Henry Samuel
Paris: Brigitte Macron’s infamous “slap” of her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, was prompted by a jealous row over messages from an Iranian actor, a French journalist has claimed.
Florian Tardif, a Paris Match magazine political correspondent, made the allegation on RTL on Wednesday (Paris time) while promoting his new book, An (Almost) Perfect Couple.
The allegation prompted a swift denial from the first lady’s entourage. The Elysée Palace insisted the claim was not made in the book itself and said Brigitte Macron had already rejected it.
“Brigitte Macron categorically denied this account directly to the author on March 5, specifying that she never looks at her husband’s mobile phone,” the president’s entourage said, adding that the claim had “not been published” by Tardif.
The author told RTL that the incident, filmed in Vietnam as the couple prepared to disembark from their plane on May 25 last year, was not a playful exchange, as the Elysée said at the time, but “a fairly significant argument”.
“What happened is that she saw a message from a well-known figure, an Iranian actress, Golshifteh Farahani,” said Tardif, who has been following the Macrons since 2017.
He claimed that Emmanuel Macron had maintained a “platonic” relationship with the Franco-Iranian actor “for a few months”, although “that is no longer the case”, and had sent messages that “went quite far”, including: “I find you very pretty.”
“That is what I was told and repeated by those around them,” Tardif said, insisting the account was based on “facts” and not rumour.
Farahani, who left Iran for France in 2008, has previously dismissed speculation about her relationship with the French president. Asked about earlier rumours by Gala magazine last August, she said: “The question is why people are interested in this kind of story.
“There is a lack of love in some people and they need to create such romances to fill it.”
The footage from Hanoi airport showed Macron appearing in the doorway of the presidential plane before Brigitte Macron’s hands briefly appeared, pushing his face.
At the time, the president said the couple had merely been “bickering, or rather joking”, while an Elysée official described the moment as one of “decompression”, “banter” and “complicity” before the start of an official visit.
But Tardif said: “This private scene became public because there was a misunderstanding on the plane. We thought the argument was over. It wasn’t.”
He claimed the Elysée later regretted not being honest about the dispute, “simply because they could have shown at that moment that they were a couple, a real couple, not a perfect couple”.
The incident resurfaced in April when US President Donald Trump mocked Macron during a White House Easter event, saying the French president’s wife “treats him extremely badly” and joking that he was “still recovering from the right to the jaw”.
Macron called the remarks “neither elegant nor up to standard”.
In an unusual show of unity, he was defended by opposition politicians, including Manuel Bompard, co-ordinator of the hard-left France Unbowed party, who said Trump’s comments were “absolutely unacceptable”.
The Telegraph, London
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