French PM’s daughter says priest beat her as teenager
A daughter of France's prime minister became the latest to accuse the clergy running a school in the Pyrenees of systemic abuse, including incidents that occurred while François Bayrou was a local official. She claimed that a priest beat her during a 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, News.Az reports citing foreign media.
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.
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