PARIS: A daughter of France’s prime minister became Wednesday the latest to accuse the clergy running a school in the Pyrenees of systemic abuse including while Francois Bayrou was a local official, saying a priest beat her during summer camp when she was 14.
Bayrou’s eldest daughter Helen Perlant, who is now 53 and uses her mother’s name, said however that her father did not know about the incident.
Multiple accusations of sexual and physical abuse at the Notre-Dame de Betharram boarding school have cast a shadow on Bayrou’s premiership.
Several of his children attended the Catholic school, and his wife taught religious studies there.
Bayrou has been accused of knowing about some of the accusations as early as the 1990s as education minister and as a local official, claims he has denied.
Perlant, a former Betharram pupil, said a priest beat her in front of her peers during summer camp in the early 1980s.
“One night when we were unpacking our sleeping bags, (Father) Lartiguet suddenly grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several metres, then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach,” she told the Paris Match magazine’s Wednesday issue.
“I wet myself and stayed like that all night, damp and rolled up in a ball in my sleeping bag,” she said.
The next day, she said, she took part in a hike with the rest of the group, “bruised all over” but determined to show the priest who had accused her of being “rude like your father” that she was not his victim.
“Betharram was organised like a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on pupils and teachers so they stayed silent,” Perlant said.
“I kept quiet about it for 30 years,” she said.
“Perhaps unconsciously I wanted to protect my father from political blows he was receiving locally,” she added.
“He does not know I am a victim.”
In total 200 legal complaints have been filed since February last year accusing priests and staff at Betharram of physical or sexual abuse from 1957 to 2004, according to an association of victims.
Ninety of these complaints concern sexual violence, including one that alleges gang rape by two priests.
But only two complaints so far have led to charges being filed against a former supervisor over alleged sexual assault of a minor in 2004 and rape of a minor from 1991 to 1994.
All other accusations have passed the statute of limitations.
Bayrou is to be questioned by a parliamentary inquiry into the accsations on May 14.
