French PM faces scrutiny over sexual abuse claims at Catholic school

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00:00Is François Bayrou's precarious premiership now more under threat than ever?

00:05He maintains he did everything right.

00:07But did he take action to protect the boys abused at Bétharin boarding school?

00:11Or did he instead look to protect the school?

00:14An institution in the Catholic South West that his children attended and where his wife

00:18gave catechism lessons.

00:20The socialists who saved his budget last week have now cautiously joined those calling for

00:25his resignation.

00:26What I believe is if he participated in one way or another in the legal matter to protect

00:33Bétharin, then in all conscience he must resign.

00:39Adding that the Prime Minister seems to have lied several times now to parliament.

00:43When alumni of the boys boarding school started sharing their memories on a Facebook group,

00:48more than a hundred legal complaints for physical and sexual abuse ensued, including some dating

00:53from now Prime Minister François Bayrou's stint as education minister in the 1990s.

01:00When confronted in parliament on his failure to take action, he denied all knowledge of

01:04the affair.

01:06Obviously I was never informed of anything, any violence, or any of what we now know to

01:13be sexual violence, never.

01:18But the latest revelations were not the first inklings of something wrong at Bétharin.

01:22In 1996, a supervisor at the school was found guilty of hitting a 14-year-old so brutally

01:27he was left with impaired hearing.

01:30This during Bayrou's tenure as education minister.

01:33He travelled to Pau on Saturday to meet with a collective of victims, where he amended

01:37his story, saying that when he heard of the incident at the time he organised an inspection

01:43of which the conclusions were, quote, reassuring.

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