The Duchess of Sussex is ‘despicably racist’, the Covid-19 vaccine is ‘pure evil’ and ‘secret Jewish gangs’ are doing ‘horrific things’ in Hollywood.

Followers of the firebrand Right-wing commentator Candace Owens have become accustomed to endlessly outlandish opinions.

However, in March 2024, she took yet another outrageous tack when she announced on her podcast that France’s First Lady is a man.

‘I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,’ she later posted on X.

And she may now have to do exactly that, as the French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife this week sued the American shock jock for defamation.

In a 218-page lawsuit filed in a court in the US state of Delaware, France’s ‘first couple’ described Owens, 36, – who is married to the son of a multimillionaire British peer – as a ‘far-Right conspiracy theorist who thrives on making outrageous claims, prioritising shock value and follower-growth over truth or responsible discourse’.

The Macrons are seeking unspecified punitive damages, saying their accuser subjected them to a ‘campaign of global humiliation’.

Their chief complaint is that Owens recycled an old and disproven conspiracy theory that Brigitte, 72, who has three children by her ex-husband, was born a man under the name Jean-Michel Trogneux and then transitioned to become a woman.

Candace Owens with her husband, both posing behind president Donald Trump's chair in the Oval Office in 2020

Owens even sold T-shirts displaying Brigitte on a mocked-up TIME magazine ‘Man of the Year’ cover.

They also say she has claimed the Macrons were blood relatives ‘committing incest’ and that Emmanuel came to power as the result of a CIA ‘mind control’ programme.

According to the lawsuit, Owens says she first learnt of allegations that Mrs Macron was a man from a 2021 Daily Mail investigation debunking the claim as a ‘wicked slur’, only for Owens to ‘shockingly’ assert the article hadn’t disproved the story at all.

Owens bombastically responded that ‘on behalf of the entire world’ she will see the Macrons in court. She added: ‘We are revolting against the perverts that run the world.’

World leaders don’t usually bother to sue internet influencers but, with 6.9 million followers on X and 4.5 million YouTube subscribers, Owens is no ordinary agitator. The Macrons will have to prove she acted out of ‘actual malice’, which effectively means she knew she was peddling lies.

That’s a question that goes to the heart of the controversy over the deceptively doe-eyed pin-up of ultra-conservative America.

Does the woman who tweeted that ‘Russian Lives Matter’ following the invasion of Ukraine really believe all the tripe that she spouts, or is it just for clicks?

She hasn’t always been as outrageous as she now appears. Although she’s clearly a dedicated controversialist with an incendiary opinion for every occasion, she has in the past appeared to articulate the unspoken thoughts of millions, not least when she opposed Covid lockdowns.

But, nowadays, she all too often sounds like a swivel-eyed lunatic, willing to champion any wild conspiracy theory or toxic cause just to stay in the limelight.

In this age of monetised, on-tap online inflammatory rhetoric, few people know how to get noticed quite like Candace Owens. Her Barbie-esque appearance of high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and slim figure helps. As does the fact she is youngish, black and undeniably articulate.

French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte in Paris during a state visit from China in 2019

While her views are often too extreme for mainstream conservatives, she has built a lucrative empire online. Her podcast, Candace, is often in Spotify’s top five.

Owens was – just a little surprisingly – once a diehard liberal. Born in the suburbs outside New York, she was brought up in Stamford, Connecticut, mostly by her grandparents, after her parents divorced when she was 11.

At high school, she successfully sued the education board after she received voicemail death threats from some white male classmates. After studying journalism at a state university, she worked as an intern at Vogue magazine and as an assistant at a Manhattan private equity firm.

In 2015, she started a marketing agency and began writing an anti-conservative blog that, among other things, ridiculed the size of Donald Trump’s genitalia.

She first started getting noticed the next year when she launched an anti-online-bullying website called Social Autopsy. It received widespread media criticism which Owens believed was orchestrated by feminist activists.

Having experienced the sharp end of the media herself, she said, she started to sympathise with Trump and ‘became a conservative overnight’ after realising ‘liberals were actually the racists’.

Courting controversy became her guiding principle as she grew to be a rising star on YouTube and a leading voice in conservative efforts to wean young minority Americans off the Democrats.

She drew support from Trump and liberal-baiting rapper Kanye West after a 2018 video of her went viral. In it she attacks black protesters at the University of California, calling them ‘privileged Americans’ obsessed with ‘shouting about slavery’.

Candace Owens poses with Kanye West wearing 'White Lives Matter' shirts at his YZY fashion show

Trump responded by calling her ‘the hottest thing out there right now’ and invited her to visit him in the White House, saying she was ‘so good for our country!’.

For every plaudit she got from the Right, she received a passionate condemnation from the Left, which damned her as anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, anti-trans, anti-black and anti-feminist.

In 2021, she joined conservative news site the Daily Wire, only to be ousted in March last year after its co-founder, Ben Shapiro, took exception to her describing ‘political Jews’ as ‘some of the most vile, dishonest, manipulative people that I have ever met’.

Last July, after she dismissed the appalling medical experiments of SS concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele as ‘bizarre propaganda’, even her own father-in-law felt he had to publicly distance himself.

Just as she has no time for women who allow themselves to become victims of predatory men – castigating the MeToo movement for ‘turning sexual assault into a trend’ and encouraging women to be seen as ‘stupid’ and ‘weak’ – so she has expressed exasperation with her fellow African-Americans.

Owens called Black Lives Matter advocates ‘whiny toddlers’ and compared black Democrats to slaves on plantations.

In 2022, she and Kanye West caused uproar at Paris Fashion Week by wearing ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirts.

She’s dismissed climate change as a lie to ‘extract dollars from Americans’ and abortion as the ‘extermination’ of black babies.

Owens can, of course, claim she’s entitled to challenge the liberal consensus in the US but she’s on shakier ground espousing conspiracy theories.

Her unconventionality extends to her private life given that she is married to the ex-public schoolboy son of the British peer, Lord Farmer.

Owens met her spouse, entrepreneur George Farmer, in London in 2018, through their shared involvement in Turning Point USA, a group that advocates for conservative policies at schools and universities. He proposed over FaceTime 18 days later.

George, 35, who was a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford University, where he studied theology, is the son of hedge fund tycoon Michael, a Brexit supporter and devout Christian, who is the deputy chairman of the Council for Christians and Jews.

George and Candace wed in 2019 at the Trump Winery, a Virginia estate, owned by the President’s family.

She and George also share strong Christian beliefs. Owens (who converted to Catholicism at London’s Brompton Oratory last year) and Farmer live in Connecticut where they are raising their four children.

What’s clear now is that Candace’s reputation is about to be tested as never before.

If she goes ahead to a trial, Owens’s reputation will be tested as never before – in a case that will undoubtedly raise her cherished profile but may end up costing her dearly.