A new book has claimed that Brigitte Macron's infamous slap of her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, was sparked when she saw a message on his phone from an Iranian actress. The incident, captured on video in May last year, showed the first lady pushing the president in the face as the couple prepared to disembark from a plane in Vietnam.
At the time, Macron insisted the moment was 'nothing,' describing it as 'bickering, or rather joking, with my wife.' However, French journalist Florian Tardif, author of the book '(A (Nearly) Perfect Couple),' presents a different narrative. Speaking on RTL radio on Wednesday, Tardif, a journalist at Paris Match who has been covering the Macrons since 2017, called the episode a classic 'couple's scene.'
'What happened is that she saw a message from a well-known figure. An Iranian actress,' Tardif said. He claims Macron maintained a 'platonic' relationship with the actress 'for a few months' but sent her 'messages that went quite far,' such as 'I find you very pretty.' Tardif insists he has 'verified' the story and that everything in his book is based on 'facts.'
According to Tardif, these messages caused 'tension' within the couple, culminating in a heated and 'significant' argument aboard the presidential plane on the tarmac at Hanoi airport. 'This private scene became public because there was a misunderstanding on the plane. We thought the argument was over. It wasn't,' he concluded.
Tardif claimed the Elysee Palace 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.' Initially, an Elysee official described the episode as 'a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh.'
Brigitte Macron's representatives denied to Le Parisien on Wednesday that the scene was linked to the Iranian actress, further emphasising that the first lady would never check her husband's phone. '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 this detail had not been published by the author.
