her playing in the garden and a wedding portrait with her first (late) husband, a wealthy banker named Andre-Louis Auziere.
So case closed? Not so fast! When I mentioned these to Amandine, she laughed and told me all documentary evidence was a ‘forgery’ created by ‘Brigitte’s real father, an intelligence officer’.
We move on. Elsewhere Roy and fellow conspiracists insist that Jean-Michel Trogneux cannot be found (presumably because he’s now living as Brigitte). That is, again, false: he still lives in Amiens, where last September he was tracked down by Emmanuelle Anizon, a journalist for the prestigious L’Obs magazine.
‘This story is absurd. It’s a bunch of losers,’ Trogneux told her.
Anizon will next week release a book called L’Affair Madame about the Brigitte Macron rumours, billed as an ‘anatomy of fake news’. She says the conspiracy can be traced back to the 2017 election campaign, when journalists first began to delve into Macron’s marriage.
‘Many biographers thought there was something missing about Brigitte’s past,’ she tells me. ‘There are very few documents. The family weren’t speaking. It’s probably because of their story, which is very unusual.’
That much is certainly true. For Emmanuel Macron first met his future wife in the early 1990s, when he was 15 and she was a 39-year-old married mother-ofthree teaching at his school, the prestigious Lycee La Providence in Amiens.
Their illicit relationship has been endlessly chronicled by reporters, biographers and Macron himself, in a 2016 memoir.
‘Things happened surreptitiously and I fell in love,’ he recalled. ‘An intellectual connection became something more emotionally involving, day by day. We spoke about everything.’
What is less widely appreciated is the scandal their liaison caused in a country where — although the age of consent is 15 — laws criminalised relationships between teachers and any pupil under 18.
Anonymous letters were sent to the couple’s parents and to the school. One biographer has told how passers-by spat on the front doors of their family homes.
There are rumours they were discovered in flagrante by Macron’s horrified parents, who perhaps understandably removed him from La Providence and sent him off to board in Paris.
Among those most affected were Brigitte’s three children, one of whom had been in Emmanuel’s class. In her recent Paris Match interview, daughter Tiphaine recalled the sense of shame.
‘It was not yet the era of social networks, but we were in a small provincial town. Everything is known. Despite all this, they stood tall. I gained an open mind, the desire to move forward without listening to peripheral noise.’
While she and her siblings eventually came to terms with the relationship, Brigitte’s first husband Andre-Louis never did. He moved to Lille and died a recluse in 2019, with Tiphaine recalling how he was buried on Christmas Eve. ‘He was different, a nonconformist, who wanted anonymity more than anything else.’
All of which brings us back to another thread of the big conspiracy. It posits that Andre-Louis never existed and was instead a fictional character created to cover up Brigitte’s real gender. As a result, Amandine has said, journalists who in 2017 tried to interview the new First Lady’s exhusband ‘just couldn’t find him’.
That is, again, untrue. Reporters for several outlets, including the Mail, tracked Andre-Louis down to Lille, several years ago.
But as was his right, he declined to comment.
And on it goes. On social media, even the wildest lies refuse to die. Indeed, many are simply recycled: a few years before online sleuths decided to question Brigitte’s
When they met, he was 15, she was 39
Brigitte’s three children have been affected
gender, they were for example doing exactly the same thing to Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle.
Tristan Mendes France, who runs Project Ripost, a French organisation that counters ‘fake news’ says the problem has lately been exacerbated by gangs flooding TikTok with AI-generated videos sharing bizarre conspiracy theories. ‘The images are artificial, they use a synthetic voice and text comes from Chat GPT.
‘Creators don’t care if it’s true. The idea is simply to get lots of views because if a video goes viral, the platform will pay you for it,’ he says. ‘Brigitte Macron won’t be the last woman accused of being a man. The problem is that people believe this stuff and if you try to fight back you can end up feeding the rumours.’
All of which brings us back to Amandine Roy.
Will anything, I asked, shake her belief that the First Lady of France is actually male?
‘I come from Brittany,’ she replies. ‘People from Brittany are stubborn. A lot of people have said I am crazy. They look at me with contempt. But I follow the facts, so if this really is untrue, then Brigitte Macron can prove it by taking a simple DNA test.’
Maybe, she adds, the forthcoming court case will require it. And so le charade continues.