French President Emmanuel Macron was quick to shut down any speculation about a viral video that appeared to show his wife, Brigitte Macron, shoving his face, but that hasn’t stopped social media users from pointing out controversial details about their relationship.
On May 26, cameras caught the French president taking a shove to the face right as the door of a plane carrying the couple opened at the beginning of an official trip to Hanoi, Vietnam. Macron, after being briefly stunned, quickly turned to the cameras to wave while the arm responsible for the shove was soon revealed to be that of his wife.
“I was bickering, or rather joking, with my wife,” Macron later told reporters, via The New York Times. “It’s nothing. I’m surprised by it, it turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it… It’s nonsense.”
The theories Macron references may or may not include social media users, and even Time, connecting the incident back to the problematic beginnings of the couple’s relationship.
Macron met Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years his senior, as a 15-year-old student at the private school where she worked as a teacher. Brigitte, then a married mother of three, including a daughter who was a classmate of her future husband, oversaw a theatre workshop at the school and reportedly grew close to Macron while working on a play together.
In the 2017 biography, Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man, the President’s parents recalled removing their son from the school once they learned about the relationship. “When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say, ‘How wonderful!'” Macron’s father said.
Though the age of consent in France is 15, Macron’s horrified parents still tried to urge Brigitte not to see their son until he was an adult but she allegedly told them she couldn’t “promise anything.”
The pair eventually married in 2007 when he was 29 and she was 54 years old. They do not share any children.
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