the times | Wednesday May 25 2022 9
times2
Left: Mathieu Gallet.
Above: Emmanuel
Macron and his wife,
Brigittepresident]. We
have to stop him
by creating the
rumour that he
is gay.’ ”
He says the
plot was rooted
in prejudice.
Noting the age
difference
between Macron,
who is 44, and his
wife, who is 69,
the plotters “said
to themselves,
‘A heterosexual
man cannot have
a true relationship
with a woman
24 years older
than him, and
therefore it means
he is gay.’
“It is an idea
based in absolute
misogyny.”
Macron’s rivals
were also
homophobic, he
says. “Those who
created this
rumour said to
themselves that
French society
would say, ‘No,
we cannot elect a gay president or a
closet gay president,’ and that people
would think to themselves, ‘If he hides
things about his private life, he is
going to hide things from the nation.’ ”
The plan appeared to fly in the face
of historical precedent, given that the
country has always taken a laid-back
view of its presidents’ extramarital
affairs. Yet, Gallet says, Macron’s
opponents thought public opinion
would show far less tolerance towards
a liaison if it involved a gay lover.
But they misjudged public opinion, he
believes — the gossip did nothing to
damage Macron’s reputation, and may
have boosted it. Indeed, Macron’s press
team let the rumour circulate for
months without trying to counter it.
“I think... they thought it made him
look good in the eyes of some voters,
probably young voters,” Gallet says.
Macron was elected triumphantly
in 2017, and won a second election on
April 24. In the end, there may have
been only two victims of the gossip
mongers. The first was Brigitte
Macron, who is said to have been left
hurt and angry by it all. The second
was Gallet, who was dismissed from
his post after being convicted of
breaking the procurement law in 2018.
Macron was in office at the time and
could easily have chosen to overlook
the offence, Gallet says. Instead, the
order came down to terminate his
contract. “Basically, sacking me was
a way of putting a definitive end to
the rumour and of showing that I was
not being protected,” says Gallet, who
now works in the private sector at the
head of a start-up that touts itself as
the Netflix of podcasts. He has been
left with a sense of “waste”.
“Everyone recognises that I did a
good job at Radio France. We put the
ratings back up and modernised the
radio. But I have the impression that
it all ended halfway down the road
because of that stupid rumour.”four times. The people who created
this rumour were not pulling the
thread of a friendship to say that it
was more than a friendship. They
were creating a complete fiction.”
If the plotters chose to cast Gallet as
“the lover” it was probably because he
had never hidden his homosexuality,
he was the same age as Macron, he
was eminently seductive — handsome,
affable and articulate — and he was
controversial. During his time at Radio
France Gallet fell foul of unionists,
who leaked to the press details of a
€100,000 renovation of his office. The
refit had been approved before his
appointment, but the disclosure hurt
his reputation. Gallet was also at odds
with the socialist government of the
day, which discovered that he’d failed
to respect public sector procurement
regulations in his job as head of the
National Audiovisual Institute.
Ministers tipped off prosecutors, and
Gallet ended up with a €30,000 fine.
In other words, the plotters almost
certainly thought they could depict
him as an electoral liability for
Macron. Gallet is convinced that the
“affair” was invented by Macron’s
socialist cabinet colleagues of the day.
He blames Manuel Valls, then prime
minister, who denies the claim. “I
think the socialists realised that
Macron was ambitious and thought,
‘This guy, he’s going to beat us [in the
race to become France’s nextMathieu Gallet was
collateral damage
in a failed attempt
to influence who
became president,
he tells Adam Sage
W
hen he
realised that
the Paris
rumour
mill had
labelled him
Emmanuel
Macron’s
gay lover, Mathieu Gallet thought it
was ludicrous. Gallet, then chairman
of Radio France, the state broadcaster,
was in a relationship with a 20-year-
old student. Besides, he found Macron
unstylish, and not at all his type.
But the rumour spread. It became
a national sexual fantasy, angered
Brigitte Macron and ended up costing
Gallet his job, or so he believes. Now
he is talking publicly for the first time
about what he calls a “very French
story”. He has also written a book on
the subject, Jeux de pouvoir (Power
Games), which chronicles the dirty
tricks that riddled his four years at
Radio France, and how he became a
collateral victim of a plot to prevent
Macron’s rise to the Elysée in 2017 by
depicting him as a closet homosexual.
“In French stories there is always
a mix between the serious and the
less serious. In this case, the serious
is the politics and the less serious is
this business of the rumour with
Emmanuel Macron,” Gallet, 45, says
when we meet in an upmarket
Californian-style café in Paris.
He had been appointed chairman of
Radio France in 2014 at the age of 37
after pledging to modernise a service
that, like much of the French public
sector, seemed to be stuck in a time
warp. At about the same time Macron,
hitherto an anonymous backroom
adviser to François Hollande, the
socialist who was president at the
time, had emerged from the shadows
after being made economy minister.
He used the post to prepare a career
path that involved quitting the
left-wing government, setting up his
own centrist political party and
running for the presidency on a
promise of sweeping economic reform.
The rumour that Macron and Gallet
were having an affair began circulating
in Paris in late 2016, just as it was
becoming obvious that the centrist
leader was a serious contender. It took
hold on social media, swept through
the French political class and became
a pillar of dinner-party conversations.
Paparazzi staked out Gallet’s flat, and
supposedly well-informed sources
told journalists that compromising
photographs of him with Macron were
about to be published.
Even provincial backwaters heard
the rumour. Gallet’s aunt, for instance,
was told about the “affair” at a dinner
party in La Rochelle, in western
France, while his grandmother, who
lives near Bordeaux, was sent an email
informing her that he had moved in
with Macron.
It was not only France that gossiped.
Gallet says that state-backed Russian
agents latched on to the rumour in the
hope of destabilising the presidential
election, just as they had interfered in
the race between Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump in the US. Fake
accounts relayed talk of “the affair”,
and “Mathieu Gallet and Emmanuel
Macron” became a top search on
Google, as Gallet discovered to his
embarrassment when he led a team
of Radio France executives to the
platform’s Californian headquarters
and found that he was trending.
Just about the only place where
there was no mention of the rumour
was in the French media — which is
coy about prying into the private lives
of the great and good — until Macron
went public, jokingly dismissing it at
a rally shortly before the election.
Gallet says the media’s reluctance to
address the rumour somehow helped
to turn it into a nationwide “fantasy”.
The whole thing was a total
invention from start to finish, he says
— he wasn’t even a friend of Macron.
“I know you’re keen on sexual
scandals in Britain but in France they
take quite a detestable direction.
Macron and I knew each other, of
course, we had friends in common, but
we had only ever actually met three orBasically,
sacking
me was
a way of
putting a
definitive
end to the
rumour
p
h
b
r
isp
in
N d b w w t t‘A
m
a
w
2
th
t h b m w h s c rth
F
w
t l t gaMacron’s gay lover? C’est faux
GOFF PHOTOS; PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES