French President Emmanuel Macron addressed video that’s gone viral of his wife Brigitte shoving him in the face.
The incident took place as the two arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, as the door on his presidential plane opened.
Brigitte’s arms are seen pushing his face, surprising Macron. When he realizes the press was looking on, he smiled and waved.
When the couple began to descend the staircase, Brigitte rebuffed Macron's offer to help her, choosing the rail instead.
Emmanuel Macron’s wife slapped him in the face and then refused to hold his arm pic.twitter.com/P6MhC5wIKe
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 26, 2025
“There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” the president told reporters.
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Macron confirmed the video's authenticity but said the images were being weaponized.
“The videos are all real, and yes, sometimes people tamper with them, but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them," he added.
His office also addressed the video.
“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” a statement said.
Earlier this month, the Élysée was forced to address another source of online chatter after some alleged he had a bag of cocaine on a table as he met with leaders of Britain and Germany.
“This is a tissue. For blowing your nose… When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation makes a simple tissue look like drugs," the statement said.
