French President Emmanuel Macron has spoken out after a video of his wife ‘slapping him’ was released.
The video shows the 47-year-old standing at an aircraft door at Hanoi Airport. The door then opens and his wife, Brigitte, can be seen reaching her hands towards his face in a brief shoving motion.
He seems surprised by this move but turns around and waves to the media before the couple walk down the stairs. His wife then refuses to take his offered arm.
Watch the incident below:
The video has circulated online causing many to speculate about what happened, including Russian state media and French far-right media.
At first, the Élysée Palace dismissed the video as “fake news”, but now Macron has insisted the video is real and that it has been taken out of context.
He said: “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,”.
“We are horsing around, having a joke, and I was surprised by that, and that becomes a sort of geopolitical disaster,” he continued. “It’s nonsense. People read all kinds of stupidity into things.”
A spokesperson from the Élysée Palace agreed with these statements, claiming the interaction was “a moment of complicity” and that the couple were “decompressing one last time” before turning to their official business.
One source from the palace said “It wasn’t even a slap,”.
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