"Hello Alain. My name is Hélène. I am François Bayrou's daughter." When Alain Esquerre received the unexpected call from the French prime minister's eldest child on February 21, he had already been compiling testimonies of physical violence, sexual assaults and rapes suffered by former students, like himself, of the Pyrénées school Notre-Dame de Bétharram for over a year.

The scandal had already drawn in Bayrou a few days earlier. On February 11, the prime minister, challenged over his inaction in the Assemblée Nationale, denied any knowledge of the allegations against the school – where three of his children were educated – despite multiple pieces of evidence published in the press that attested otherwise.

Hélène Perlant's testimony – she took her mother's last name – was revealed on Tuesday, April 22, in an interview with Paris Match and detailed in a chapter of Esquerre's upcoming book to be published on Thursday, Le Silence de Bétharram ("The Silence of Bétharram"). It showed that the climate of violence that reigned at Bétharram did not spare the eldest of the Bayrou children when she attended the institution in the 1980s.

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