French PM faces pressure after daughter reveals school abuse
The daughter of French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Wednesday accused clergy at the Catholic Notre-Dame de Bétharram school in the Pyrenees of systemic abuse, alleging a priest beat her at summer camp when she was 14—while her father was serving as a local official, News.Az reports citing France24.
Bayrou has been under fire for failing to report the multiple allegations of abuse when he was education minister in the 1990s, but he has repeatedly insisted he knew nothing about the incidents.
The eldest daughter of France’s Prime Minister François Bayrou, Hélène Perlant, recently revealed that she had been beaten by a priest while she was a teenager attending a Catholic school near his home town of Pau.
Her account comes after over 200 now adult victims have filed complaints about the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse they suffered at the hands of clergy at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school between the 1960s up until the 2000s.
Perlant appeared to contradict her father’s claims of being unaware of the widespread abuse while he was involved in local government in the area, and during his time as education minister.
“I don’t think he [my father] remembers, but I was there the evening he came back from Judge Mirande’s,” she said during a televised Mediapart interview. Her father asked her at the time if she thought the allegations could be true, she added.
The judge, Christian Mirande, confirmed that he had discussed the allegations with Bayrou in 1998, but said the now prime minister was probably already informed by the local media.
Bayrou had initially claimed that he never discussed the allegations with the judge.
"Like the testimonies of the other victims, the account of Hélène Perlant contradicts the words of François Bayrou," wrote the MP Paul Vannier, of the leftwing party France Unbowed (La France InSoumise) on X.
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