Candace Owens

Candace Owens (born April 29, 1989, White Plains, New York, U.S.) is a right-wing commentator known for her inflammatory podcasts, videos, and social media posts. Owens was sued in 2025 by French Pres. Emmanuel Macron and first lady Brigitte Macron over Owens’s baseless claims that Brigitte Macron was born male. Owens has also speculated about conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Early years

Owens was born in White Plains, New York, but grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, in low-income housing. She has described her grandfather as a major parental figure in her life. Owens had a traumatic experience in high school when a former friend called her the N-word and threatened to kill her in a series of voicemail messages. Others on the messages included the 14-year-old son of then Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy; the elder Malloy would become Connecticut’s governor. In another incident, Owens said she was kicked and subjected to racial slurs by three girls in a parking lot. She ended up missing six weeks of school, during which time she said she was attacked online by students, parents, and teachers. Her family ultimately received a settlement of more than $37,000 from the school district.

In 2016—after dropping out of the University of Rhode Island and working in New York City at Vogue and Glamour—Owens wrote an open letter to Connecticut in the Stamford Advocate, recounting the hateful phone messages. “Their words, to this very day, represent the most horrific that I have ever heard uttered against another human being,” she wrote. In recalling how the case became a media sensation she wrote, “Soon my face was plastered on the front page of every newspaper across Connecticut and everyone from the NAACP, to Dr. Phil wanted in on the story.”

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Looking back, Owens expressed some empathy for her teen tormentors. “We were children,” she wrote. “I say ‘we’ because I wasn’t the only victim. I wasn’t the only child who had to read your words. The four boys who left me those messages were labeled racists. They were labeled ‘no good.’ Those are words that no child deserves to hear.” In the piece, she also wrote that she was starting a website aimed at curtailing online bullying. The site, however, came under criticism online from people who saw it as a vehicle for promoting cyberbullying rather than preventing it.

Rising star on the right

In 2017 Owens described on a conservative podcast how she “became a conservative overnight. I realized that liberals were actually the racists, that liberals were actually the trolls.” Using the name Red Pill Black—a nod to a pill in the 1999 film The Matrix—Owens began a series of YouTube videos. Her debut video was called “Mom, Dad…I’m a Conservative,” a parody of a child coming out as gay.

She gained increased prominence in the wake of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a woman was killed and dozens were injured. She posted a video titled “I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy” that gained the attention of prominent right-wing commentators, including InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Later that year, Owens was hired by Turning Point USA’s Kirk, who brought her with him to talk to students on college campuses across the country. She also gained the attention of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, who, in May 2018, posted about Owens on Twitter (now X):

Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on…so good for our Country!

But at a conservative event in London in December 2018, she angered many by saying, “If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine. The problem is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany.” She later issued a clarification and said she was quoted out of context, but the controversy led her to resign from Turning Point USA in 2019. In 2020 Owens joined The Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet cofounded by political commentator Ben Shapiro.

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While at The Daily Wire, she continued to make controversial content, including a documentary critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2022 she and Kanye West (also called Ye) sported “White Lives Matter” T-shirts at Paris Fashion Week. She also initially defended West after he tweeted that he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” Owens’s take: “If you are an honest person, you did not think this tweet was antisemitic.” Shapiro, who is Jewish, criticized her at a college event, saying, “Candace is great, but she initially gave a response that I thought was pretty wrong, both morally and sort of logically.”

Owens continued to anger Shapiro, including with her claim that a “small ring” of Jewish people in Hollywood and Washington, D.C., were involved in something “quite sinister.” In 2023 Shapiro accused her of engaging in “disgraceful” commentary. She replied that one “cannot serve both God and money.” The Anti-Defamation League has described Owens as someone “who has come to embrace and promote antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel rhetoric.” In 2024 The Daily Wire ended its relationship with Owens, who declared in a social media post, “The rumors are true—I am finally free.”

Macron and Kirk

Owens has continued to draw huge audiences; as of 2025 she had 5.5 million followers on YouTube. Her claim that Brigitte Macron, the French first lady, was born male led to a defamation lawsuit filed in 2025 by the Macrons in a Delaware court. The suit alleged that Owens promoted “outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions” on her podcast and social media posts, including claims that the first couple were blood relatives and that Macron has stolen another person’s identity. The Macrons said in a statement that after Owens ignored their requests for a retraction, they “concluded that referring the matter to a court of law was the only remaining avenue for remedy.” In a video response Owens continued to mock the couple, telling viewers she had been “sued by the first lady man of France.” Owens said she had sought to interview Macron before airing the material.

In the wake of Kirk’s assassination in September 2025, Owens used her platforms to posit conspiracy theories about his death, including that he had been shot from below the stage where he was speaking and that the assassin had fled through a series of tunnels. Owens has also been among conservatives who have tied Israel to Kirk’s death. (Tyler Robinson has been charged with murder in connection with Kirk’s killing; he is believed to have fired the fatal shot from a building some 175 yards from where Kirk was speaking.) In December 2025, Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk called on Owens to stop amplifying false claims. When asked by Bari Weiss as part of a CBS News town hall what she would say to Owens, Kirk replied: “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop.”

Personal life

Owens married George Farmer, a conservative British business executive and the son of a member of Parliament’s House of Lords, in 2019. The couple has four children.