French President Emmanuel Macron was slapped by his wife, Brigitte Macron, during a foreign trip last year after she allegedly found a steamy message from a younger Iranian actress on his phone, according to sensational claims in a new book.
Brigitte Macron’s viral attack on her husband, which was caught on camera, was a result of the steamy messages allegedly sent between her former student, 48, and Iranian-born Golshifteh Farahani, 42, journalist Florian Tardif claimed in an interview with RTL France.
The incident prompted speculation of a rift in their union and subsequent denials by the couple, who insisted that they were just “joking”.
“I find you very pretty,” President Macron told Farahani, in one of the messages, according to Tardif, whose book, “An (Almost) Perfect Couple,” was published Wednesday.
Farahani, who is known to be a staunch critic of the regime in Tehran, allegedly kept up a “platonic relationship” with Macron for several months, reported Le Parisien.
“[This] led to tensions within the couple, which resulted in this private scene becoming public,” explained Tardif, a journalist with Paris Match, referring to the infamous incident in May last year as the couple prepared to disembark their plane in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Moments before the slap, Brigitte, 73, had read a message from Farahani on her husband’s phone, reported Le Parisien.
“What hurt Brigitte was not so much the contents of the message as what it hinted at: a possibility … nothing tangible or that could really be denounced but the idea alone … was enough,” reads an extract from the book, serialized in Paris Match.
“She [Brigitte] saw herself being erased,” Tardif quoted a friend of the first lady as saying.
“Everything in the book is facts, facts, and only facts,” Tardif insisted.
Farahani, 42, has denied rumours that the pair were having an affair when questioned by journalists and has said that their connection was “platonic”.
However, a source close to Mrs Macron “categorically denied” the claims when Tardif interviewed them in March and insisted that she “never looks into her husband’s phone”, according to Le Parisien.
Farahani told Le Point earlier this year: “I think that there is a lack of love for some people and they need to create romances like this to fill [the void].”
An Elysee official initially played down the moment at the time of the incident last year, saying: “It was a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh.”
Macron later admitted that the couple had been “squabbling” and that the attention to the incident was surprising to him.
“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he told reporters at the time. “I’m surprised by it, it turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it. It’s nonsense.”