Caroline Blumberg / POOL / EPA
Hélène Perlant is one of the approximately 200 alumni that came to public. Your case has been dating back for almost 40 years. Scandal involves his father, François Bayrou, accused of not reacting to evidence.
French Prime Minister’s eldest daughter, François Bayrou, revealed that she was one of several abuse victims in a renowned Catholic school in southern France, at the center of a scandal that is under pressure over the head of government.
Currently 53, Hélène Péllant He reported in an interview with the magazine on Tuesday, which he was the victim of severe physical abuse for almost 40 years, when he was a student at the Notre Dame de Bétharam school.
In an episode he had never told his parents during a summer camp, a school cleric beat her brutally: “One night, when we were opening the bags, [o padre] He suddenly grabbed me by the hair, dragged me on the floor for several meters and struck me punches and kicks all over my body, especially in the stomach”Said Perlant.
“I got up and spent the whole night like that, wet and fetal position on my bag,” he said.
The next day, he participated, “all over,” in a walk with the rest of the group, determined to show the priest, that he had accused her of being “misconduct as his father,” who was not a victim.
How the scandal reaches the prime minister
Perlant’s statements raised controversy in France. Bayrou, from the Democratic-Christian and Liberal Democratic Movement (modem) party, is being criticized for allegedly not reacting to evidence of misconduct at school, located in his electoral circle, during the period when he was Minister of Education, from 1993 to 1997.
Several other reports of abuse in the notre dame of Betharam are coming public. About 200 alumni filed a complaint, claiming that they were the subject of physical abuse and also sexual aggression at school, between 1957 and 2004, according to an association that represents the victims.
Of these complaints, 90 refer to sexual abuseincluding one that mentions a collective violation by two priests. However, so far, only two have resulted in formal accusations: against a supervisor accused of sexual abuse and violation of minors.
A former policy stated in the inquiry that he heard that Bayrou, while a local authority, intervened in 1998 for a priest and former school director accused of raping a ten-year-old boy a decade earlier. Liberty, two years later the man was found dead on the Tiber River in Rome. Bayrou denied having interfered in the case.
In 1996, when he was a minister of education, a student’s parents accused a school inspector of giving such a strong slap to the boy that he lost hearing of one of his ears. This man would be condemned.
The Prime Minister’s wife also worked as a teacher of religious studies at schooland other children of the couple attended it. Bayrou says that at the time he was unaware of any misconduct.
Next May 14, Bayrou should be heard by a Inquiry Commission.
“It was like a sect or a totalitarian regime”
Perlant said in the interview that, in his student time, “the victims of beating and sexual aggression did not speak.”
“Betharram was organized as a sect or a totalitarian regime, exerting psychological pressure on students and teachers to keep them silent.”
The French leader’s daughter also added that the school had strategies to ensure that the victims were ashamed and that He remained silent for because “perhaps unconsciously he wanted to protect my father from the political crises he faced in the region.”
“As a father, it is a stab in the heart”
The Christian Democrat Bayrou stated that the daughter had never reported the successful.
“As a father, it is a stab in the heart. But, as a public servant, I think of all victims […] I don’t want to abandon them. ”
This Thursday, a book by the school victims was released in France, which includes a testimony of Perlant. She believes her father, like many other people around school, did not realize what was going on.
