Candace Owens has publicly tied a February 2025 call from Trump to her later break with him over the Epstein files, and she doubled down on that link in a recent appearance on Theo Von's podcast, clipped and posted on October 7, 2026.
In February 2025, days after she finished a multi-part series claiming Brigitte Macron was born male — a claim the Macrons have sued her over for defamation — Owens says she got a message from someone close to the White House. The intermediary told her Emmanuel Macron had pulled Trump aside during a Washington visit and asked him to get her to stop talking about Brigitte. She says the request was framed to her as tied to Ukraine talks. Trump then called her himself. By her account, he said he had seen Brigitte up close and she looked like a woman, that the coverage was affecting an older woman, and that Macron had asked him to intervene. Owens says she pushed back and told him it was not her fault Macron married someone she claims was born male. She later told Tucker Carlson the same story in August 2025, adding that she agreed only to pause for a few months.
On Theo Von's show she went further. Asked whether the whole story was about sex, money, or power, she said "all of it" and that "it's deep." She then connected the Trump call to the Epstein files in hindsight: "In retrospect … I think it all actually relates to the Epstein files." She called the Epstein story "a France story," pointing to Ghislaine Maxwell's family background, Epstein's associate Jean-Luc Brunel and French modelling agencies, and argued those agencies functioned as a front for moving people from Eastern Europe. She said she had not realised, when she started the Brigitte series and looked at possible Mossad ties, that the pieces could fit a trafficking network. She also referenced the film Red Sparrow as an illustration of women conditioned from a young age and then placed near powerful men.
That is the insinuation: the same French circle she was investigating is, in her view, part of the Epstein network, and the request that she stop talking about Brigitte was not only about the gender claim or Ukraine diplomacy. She has not produced a document showing Trump in the Epstein files. The link is her retrospective reading of the call.
She has repeated the broader break elsewhere. On X she has written that the Epstein files are why she dropped Trump, that "the Epstein files matter," and that she will not be talked out of it. In a September 2026 interview she said her line was when Trump asked cameras, "Are we still talking about the Epstein files?" She argues people around him ran on releasing the files and that the delay protects donors. She has also claimed released Epstein-related emails discuss Emmanuel Macron's personal life and treat that as confirmation of her earlier series. French courts have convicted some people for cyberbullying Brigitte over similar claims; Owens has called those cases speech restrictions, not proof of Brigitte's sex.
What is on the record is her account of the February call, the Macron lawsuit, her public split with Trump over the files, and the Theo Von remarks tying the call to Epstein, Brunel, and French modelling agencies. The claim that the call was about protecting an Epstein-linked network remains her inference, not a released file or a confirmed White House statement.