Brigitte Macron's infamous slap of her husband Emmanuel was sparked when she saw a message on his phone from an Iranian actress, a new book has claimed, Daily News reports.
In the viral video from May last year, the first lady was seen pushing the French president in the face as the couple prepared to get off a plane in Vietnam. At the time, Macron insisted the incident was 'nothing', and said he was just 'bickering, or rather joking, with my wife'.
But French journalist Florian Tardif has painted a rather different picture in his new book, '(A (Nearly) Perfect Couple)' - which promises to deliver an 'investigation' into the 'forbidden zones' of the husband and wife. Speaking on RTL radio on Wednesday, Tardif - a journalist at Paris Match who has been following the Macrons since 2017 - called the notorious moment a classic 'couple's scene'. 'What happened is that she [Brigitte Macron], saw a message from a well-known figure. An Iranian actress,' he said.
Tardif claims that Macron maintained a 'platonic' relationship with the acclaimed star 'for a few months', but sent her 'messages that went quite far', such as: 'I find you very pretty.' 'That's what I've been told by those close to him, and that's what I'm saying this morning,' Tardif said, insisting he has 'verified' the story and that everything in his book is based on 'facts'. These messages caused 'tension' within the couple, culminating in a heated and 'significant' argument aboard the presidential plane on the tarmac at Hanoi airport, the journalist claimed. '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 actually 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.' At the time, 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 and further emphasised 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.
