A new claim directly contradicts the explanation French President Emmanuel Macron gave for the widely covered slap he received from his wife, Brigitte, last year – and paints the couple in a strikingly human light.
Macron arrived in Vietnam on Sunday, May 25, 2025, at the start of an Asian tour, when cameras captured a hand across the president's face as the door of the presidential Airbus opened. "My wife and I were just laughing, as we often do," the president insisted.
Florian Tardif, a political journalist at Paris Match, offers a different version of events in his book, Un couple (presque) parfait" ("An Almost Perfect Couple"), published by Albin Michel. "This is actually a scene between a couple," he said on Wednesday, during an interview with Marc-Olivier Fogiel on RTL. He claims the incident stemmed from a jealous outburst involving a well-known figure. "What happened is that [Brigitte Macron] saw a message from a well-known person, an Iranian actress, Golshifteh Farahani," Tardif declared on RTL.
Video: French President Emmanuel Macron gets slapped by his wife Brigitte Macron in Vietnam. Credit: Reuters
The journalist says he thoroughly verified this account before including it in his book. "I simply named her because at some point, there were rumors circulating in Paris. This is not a rumor; I explicitly told the Élysée Palace that this is not their version.
"The president of the republic maintained a platonic relationship with the actress for several months," he now claims. "That is what I was told, that is what I was told again and again." He added, "The messages, which were passed on to me by close friends, went quite far. 'Look, I find you very beautiful,' etc."
These exchanges, he says, created tension within the presidential couple. "It led to tension, which led to this private scene becoming public, simply because at some point there was a misunderstanding on the plane in which we thought this argument – a fairly significant argument – was over. It was not over."
Tardif claims the Élysée now "regrets" its communications around the episode. "They regret it today at the Élysée simply because they could have shown at that moment that they are a couple, that they are a real couple, that they are not a perfect couple. That is the story we have been given since the beginning of the first five-year term."
