“She slapped him! She shoved him in the face! It’s domestic abuse! It was just a harmless joke! It’s what married couples do to each other all the time.”
Take your pick among all these possibilities, but the video of French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, deplaning, has gone viral and is causing a hornet’s nest of controversy.
The video, captured by the Associated Press, shows the couple arriving in Vietnam. As they emerge from the plane doorway, Brigitte Macron’s hands briefly make contact with Emmanuel’s face, seemingly pushing it, causing his head to snap to the side with a startled expression. He then quickly composes himself and offers an awkward wave to the waiting media. Brigitte then remains momentarily out of view behind the plane’s fuselage. As they descend the stairs Brigitte refuses to take his arm, tense expression on her face.
The President has dismissed the incident, stating that he was “bickering, or rather joking, with my wife. It’s nothing.” He also suggested that content of videos involving him has been manipulated by “crackpots.”
The public is not buying this explanation and neither are body language analysts, like Judi James, who have contradicted the “playful” explanation. James stated, “I would not describe the gesture we saw from inside the plane as one of ‘play’ as has been claimed.” She noted that pushing someone’s face hard enough for their head to reel to the side, especially without shared laughter or teasing rituals, should not be normalized as “fun” to save political face. She also observed Macron’s “angry and tense” body language and a balled fist after the interaction.
At the center of the skepticism is the age difference between the two–she is 72, he a mere 47—and the history of their relationship. Emmanuel was Brigitte’s student; when they met, he was a 15-year-old lycée student and his shocked parents did everything possible to get him away from her influence—including packing him off to boarding school. Still, true love won’t be denied and fourteen years later they tied the knot.
Posters on social media have been making derisive comments like “When your teacher is still slapping you after 40 years!” More serious are the many allegations against Brigitte: “Groomer”, “Sexual predator,” and “Domestic Abuser.” Some are outraged about the double standard implied in the incident, recalling that if this was a man shoving a woman in the face he would have been arrested already. And with such a controversial background always present, many also comment that had the teacher been a man and the student a girl, he would have been convicted of sexual abuse for certain.
As if this embarrassing episode were not enough, Emmanuel has been in hot water recently over an even more serious issue dubbed the “Cocaine Controversy”: persistent rumors about his alleged use of cocaine, which he has also denied.
In trying to dismiss the “slap,” Macron’s office pulled out the always-available “fake news” card, suggesting that pro-Russian trolls were responsible for turning the incident into a controversy.
Whether this was a genuine case of domestic abuse or Brigitte was only cleaning something off his face (as was initially claimed) for the president of France to be “manhandled” by his wife does not make good news–especially not when one of the persistent conspiracy theories is that Brigitte is a trans woman who groomed Emmanuel when she was still a man.
Apart from the public interest and involvement in this bizarre incident, there is a political dimension to be considered: the many comments questioning whether a man who is slapped around by his “grandma-wife” (a common insult towards Brigitte) can stand up to tough leaders like Putting and Trump.
As they say in politics, “optics is everything.”
