In March 2025, a rumor began to spread that France had offered conservative commentator Candace Owens millions of dollars to stop spreading the rumor that France's first lady, Brigitte Macron, was a trans woman.
For example, an Instagram user posted a video with the rumor that the European country would grant her $50,000 a month if she stopped (archived):
BREAKING: FRANCE offered to pay CANDACE OWENS a one-time payment of $4 MILLION & $50K per-month for the rest of her life, if she STOPPED REPORTING on BRIGITTE MACRON.
As of this writing, the post had received 1,636 likes and 248 comments. Some commenters seemed to take the claims at face value. "SO IT IS TRUE Brigitte is a man," one said.
A Google search for the exact text revealed that those claims had appeared word for word on several other platforms, including X, Gab and Facebook. The first instance of this claim came from an account on X named "Legitimate Targets," manned by Jackson Hinkle (archived):
No Google search or Google News search showed that this information had been picked up by reputable news outlets.
The rumor that Macron is a trans woman is false, as Snopes has reported before. However, Owens has been spreading it since 2024, going so far as to help create and promote a podcast series about this rumor.
In fact, Owens and Hinkle are both known purveyors of demonstrably false claims, often with an antisemitic and authoritarian slant.
For example, fact-checking website PolitiFact has investigated supposed facts peddled by Owens since 2019, from the claim that George Soros was funding Black Lives Matter protests in Minnesota to an allegation that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was expanding eastward, rating them from false to mostly false.
Hinkle, who used to support U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democrat from Vermont, became over time a vocal admirer of Russia President Vladimir Putin. Hinkle doesn't adhere wholly to one ideology, describing himself as "pro-family," "anti-woke," "pro-Palestine, Russia and China," but also as a "Marxist-Leninist" (archived):
He also once praised Syria's former dictator Bashar al-Assad as a "hero" and voiced support for Iran's Islamist regime against Israel.
Hinkle rose to prominence as the Israel-Gaza war started in 2023. For example, he often amplified miscaptioned images in support of Palestinians. He also made claims denying Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, actions, attributing them to national Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which swiftly refuted that they had made them. Before then, he had taken a position against Ukraine after Russia invaded the country in 2022. In fact, he was part of a mission to Donbas, the Ukrainian region occupied by Russian forces. Russia sponsored the mission. Hinkle has been identified both by the New York Times and by Conspiracy Watch, a fact-checking website based in France, as someone who has gained fame for spreading disinformation and Russian talking points.
Hinkle has frequently expressed support for Owens.
Based on the nature of the content Hinkle typically shares and on the fact that we could find no reputable source for it or evidence that it's true, we deemed the claim false.