Right-Wing OAN Apparently Duped by Russian Propaganda Campaign
By Sam Howard
What happened: The long-standing conspiracy theory that the French president’s wife Brigette Macron is transgender has been given a boost in the U.S by One America News (NewsGuard Trust Score: 22.5/100), which cited a deepfake report created by a Russian propaganda operation.
A closer look: During a July 11 segment of the OAN weeknight show “Fine Point,” host Chanel Rion said, “The surgeon who promised to give an interview about the sex change of Brigitte Macron was found dead in Paris. And get this … he I guess fell out of a window."
Rion was reading from a July 3 headline on pro-Kremlin news site EADaily.com (Trust Score: 12.5/100).
A clip of the segment posted on OAN’s official X account garnered 250,300 views and 2,200 likes in three days before it was deleted on July 14.
Russian origin: The baseless claim appears to have originated in a July 1 video reporting that a surgeon was found dead in Paris on June 29, 2025, after falling from a window. The video included footage of an earlier interview with the supposed surgeon, said to be 58-year-old François Faivre, in which Faivre said he worked at the American Hospital in Paris with a plastic surgeon who “told me about the physical changes that Ms. Brigitte Macron underwent during the transgender surgery in the hospital.”
Actually: There is no evidence that a surgeon named François Faivre died suspiciously in Paris in June 2025, let alone that he ever existed. It is not known who the man in the video is.
American Hospital in Paris communications manager Alexis Ray told NewsGuard in a July 2025 phone interview that no one named François Faivre has ever worked at the hospital.
NewsGuard ran the interview video through AI detection tool Hive, which found with 91 percent likelihood that the footage is a deepfake.
The July 1 video appears to have been first posted to EnqueteDuJour.fr, a site masquerading as a news outlet with a domain registered only six days earlier, according to WhoIs domain registration records.
The false narrative resembles campaigns previously manufactured and disseminated by a Russian influence operation known as Storm-1516. Campaigns from Storm-1516 typically involve a staged “first-person testimony” from a fictitious persona who claims to have first-hand knowledge of covert or illegal actions by politicians.
The Storm-1516 network includes John Mark Dougan, a fugitive former Florida deputy sheriff-turned-Russian propagandist based in Moscow. Dougan is not a stranger to OAN. He was previously credited as an “OAN foreign correspondent” when OANN.com published his pro-Kremlin coverage of Russia’s war with Ukraine in August 2022. Dougan had not appeared again on OAN, a spokesperson for the channel told The Washington Post in an October 2024 report.
Asked about Rion’s comments, Charles Herring, president of OAN parent company Herring Networks, told NewsGuard in a July 14, 2025, email that the “Fine Point” segment, called Headline Roulette, “is NOT meant to be taken seriously – it’s a comedic sketch mocking outrageous headlines. The name of the segment highlights this point. The guest, Tim Young, is introduced as a comedian. The headlines are being mocked. Note the laughing of the host.”
However, the other two headlines covered in the segment described real news stories, including an NBC News report on X AI chatbot Grok praising Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. And while it is true Rion introduced guest Tim Young as a comedian, she also described him as a “media fellow at the Heritage Foundation,” the conservative think tank.
In May 2025, Kari Lake, senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, announced that OAN would “provide newsfeed services” to government-funded news outlets that include Voice of America.
The agency did not respond to two emails from NewsGuard on July 14 and July 15, 2025, seeking comment on the Macron segment and asking whether the clip appeared on Voice of America.
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