A daughter of France's Prime Minister François Bayrou Wednesday became the latest person to accuse the clergy running a school in the Pyrenees of systemic abuse including while her father was a local official, saying a priest beat her during summer camp when she was 14.
Bayrou's eldest daughter Hélène Perlant, who is now 53 and uses her mother's name, said however that her father did not know about the incident.
Multiple accusations of sexual and physical abuse at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram boarding school have cast a shadow on Bayrou's premiership– the latest in decades of such complaints against members of Catholic institutions worldwide.
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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 Bétharram 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 was quoted as saying in 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.
The next day, she said, she took part in a hike with the rest of the group, "bruised all over" but determined to show the priest who had accused her of being "rude like your father" that she was not his victim.
"Bétharram was organised like a sect or a totalitarian regime exercising psychological pressure on pupils and teachers so they stayed silent," she said.
'Stabs me in the heart'
"I kept quiet about it for 30 years," Perlant said.
"Perhaps unconsciously I wanted to protect my father from political blows he was receiving locally," she added.
"He does not know I am a victim."
Bayrou on Wednesday afternoon confirmed his daughter had never told him about the beating.
Read moreFrench prosecutors open rape investigation in Catholic school abuse scandal
"As a father, it stabs me in the heart," he told the press.
But as a public official, "I'm thinking of (all) the victims," he added.
"I don't want to abandon them."
In total 200 legal complaints have been filed since February last year accusing priests and staff at Bétharram of physical or sexual abuse from 1957 to 2004, according to an association of victims.
90 of these complaints concern sexual violence, including one that alleges gang rape by two priests.
But only two complaints so far have led to charges being filed, against a former supervisor over alleged sexual assault of a minor in 2004 and rape of a minor from 1991 to 1994.
All other accusations have passed the statute of limitations.
Parliamentary inquiry
Bayrou is scheduled to be questioned by a parliamentary inquiry into the accusations on May 14.
A former policeman told the inquiry earlier this month that he was told Bayrou, then a local official, had "intervened" in 1998 in the case of a priest and former headmaster at the school accused of having raped a 10-year-old boy a decade earlier.
The man was released then found dead two years later in the river Tiber in Rome.
Bayrou has denied ever having intervened.
Read moreAccused of lying to parliament, French PM Bayrou vows to probe Catholic school sex abuse
In 1996, when he was education minister, the parents of a pupil at the school filed a complaint after a school supervisor slapped the boy so hard he lost his hearing in one ear.
The supervisor at the Notre-Dame de Bétharram school was found guilty.
Perlant's interview comes before the publication on Thursday of a book telling the stories of former pupils at the school.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
