Just what does Trump know about Macron’s ‘naughty’ bedroom antics?
As ex-U.S. president claims FBI took secret dossier on French premier during raid on Mar-a-Lago home ...
THE questions are swirling around the gilded corridors of the elysee Palace. Just what, if anything, has President emmanuel Macron been up to behind the heavy doors of his private salon — while his wife Brigitte was away?
After all, French presidents are notorious for being boudoir-hoppers. On the night Princess Diana died in Paris, for example, Jacques Chirac couldn’t be found. he was eventually discovered sleeping with Italian movie star Claudia Cardinale, rather than his wife.
For the fresh rumours about Macron, we can thank Donald Trump. The former U.S. President claims he’s sitting on a whopper of a sexual scandal relating to his erstwhile French counterpart.
On August 8, the FBI raided Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, seizing boxes of classified documents as part of a criminal investigation into his alleged mishandling of top-secret material.
One of the files is being referred to in Paris as — ooh la la! — the ‘Macron Sex Dossier’. The mysterious file, ‘Item 1a’, was tantalisingly listed by the FBI as ‘info re: President of France’.
Though the true contents remain under wraps, the internet is inevitably aflame with rumours, and spooks are said to be chattering on both sides of the Atlantic.
And Trump has long shown a strange fascination with Macron’s sex life, reportedly boasting in private of knowing every allegedly salacious detail. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Trump enjoyed saying Macron was ‘naughty’ — and that ‘[not] very many people know’.
Last night, a Macron ally in Paris told me: ‘All French presidents have their sexual peccadillos, and details always leak out.
‘efforts are being made to find out what the Macron Sex Dossier contains — and it’s only a matter of time.’
By now, almost everyone knows that Macron, 44, met his wife Brigitte, 69, when he was a 15-year- old schoolboy and she his 39- year- old teacher, er, a married mother of three.
But that is only the start of the eyebrow-raising allegations about Macron’s private life.
WhILecampaigning to be president in 2017, Macron was forced to deny being a part of a ‘rich gay lobby’, denying suggestions that he was having a passionate affair with Mathieu Gallet, the then 40-yearold boss of Radio France.
Openly gay, the smouldering and chiselled Gallet was a prominent figure in the French media and he was known to have met Macron at various functions.
Online rumours began mushrooming, and Macron was forced to state on the record: ‘They say I have a double life with Mathieu Gallet . . . but it can’t be me.’
he reiterated at another rally: ‘I am who I am — I have never had anything to hide. I hear people saying that I have a secret life or something. It’s not nice for Brigitte, because I share all my days and nights with her, and she asks me how I manage it.’
A year later, the Parisian rumour mill, always excitable, had worked itself into a freshly spinning dynamo of gossip.
Macron, they insisted, was now sleeping with his former security officer and later deputy chief of staff, Alexandre Benalla. What else could explain the president’s lenient treatment, and continued employment, of Benalla after he’d been filmed beating up a French citizen?
On May Day in 2018 — a day that often attracts protests — Benalla had been keen to observe events alongside the gendarmes. But he was on his day off, so had sought permission from his boss, Macron’s chief of staff, to do so.
On the day, however, he was filmed wearing a riot helmet, visor and an orange armband displaying the word ‘police’.
This was illegal: he wasn’t meant to be a part of the security effort in any official way and to impersonate an officer is a serious offence.
But Benalla went one further. The dress-up excitement got the better of him and he set about manhandling the protesters.
A bystander filmed him ‘arresting’ one woman, dragging her away from a crowd by the neck. Benalla later grappled a man to the pavement, punching him in the head as he went.
When the scandal broke in July 2018, Macron was on the back foot, forced to explain awkwardly not only why Benalla still had a job but even retained security clearance to
the National Assembly, the use of a chaffeur- driven car and even a government apartment.
Benalla was belatedly sacked — but what had taken Macron so long? Soon people were filling in the gaps themselves. The President had to release a bizarre statement saying that Benalla had ‘never been my lover’.
he added, perhaps unnecessarily, that Benalla had ‘never had the nuclear codes’, either.
A source from the opposition Socialist party told the Mail: ‘Macron was denying something that nobody of any importance was interested in. The accusation was that he was looking after Benalla because he was one of his favoured employees, and this seemed like extreme arrogance.’
Benalla was eventually given a nominal jail sentence for his May Day antics.
In an interview with Tetu, France’s leading LGBT magazine, February 2017, Macron said: ‘If I had been homosexual, I would say it and I would live it. Two things are odious about the innuendo: to say that it is not possible for a man living with an older woman to be anything other than a homosexual, and to imply that someone is a misogynistic secret gigolo. It’s all homophobia.’
BRIGITTE herself complained about receiving an anonymous phone call in 2017, when a male voice said her husband was ‘seeing another man’. Despite strenuous efforts by the French secret services, the caller was never identified.
And Brigitte has been no stranger to poisonous rumours about herself either.
Far- Right journalists have repeatedly peddled the fiction that she was born a man, Jean-Michel Trogneux, in April 1953. Trogneux supposedly underwent gender reassignment surgery in the early 1980s. Platforms linked to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party, anti-vaxxers, and the Yellow Vests anti-government movement have spread the false claims.
Le Figaro was among numerous respected news outlets that denounced the attack on her as ‘false transphobic information’ based on ‘absurd rumours’.
But even such an outrageous falsehood was taken in the French public’s stride, so used are they to salacious hearsay about their leaders. Why are so many French people quick to believe the gossip? Part of the answer surely lies in the antics of many of Macron’s priapic predecessors.
France’s healthy tradition of state- sponsored sexual excess stretches back centuries.
In 1899, Felix Faure completed his presidential term by dropping dead while canoodling with a much younger mistress on an elysee chaise longue. Nearly a century on, President Francois Mitterrand carried the torch, maintaining a mistress and daughter at the
state’s expense. Jacques Chirac, meanwhile, was nicknamed ‘Mr Three Minutes, including shower’ after countless trips to his mistresses in official convoys during working hours.
Nicolas Sarkozy carried on the tradition by pursuing various women, before divorcing in office and then marrying former supermodel Carla Bruni, an old flame of Mick Jagger.
Finally, portly Socialist Francois Hollande also had a revolving salon door at the Elysee. He was seen jumping on the back of a moped to attend early morning trysts with a nubile actress Julie Gayet.
Paparazzi pictures of Hollande scooting to his love-nest around the corner from the Elysee were too much for his live-in girlfriend, Valerie Trierweiler, to bear. The Paris Match political correspondent checked herself into hospital soon after.
No wonder scandal-seekers expect the same from Macron. So what’s the truth about the man dubbed a ‘petit Napoleon’ by his critics thanks to his domineering style?
Informed observers sometimes liken him to a ‘Not Tonight, Josephine’ type — almost asexual, in the model of Bonaparte himself.
AN OLD friend who has known the president since he was a schoolboy says: ‘He hasn’t got much to worry about. If anything, he’s always been boringly wellbehaved since the start of his affair with Brigitte. He’s calmed down a lot, so a bit of extra spice would appeal to people — especially the young. Good luck to him — he’s got nothing to be ashamed of, and he’s certainly not scared of Donald Trump.’
Macron has frequently complained about Russian agents working for Vladimir Putin attacking him through cyberspace. ‘They are the ones who start the rumours, and then circulate them using bot farms,’ said another Macron aide.
‘Spreading misinformation is a perfect tool for political opponents who want to discredit someone. It may well be that agents working for Trump simply compiled misinformation that they were able to Google online.’
That could well be true. Whatever is in file ‘1a’, the most cutting of his critics would say his only true love has been himself. Perhaps the most intense extra-marital affair Macron has always had . . . is with the mirror.