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Thank you for subscribing. — Jessica Reed Kraus
When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, filed a lawsuit against an American internet personality in a Delaware court this July, I wasn’t sure what I’d make of it. I did not expect the case to affect me emotionally.
Then I sat down to read the filing.
Across 219 pages, the suit detailed an “orchestrated campaign of defamation” in which the French first lady was subject to a barrage of “verifiably false and devastating lies” that spread uncontrollably and led to sustained harassment. The primary conspiracy alleged she was he: a biological male who had stolen a woman’s identity in order to fraudulently live as a woman and fraudulently serve as the “First Lady” of France. Secondary conspiracies included that she was a blood relative of her husband, rendering their marriage not just same-sex but incestuous, and that the French president himself was a Manchurian candidate installed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The accusations were broadcast to millions beginning in March 2024, the suit alleged, so that the respondent could “promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money” as “global humiliation” was visited upon the Macrons. Efforts to correct the falsehoods only intensified the harassment. “Rather than engage with President and Mrs. Macron’s efforts to set the record straight,” the suit stated, the respondent “disregarded all credible evidence disproving her claim,” “mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base,” and continued to platform “known conspiracy theorists and proven defamers.” When the Macrons demanded a retraction, the respondent produced an eight-part podcast series further amplifying the conspiracy instead. “It is not the pursuit of truth,” the complaint states, “but the pursuit of fame.”
My pulse quickened as I read the documents. The experience was so familiar that it was almost disturbing. Thousands of miles away, under entirely different circumstances, the same forces that had overtaken my own life that spring appeared to be bearing down on the leaders of a foreign government. I recognized the pattern because I had already lived a version of it.
As someone who has endured the wrath of Candace Owens, I can attest to the damage she is capable of inflicting with the stories she tells on camera about those she casts as villains. For me, it arrived as a jolt of terror, followed by chaos and aftershocks of mental and spiritual distress that still reverberate eight months later.
Her objects of scorn change with the news and with political and cultural winds, but her method is consistent. Her pattern is predictable. Ruthless. Calculated.
It brings me no solace to know I am not alone.
I first became aware of Candace Owens in 2018, not long after I boarded a train from New York to Washington and marched alongside the women protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump. I noticed a post from a woman I followed expressing excitement about seeing Candace speak at a local college. Curious, I looked her up. She was telegenic and charismatic. Her delivery was sharp, her effect hypnotic. I was captivated.
At the time, as I engaged outwardly in demonstrations against Trump, my political views were quietly and privately beginning to shift. A crop of Breitbart-endorsed personalities became my entry point into conservative politics. In addition to Candace, I was reading provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
Within a decade, Candace had become one of the loudest and most successful conservative voices in the country.
Like me, her values had initially aligned with the left. One of the earliest formative incidents documented dates to 2005. An April 5, 2023 Vanity Fair profile described a fall 2005 incident in which Owens was allegedly attacked by three white girls who had threatened her earlier that day, then confronted her at a local Blockbuster where she worked.
In 2007, Owens filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the Stamford, Connecticut school district after receiving racist threats from white classmates at her high school. The NAACP assisted in the case, which alleged the school failed to protect her from racial harassment. It was widely covered at the time and ultimately settled for $37,500.
She wrote that the event caused her to develop “a severe eating disorder.”
That same year, Owens was arrested in an unrelated harassment case while still a minor, according to a report by the Danbury News-Times. Because she was 17 at the time, her records remained sealed.
A few years later, through a mainstream channel, she formally entered the media. There is scant verifiable information available about this period. According to Candace, she dropped out of the University of Rhode Island her junior year and worked for Condé Nast, with an internship either/or at Glamour or Vogue.
By 2015, she was the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Degree180, marketed as a publication for the aspiring girlboss. It featured a wide mix of content, some of it openly anti-Trump, anti-Tea Party, anti-male, anti-White, and anti-Gamergate, alongside articles about sex and celebrity gossip. In practice, it functioned as a venue for an unfocused assortment of short musings on lifestyle, love, sex, mid-twenties ennui, and, at times, politics. The pieces were penned by Candace and a group of other young female authors who sought to appear relatable, with selfies as their official photos and playful bios that made them seem more like teenagers on social media than would-be media players. The site resembled other lo-fi blog collectives of the period, similar to XoJane, Bustle, or Thought Catalogue.
“By the time I was eight years old, I knew that I wanted to be a writer,” Candace confessed in one entry. Now she was a young woman writing to sort out who she was and where she fit in. She shared quotes by Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Einstein, and Kanye West, her idol before he became her friend. “In many ways, and yes, I am aware this is going to come off as arrogant, I feel that I am the female Kanye West,” she wrote.
In another entry—many of which have since been scrubbed from the internet and now survive only through archived snapshots—she recounted an illuminating conversation with a New York cab driver who lectured her on American hypocrisy around monogamy. She listened, she wrote, in service of “my constant quest to expand my consciousness and challenge previously held ideas.” In another, she wrote that she found extramarital affairs “romantic,” morally wrong, yes, but instances in which reason was overtaken by passion, which charmed her. She also described the shocking ease with which she had obtained Adderall and Xanax prescriptions, offering a critique of a society that dispenses drugs first and asks questions later, or never. “Can we feel sad? Can we feel happy? Can we maybe feel unmotivated and lazy sometimes as our minds and bodies continue to transform like the ever-shifting landscapes that they are? Do we dare to just… feel?”
She sounded, honestly, like a writer: someone puzzled by and curious about the human experience, watching from the sidelines even as she lived it herself. In her simmering unease with social conventions and powerful systems, she reflected the naturally anti-establishment worldview most writers possess in some form. There were, of course, glimpses of the Candace the world would soon come to know. Beyond the Kanye worship were colorful missives designed to provoke outrage about gender, sexuality, and race. She published criticism of the “mad hatter” leading the conservative movement (Donald Trump) and even a satirical interview with God.
In a post titled: I’m So Sorry Ladies, But We Can NEVER Stop Faking the Orgasm, she cracked jokes, but in doing so articulated views that appear, in hindsight, like the foundation of her conservatism. She argued in favor of the faux orgasm because, in her view, once you are rolling around in the bed you have made, you must accept the circumstances and deal with them.
“It sucks to say it, but you and I both know that the fastest way to end your misery is to just make him think he’s Elvis Presley. Don’t fake one, fake twelve,” she wrote. “Tell him you can’t even feel your insides anymore; that your mind is literally so blown, the CSI will be crawling all over the place if he doesn’t dismount and get the fuck out of there—RIGHT NOW. And then it’s over and you’ll never have to do that again. Because ultimately, ladies, the truth is geometrical: the fastest way from Point A to Point B is a straight line. A loud, gratuitous, can-I-file-this-as-charitable-on-my-tax-returns, sucky straight line.”
In a separate diatribe against anal sex, she argued that heterosexual men enjoyed it not for physical pleasure but for psychological reasons. “If it feels better in the front, plus there’s the added benefit of having the natural lubrication versus whatever messy jellies and lubes are required to effectively slip it into the back—what then is the actual point?” she wrote. “I’m thinking it has everything to do with dominance. In Roman times, when a male wanted to assert dominance over another male, he would rape him—in the ass—as it was considered the ultimate form of submission. I don’t think much has changed.”
There was also an early echo of the bombastic self-promotion, snideness, and attachment to preformed conclusions that would one day dazzle millions. In October 2015, she wrote, “Degree180 launched a full-scale investigation into the bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party… The good news is, they will eventually die off, and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY.”
In 2016, she focused on a new venture: Social Autopsy, an anti-bullying platform that claimed it would expose anonymous online harassment by doxxing users for bad behavior. Her version of social credit score. “The CCP would be proud,” one user comment wrote. It didn’t go over well. Many saw it as a tool to bully people. Her Kickstarter raised less than $5K.
Degree 180 | Social Autopsy
That same year, Candace published an extremely long tirade attacking two high-profile left-wing, anti-Gamergate activists. In it, she claimed that the alleged actions of Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper had changed her political views. She began referring to herself as a “former liberal” and shut down Degree180— later elaborating in 2017 that the failed Kickstarter taught her that liberals were the “real racists” and the “real trolls.”
In January 2017, Candace was evicted from her 16th-story luxury apartment at The Beacon in Stamford, Connecticut, which rented for $3,550 per month, following proceedings in Norwalk Housing Court. She stopped paying rent roughly six months earlier. In August 2017, she sued the property owner, BLT, for $15,000, alleging the apartment was filled with mold and had damaged her health.
Candace claimed the harm included systemic yeast infections, wheezing, scars requiring laser removal, eczema, an inability to think clearly, and several other ailments.
BLT countersued for $21,300 in back rent plus legal expenses. On April 1, 2021, Candace was ordered to pay the back rent, along with legal costs.
Throughout this period, she alleged that Zoe Quinn and Randi Harper were secret “cyber terrorists” who had torpedoed her Kickstarter campaign and orchestrated a racially abusive harassment effort against her, including claims that Quinn used 4chan to incite anonymous emails filled with racial slurs. She further accused Quinn and Harper of being fraudulent anti-bullying activists who targeted SocialAutopsy because it threatened their own business model.
She moved on quickly.
While Candace has credited the media’s mistreatment of Donald Trump to waking her up to liberal faults, others argue that profit played a bigger role in her shift. Her conservative pivot—defending right-wing talking points—brought the attention she had been seeking. The following year, with a new platform, Red Pill Black, and a newfound opposition to the cancel-culture framework in which she had previously claimed victimization and attempted to launch a career, she “came out” as a conservative. She produced a skit designed to go viral in which she broke the news to her disapproving parents, playing all three roles herself.
Hearing on Confronting White Supremacy
From there, she became a frequent guest on Fox News and was soon hired by Charlie Kirk as director of engagement for Turning Point USA. She cast herself as a “truth seeker” standing athwart wokeness. Everyone from Donald Trump to her hero Kanye West offered praise. She even hinted that she might consider running for public office herself.
Meanwhile, her star continued to rise through platforms furnished by PragerU and The Daily Wire. She later departed both organizations amid heated public feuds.
In 2024, following her public spat with Ben Shapiro, she went solo. On her independent channel, she appeared to drift away from structured political commentary toward a looser mix of gossip and conspiracy-driven content.
Which is what would draw her, recklessly, into my story.
I am baffled that people cannot see how horrible she is. Discernment is lacking in today’s society.
She is a gifted writer and performer --that was her true calling, but she seemed to want something else, power to destroy and that will be her downfall.