Except that there is one slightly problematic detail in this scenario: Natacha Rey had cancer. Her illness did not miraculously appear the day before her death to support an official version of events. She had spoken publicly about her cancer as early as 2024, and her health had already had an impact on her ability to appear in court. Her death, which occurred on 13 September 2026 in Saintes, was reported as being due to this illness.
We must therefore undertake this extraordinary intellectual exercise, which had become almost subversive by 2026: accepting that a sick person might die from their illness.
This does not mean that we should look down on Natacha Rey. Nor does it even mean that we must agree or disagree with everything she claimed. We can discuss her work, her methods, the legal proceedings involving her and the accusations she made. But her death does not automatically turn her claims into truths, any more than it refutes them. A death is not proof.
This is precisely where the conspiracy theory machine becomes formidable: it is constructed in such a way that it can never lose.
Someone speaks out: they’re causing a stir.
They’re challenged: they’re trying to silence her.
She’s taken to court: proof that she’s causing a huge stir.
She wins a case: proof that she was right.
They lose a case: proof that the justice system is rigged.
They fall ill: perhaps they’ve been poisoned.
They die: inevitably, they’ve been eliminated.
With reasoning like that, no event can contradict the initial hypothesis. Everything becomes confirmation. And when a theory explains absolutely everything, including the very elements that ought to contradict it, it no longer proves anything.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is this naivety that masquerades as clear-sightedness. Those who reason in this way readily see themselves as the last sceptics in a gullible world. Yet true scepticism consists precisely in demanding evidence, even when the story told fits perfectly with what one would like to believe.
To say ‘she was a nuisance, so we killed her’ is not an investigation. It is a scenario.
To claim that a person has been murdered, you need evidence: a suspicious post-mortem, a criminal investigation, witness statements, traces, documents – a body of physically verifiable evidence. Not three messages on X, four ellipses and some eerie music playing in the background of a TikTok video.
Contemporary paranoia works all the better because it offers immediate gratification. It allows us to believe that we belong to the small group of those who have ‘got it’. The others are supposedly asleep, manipulated, ‘sheep’. It’s extremely comforting: if someone contradicts you, their contradiction itself becomes proof that they haven’t understood the system.
And this is how something that is nevertheless essential gradually disappears: the possibility of being wrong.
Natacha Rey’s death deserves better than that. It deserves, at the very least, that we do not automatically turn the end of her life into yet another episode in the narrative she had helped to create around Brigitte Macron.
From a legal perspective, we must also avoid oversimplifications. Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy were convicted of defamation at first instance in September 2024, then acquitted by the Paris Court of Appeal in July 2025. This acquittal concerned the legal classification of the statements in question; it did not constitute a judicial decision establishing the truth of the claims made about Brigitte Macron.
One can challenge those in power. One can be wary of institutions. We can investigate those in power. We can believe that the media are wrong, that the justice system is wrong and that politicians sometimes lie. All of this is part of democratic debate.
But doubting everything does not exempt one from having to prove a point.
Otherwise, it is no longer critical thinking. It is exactly the opposite: a gullibility that has simply switched sides.
And perhaps this is the cruellest paradox of this story: by constantly seeing manipulation everywhere, some people end up becoming extraordinarily easy to manipulate themselves.
