Paris (France) (AFP) – France has detected a Russia-linked disinformation effort alleging President Emmanuel Macron’s involvement with convicted US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a government authority said Friday. Politicians, celebrities, and royals have been caught up in the turmoil after the US Justice Department last week published a new cache of nearly three million documents related to the investigation of Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
France’s Viginum agency, which tracks foreign disinformation campaigns, said it had on Wednesday detected a social media operation involving a fabricated video report alleging that “journalists had uncovered a compromising exchange implicating Emmanuel Macron”. The posts cite an alleged email exchange between Epstein and late French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found dead in his cell in a Paris prison in 2022 after being charged with raping minors. According to the posts, Brunel allegedly told Epstein in May 2017 that he would take “a few boys” to a party that Macron was organising, allegations Viginum described as false. The Department of Justice’s files about Epstein do not contain the alleged email.
The story, allegedly by Le Parisien journalist Victor Cousin, was first posted on a website fraudulently using the identity of a French media organisation, France-Soir, Viginum said. Writing for Le Parisien, Cousin, 26, said he had gone to a police station to file a complaint. “I had to explain how pro-Russian individuals had stolen my identity to attack the French president,” he wrote. “The police officer in front of me stared at me with wide eyes, unable to comprehend what I was saying.”
On Wednesday, France-Soir also sought to distance itself from the fabricated report. “Warning: brand and content theft,” it said. “The website http://france-soir.net has no connection with France-Soir.” According to the government agency, the disinformation effort was likely conducted by an information operation called Storm-1516 that is linked to Russian military intelligence. The fake France-Soir website was linked “with a high degree of confidence to the CopyCop information operation”, it said. CopyCop is in turn linked to John Mark Dougan, an American fugitive living in Russia. The latter “maintains part of the digital infrastructure of the Storm-1516 information operation,” Viginum said.
On X, the first account to share the fake video report was “@LoetitiaH, a frequent relay for Storm-1516 information operations,” the agency added. The video content was then “picked up and amplified by numerous other accounts monitored by Viginum,” it said. The posts targeting Macron began appearing online on Wednesday, shared simultaneously by several social media accounts identified as regular sources of pro-Russian disinformation. The accounts have a following of several thousand internet users. Like previous disinformation operations on social media, they rely on a video with audio dubbed by artificial intelligence, screenshots of altered documents, and links to a website impersonating another media outlet to lend credibility to their narrative. The posts share a link to the clone of the France-Soir media site, launched on Sunday, whose domain name is registered as .net, instead of the .fr of the authentic site.
The French government has repeatedly warned the public over Russian disinformation campaigns in Europe, which have grown in intensity since President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Antibot4Navalny, a collective that monitors pro-Kremlin bot networks, Storm-1516 and a disinformation campaign known as Matryoshka launched simultaneous operations targeting Macron in early February. However, the group said there was no proven “direct link beyond the timing and topics” between the two operations. “No strong connections between sites or distribution accounts can give us grounds to make that claim,” Antibot4Navalny told AFP.
According to Viginum, Storm-1516 was behind at least 77 disinformation operations targeting Western countries between late 2023 and March 2025. After the publication of the Epstein files, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was also targeted by false posts. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said this week the Epstein files demonstrate “how the Western elite treats children” and that such officials “stand behind the Kyiv regime”.
© 2024 AFP
