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French Prime Minister Shocked, His Daughter Among Those Abused at Catholic School

2025-04-24 09:55:12Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
French Prime Minister Shocked, His Daughter Among Those Abused at Catholic
French Prime Minister François Bayrou

French Prime Minister François Bayrou said the discovery that his eldest daughter was among the children who were abused at a Roman Catholic school "struck him to the heart as a father."

Hélène Perlant, who is now 53, claims that a priest at Notre-Dame de Bétharram beat her at a summer camp when she was 14.

In recent weeks, details of physical and sexual abuse committed over decades in Bétharram in the Pyrenees have drawn growing attention to Bayrou, who was a local MP and education minister at the time.

Bayrou, 73, has denied suggestions he knew about the alleged abuse of pupils from the 1950s to 2010. He is due to appear before a parliamentary inquiry next month. The boarding school is located in his stronghold in the southwest and he sent three of his children there. Hélène Perlant was one of them and in the latest twist in the saga she has accused a priest at the school of beating her when she was 14.

She said she had never spoken to her father about the incident, which occurred in the 1980s.

"I've been silent for 30 years. Besides, I've never mentioned it to anyone," she said in an interview with Paris Match on Tuesday.

"The priest grabbed me by the hair, dragged me across the floor for several meters, then punched and kicked me all over, especially in the stomach. I got wet and stayed like that all night, wet," she added.

Explaining why she had not spoken about the experience, she said: "Bétharram was organised like a sect or a totalitarian regime that exerted psychological pressure on students and teachers, so they remained silent."

Notre-Dame de Bétharram – which was renamed Le Beau Rameau (The Beautiful Branch) in 2009 – is a primary and secondary school about 25 km (15 miles) from Pau, a city that Bayrou has led as mayor since 2014. The school also lies within the constituency Bayrou represented as an MP from the 1980s to 2010. A number of allegations of abuse by priests and staff emerged in the 1990s. But in 1996 an investigation by the French education ministry concluded that “Notre-Dame de Bétharram is not a school where students are brutalised”.

Later, a former principal accused of raping a 10-year-old student was acquitted without charge. The allegations continued to surface until 2023, when a man who had attended the school in the 1980s created a Facebook group for alleged victims. The social media campaign led to the filing of about 200 complaints. Almost half involve allegations of sexual violence, including rape by two priests. By February 2025, the scandal had reached national proportions and increased pressure on Bayrou’s already fragile premiership.

Three of his six children attended the school and his wife was a religion teacher there. In addition, Bayrou was education minister in the mid-1990s, when the first reports of abuse emerged.


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