President Macron and briefings on his behalf blamed conspiracy theorists, artificial intelligence, and even the Russians after footage of him being slapped by his wife spread on the internet.
President of France Emmanuel Macron is no more having a “domestic dispute” with his wife Brigitte than he is a cocaine addict, he said by way of reassurance on Monday in the wake of fast-spreading footage published Monday. Caught by press cameras as the President’s official jet arrived in Vietnam, a long-shot showing a slither of the interior of the plane shows Brigitte Macron pushing her husband, the President, away by the face with both hands.
The knee-jerk reaction of the Presidential Office at the Elysée Palace was to deny the footage was even real, notes Le Figaro, stating it was initially claimed the video was the work of artificial intelligence, even if it was quickly verified as genuine. What followed then was briefings against the video, claiming those spreading it had an interest in doing so.
A source briefing for the President blamed “conspiracy theorists” and “pro-Russian” accounts. It was said Macron “loves playing jokes like on his wife before official occasions, and she always responds like this … It wasn’t even a slap.”
Watch: Macron’s Wife Filmed Pushing Him in the Face During Vietnam Triphttps://t.co/rs426pa7Hc
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This wasn’t enough to put the matter to bed, however, and hours later the President himself spoke, insisting the video only showed a fight as much as another recent viral video showed Macron pocketing a bag of cocaine. At the time, Macron had been forced into denying the story and saying the small white object was actually a kleenex, publishing high-resolution images to justify the counter-claim.
President Macron said, dinging those past claims about his alleged drug use or relationships with other world leaders: “For three weeks… there are people who have watched videos and who think that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a mano-a-mano with a Turkish president and that, now, I am having a domestic dispute with my wife… None of this is true… everyone must calm down and above all take an interest in the substance of the news”.
Macron also invoked the Russians as being to blame, and said accounts sharing the video online belonged to identifiable “networks” and “extremists in France”.
The relationship between the French President and his wife is the matter of widespread speculation and has been since he emerged as a challenger to the Presidency, given that by Western norms, her having been Macron’s teacher in high school and the consequent age gap is relatively unusual. Macron went to the extraordinary length last year of speaking out in person to deny that his wife is a man in drag or transgender last year, calling it a false conspiracy theory at the time a French court ruled the speculation false and constituting libel.
