The daughter of the French Prime Minister François Bayrou said that she had been physically mistreated when she was a child at the Catholic school who is at the center of the political storm which was swaying from her post as Prime Minister.
The French media reported that Bayrou was in shock after learning that Hélène Pelant, 53, the eldest of her six children, was one of the alleged victims of the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school, located near his hometown in the southwest of France.
Hundreds of former students have filed legal complaints in the past year, claiming to have suffered physical and sexual abuses in the hands of the institution's staff between 1957 and 2004.
Bayrou was accused of knowing the allegations of abuse at school, but of not having acted on them during his mandate as Minister of Education in the 1990s, which he denyed firmly.
In an interview published this week by Paris Match this week, her pearl daughter said that she had been targeted by one of the school priests when he frequented a summer camp in the Pyrenees.
Pleaning, who was 14 at the time of the attack, said the group unpacking their sleeping bags when the priest “suddenly caught me by the hair, dragged me on the ground for several meters and struck me and kicked my whole body, especially in the stomach”.
The incident left her “covered with bruises” and suffering from “severe tinnitus”, she added.
Bayrou's daughter made the revelation before the publication Thursday of the silence of Bétharram, a book written by his colleague victim Alain Esquerre, which contains testimonies of pearls and others.
“I remained silent for 30 years,” said Pearl at Paris Match. “I may have wanted to protect my father, unconsciously, I think, from the political blows he was taking locally.”
Pearl said that the school “was organized as a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on students and teachers to be silent”.
The 53 -year -old also insisted that his father did not know what was going on in school.
“Obviously, one might think that he had all the information,” she said. “But I put it at the same level as all the parents. The more you are involved, the less you see, the less you understand. ”
Bayrou, who became Prime Minister in December, said in February that he would have a legal action against Mediatart for his statement that he was to know about school abuses in the 1990s.
“I have never been informed of this sexual violence,” he said in the National Assembly.
The French Prime Minister should testify in the Parliament on May 14 as part of an investigation into violence in schools.
