Paris: The daughter of France’s prime minister was just the latest to criticise the priests of systematic abuse at a university in the Pyrenees, including while Francois Bayrou was a native official, saying a pastor beat her at the age of 14 during summer camp.
Helen Perlant, the 53-year-old and mother of Bayrou’s eldest child, claimed her parents had not been aware of the incident.
Numerous allegations of sexual and physical abuse at the boarding institution Notre-Dame de Betharram have cast a dark on Bayrou’s leadership.
His family taught spiritual studies there for several of his children, and several of his children had Catholic schools.
Bayrou has been accused of being aware of some of the allegations as a native official and training minister since the 1990s, a claim he has refuted.
Former Betharram student Perlant claimed that during the early 1980s, a preacher beat her in front of her contemporaries.
She claimed in the Paris Match magazine’s Wednesday issue that” One night while we were unpacking our sleeping bags, ( Father ) Lartiguet suddenly grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several meters, and then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach.”
She said,” I soaked myself and rolled up in a game in my sleeping bag all day, wet and damp.”
She claimed that she had climbed up with the rest of the group the day before, and that she had been “bruised all over.” She was determined to show the preacher, who had accused her of being “rude like your dad” that she wasn’t his target.
According to Perlant,” Betharram was run like a religion or a authoritarian regime that put internal pressure on teachers and pupils, keeping them silent.”
She said,” I kept silent about it for 30 times.”
” Maybe unconsciously, I wanted to shield my father from the social blows he was facing locally,” she continued.
He doesn’t realize I’m a victim, he says.
According to a victim’s group, 200 legal issues have been filed since February of last year against Betharram’s priests and workers for sexual or physical abuse between 1957 and 2004.
One complaint alleges gang rape by two priests, out of 94 of these problems involving sexual assault.
However, just two issues have so far led to the filing of charges against a former boss over alleged sexual assault on a minor in 2004 and murder of a minor between 1991 and 1994.
The statute of limitations has been broken for all other complaints.
A parliamentary investigation into the accsations will hear questions for Bayrou on May 14.
