Sunday 4 September 2022 11:01 PM Trump's claim that FBI took secret dossier on Macron during raid has set ... trends now
The questions are swirling around the gilded corridors of the Elysee Palace. Just what, if anything, has President Emmanuel Macron been up to behind the heavy doors of his private salon — while his wife Brigitte was away?
After all, French presidents are notorious for being boudoir-hoppers. On the night Princess Diana died in Paris, for example, Jacques Chirac couldn’t be found. He was eventually discovered sleeping with Italian movie star Claudia Cardinale, rather than his wife.
For the fresh rumours about Macron, we can thank Donald Trump. The former U.S. President claims he’s sitting on a whopper of a sexual scandal relating to his erstwhile French counterpart.
On August 8, the FBI raided Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, seizing boxes of classified documents as part of a criminal investigation into his alleged mishandling of top-secret material.
By now, almost everyone knows that Macron, 44, met his wife Brigitte, 69, when he was a 15-year-old schoolboy and she his 39-year-old teacher, a married mother of three
One of the files is being referred to in Paris as — ooh la la! — the ‘Macron Sex Dossier’. The mysterious file, ‘Item 1a’, was tantalisingly listed by the FBI as ‘info re: President of France’.
Though the true contents remain under wraps, the internet is inevitably aflame with rumours, and spooks are said to be chattering on both sides of the Atlantic.
And Trump has long shown a strange fascination with Macron’s sex life, reportedly boasting in private of knowing every allegedly salacious detail. According to Rolling Stone magazine, Trump enjoyed saying Macron was ‘naughty’ — and that ‘[not] very many people know’.
Last night, a Macron ally in Paris told me: ‘All French presidents have their sexual peccadillos, and details always leak out.
‘Efforts are being made to find out what the Macron Sex Dossier contains — and it’s only a matter of time.’
Openly gay, the smouldering and chiselled Mathieu Gallet (pictured) was a prominent figure in the French media and he was known to have met Macron at various functions
By now, almost everyone knows that Macron, 44, met his wife Brigitte, 69, when he was a 15-year-old schoolboy and she his 39-year-old teacher, a married mother of three.
But that is only the start of the eyebrow-raising allegations about Macron’s private life.
While campaigning to be president in 2017, Macron was forced to deny being a part of a ‘rich gay lobby’, denying suggestions that he was having a passionate affair with Mathieu Gallet, the then 40-year-old boss of Radio France.
Openly gay, the smouldering and chiselled Gallet was a prominent figure in the French media and he was known to have met Macron at various functions.
Online rumours began mushrooming, and Macron was forced to state on the record: ‘They say I have a double life with Mathieu Gallet . . . but it can’t be me.’
He reiterated at another rally: ‘I am who I am — I have never had anything to hide. I hear people saying that I have a secret life or something. It’s not nice for Brigitte, because I share all my days and nights with her, and she asks me how I manage it.’
A year later, the Parisian rumour mill, always excitable, had worked itself into a freshly spinning dynamo of gossip.
Macron, they insisted, was now sleeping with his former security officer and later deputy chief of staff, Alexandre Benalla. What else could explain the president’s lenient treatment, and continued employment, of Benalla after he’d been filmed beating up a French citizen?
According to rumours in Paris, Macron was sleeping with his former security officer and later deputy chief of staff, Alexandre Benalla
On May Day in 2018 — a day that often attracts protests — Benalla had been keen to observe events alongside the gendarmes. But he was on his day off, so had sought permission from his boss, Macron’s chief of staff, to do so.
On the day, however, he was filmed wearing a riot helmet, visor and an orange armband displaying the word ‘police’.
This was illegal: he wasn’t meant to be a part of the security effort in any official way and to impersonate an officer is a serious offence.
But Benalla went one further. The dress-up excitement got the better of him and he set about manhandling the protesters.
A bystander filmed him ‘arresting’ one woman, dragging her away from a crowd by the neck. Benalla later grappled a man to the pavement, punching him in the head as he went.
When the scandal broke in
