Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, have filed a defamation lawsuit against a right-wing US podcaster who claimed the spouse of the French president used to be a man.

The 218-page complaint against Candace Owens, who has millions of followers on X and YouTube, was filed by the Macrons in Delaware Superior Court on Wednesday and seeks a jury trial and unspecified punitive damages.

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In a statement released by their lawyer, the Macrons said they filed the lawsuit after Owens repeatedly ignored requests to retract false and defamatory statements made on an eight-part YouTube and podcast series called Becoming Brigitte.

According to the Macrons, the series spread “verifiably false and devastating lies”, including that Brigitte stole another person’s identity and transitioned to female, and that the Macrons are blood relatives committing incest.

Their complaint discusses circumstances under which the Macrons met, when the now 47-year-old president was a high school student and Brigitte was a teacher. It said their relationship “remained within the bounds of the law”.

“Owens’ campaign of defamation was plainly designed to harass and cause pain to us and our families and to garner attention and notoriety,” the Macrons said.

“We gave her every opportunity to back away from these claims, but she refused. It is our earnest hope that this lawsuit will set the record straight and end this campaign of defamation once and for all,” they added.

In her podcast on Wednesday, Owens said, “This lawsuit is littered with factual inaccuracies” and part of an “obvious and desperate public relations strategy” to smear her character.

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Owens also said she did not know a lawsuit was coming, though lawyers for both sides had been communicating since January.

A spokesperson for Owens called the lawsuit itself an effort to bully her, after Brigitte rejected Owens’s repeated requests for an interview.

“This is a foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist,” the spokesperson said.

Have world leaders sued for defamation before?

Wednesday’s lawsuit is a rare case of a world leader suing for defamation.

United States President Donald Trump has also turned to the courts, including in a $10bn lawsuit accusing The Wall Street Journal of defaming him by claiming he created a lewd birthday greeting for disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

The Journal said it would defend against that case and had full confidence in its reporting.

In December, meanwhile, Trump reached a $15m settlement with Walt Disney-owned ABC over an inaccurate claim that a jury found him liable for rape, rather than sexual assault, in a civil lawsuit.

To prevail in US defamation cases, public figures must show defendants engaged in “actual malice”, a tough legal standard requiring proof that the defendants knew what they published was false or had reckless disregard for its truth.