PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron said he and his wife Brigitte decided to sue Candace Owens to defend the truth in the face of the hard-right provocateur’s repeated assertions that the French first lady was assigned male at birth.

“This has become such a big issue in the United States that we had to respond,” Macron said in an interview with Paris Match published Tuesday, his first public comments on the matter since he and Brigitte filed a defamation suit in Delaware last month. “It’s a question of having the truth respected.”

The suit alleges that Owens spread the rumor to “promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.”

Owens helmed an eight-part podcast series called “Becoming Brigitte,” in which she pushes various conspiracy theories about the Macrons and their relationship, all of which the Macrons have vociferously denied.

“[Owens] is someone who knew very well that she was spreading false information and did so with the aim of causing harm, in the service of an ideology and with established connections to far-right leaders,” Macron said in the interview.

Macron explained that the couple had been advised not to press charges when these allegations first emerged in France to avoid the so-called Streisand effect — drawing more attention to something by trying to remove it. But, Macron said, as the rumor started to spread in the United States, the matter became too serious to ignore.

After the Macrons’ suit was made public, a spokesperson for Owens slammed it as a “foreign government attacking the First Amendment rights of an American independent journalist.”

Macron responded by saying freedom of speech does not protect Owens from spreading false, harmful “nonsense.”

He also hit back with a jab aimed more broadly at the MAGA movement, saying “those talking about so-called freedom of speech are the same ones banning reporters from the Oval Office,” he said, referring to the White House’s decision to block reporters from the Associated Press from entering the Oval Office and Air Force One in response to how the organization covered U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing contributed to this report.