"Elite French boarding school rocked by sexual abuse scandal exposing predator haven"

When 14-year-old Pascal Gélie saw a brochure for an elite French Catholic boarding school promoting outdoor activities, he pleaded with his parents to enroll him. Having recently watched the American film *Dead Poets Society*, he imagined a life of camaraderie and sports.

“By the first night, I knew I had made a terrible mistake,” said Gélie, now 51 and working in an office in Bordeaux. “Forty of us were crammed into a dormitory with worn-out mattresses. When I quietly asked another boy for toilet paper, the supervisor seized my face and pointed to the stone terrace outside. Someone warned me to grab my coat—punishments could mean standing outside for hours in the cold. I spent the entire night there.”

He added: “That was only the beginning: routine strikes to the head, children beaten until bloody or unconscious. I saw one boy’s hair torn out. Another was hit so hard he lost 40% of his hearing. Sometimes, everyone would be forced to stand by their beds for hours at night because someone whispered, or our beds were flipped with us still in them. It was pure terror.”

Gélie is among former students of Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a private Catholic school where testimonies of violence, rape, and sexual assault have revealed what may be France’s largest child abuse scandal in an educational setting. The education minister, Élisabeth Borne, has described it as a *#MeTooSchools* moment.

A parliamentary inquiry has gathered months of testimony on Bétharram, located near Lourdes in the Pyrenees, along with other private schools and children’s homes nationwide. On Wednesday, the inquiry will release its findings and 50 recommendations for preventing violence in education. The report is expected to condemn the French state’s failure to protect children.

The scandal has also touched François Bayrou, the prime minister, who sent several of his children to the school, where his wife taught religious studies. Bayrou’s daughter, now 53, recently disclosed she was severely beaten at a school-associated summer camp but never told her father. Bayrou, a former education minister and local politician, was questioned about whether he knew of—and concealed—abuse at Bétharram. He denied hiding anything, saying rivals were waging a “destructive” campaign against him.

So far, 200 legal complaints have been filed accusing Bétharram staff and priests of physical or sexual abuse between 1957 and 2004. Ninety allege sexual violence or rape. Two complaints have led to charges: one against a former supervisor for the alleged sexual assault of a minor in 2004, and another for alleged rape from 1991 to 1994. He remains in custody during the investigation. Many other accusations are beyond the statute of limitations.