“Big vicious people attack me”: Abbé Pierre was allegedly the victim of sexual assault during his childhood

Abbé Pierre was the victim of sexual assault as a child, according to a letter cited this Friday by The Worldwritten by the priest now accused of sexual violence.

Abbé Pierre, whose real name is Henri Grouès, recounts in this letter that he was sexually assaulted when he was a resident at the Notre-Dame des Minimes college in Lyon. “Big bad guys are coming after me. For two months, at gunpoint, I become their game“, he wrote in 1932 in a letter cited by Le Monde.

This passage is part of a letter from “almost 17 pages“which he wrote after entering the Capuchins,”from his monastic cell in Saint-Étienne“. It is addressed “to his master of novices, Louis-Antoine de Clermont-Ferrand“.

He says he was seven years old at the time of these attacks, which led him to flee school to return home, where he remained ill for three months. “When, afterwards, I go back to the Minimes, the adults have forgotten me“, he explains. His attackers would then have been surprised with another victim and “dismissed with great scandal“.

An iconic figure in France and founder of Emmaüs, Abbé Pierre has been the target of a series of testimonies from women on sexual violence committed between the 1950s and the 2000s since July. In the wake of these revelations, a commission of independent experts was tasked with shedding light on the dysfunctions which allowed him to “not be worried” for his actions, and the Church opened its archives concerning him.

Abbé Pierre church sexual assault priests