New Delhi: French President Emmanuel Macron rejected reports of being slapped by his wife Brigitte while they were about to disembark from a plane on arrival in Hanoi, Vietnam.
A viral video showed the First Lady of France reaching out and pushing Macron’s face as the latter moves away.
The clip also appeared to show Brigitte ignoring Macron as he tries to hold her hand when they step down the aircraft.
Macron agreed that the video was authentic, but condemned the way it had been used to belittle him.
“There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife, and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” Macron told mediapersons in Hanoi on Monday.
“The videos are all real, and yes, sometimes people tamper with them, but people are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them,” Macron lamented.
As the video was all over the internet, the trollers worked overtime targeting the Macrons.
“Groomed him… now abusing him,” one user wrote, referring to Brigitte, who was Macron’s high school teacher and is 25 years older than him.
“Okay, but did you guys SEE @EmmanuelMacron’s wife literally push his face like she was swatting a fly? Like she thought she was invisible or something.. And Macron just laughed it off, shaking hands like, ‘No big deal, just got publicly slapped by my wife, move along’,” commented another netizen.
“@grok is Bridgette Macron a man,” mocked one person.
Macron’s office earlier downplayed the incident, calling it a ‘moment of togetherness’.