Two women have accused the late British broadcaster Clement Freud of abusing them as children in a television documentary due to be broadcast Wednesday.
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Freud, who died in 2009, spent years abusing a girl who he brought up as a daughter, and violently raped a teenager while he was an MP.
ITV said two of Freud’s children had viewed the documentary before broadcast on their mother’s behalf. Two women have come forward to claim that Feud abused them from the ages of 10 and 11.
Freud died at his desk aged 84 in 2009.
Freud’s wife yesterday said she was “shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry” for the actions of her late husband.
Freud’s widow Jill Freud, now 89, said in response to the programme: “This is a very sad day for me”.
Sir Freud also owns a villa in Praia da Luz, Portugal – the same place where Madeleine was abducted.
His family, who include PR executive Matthew Freud, said that Freud was not in Portugal at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance and that they have not been contacted by police.
A source close to the McCanns told The Telegraph that they were “horrified” by the news.
Detectives of UK’s Metropolitan Police, who are tasked to investigate Madeleine McCann case, have now been alerted to look into the angle linking Sir Freud to the case.
The grandson of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the brother of the painter Lucian Freud, he worked his way into the heart of British society. His daughter, a broadcaster, is the partner of Richard Curtis, the filmmaker behind Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually.
A Liberal MP from 1973 to 1987, he was knighted in 1987.
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Victims Sylvia Woosley, now in her late 70s, and an unnamed woman now in her 50s, were abused for up to nine years each after Freud befriended their parents. “It was the first time, aged 10, that a father figure comes into my life…”
“I can remember his kissing me on the mouth and soft hugging me”, she said. It was disgusting and I didn’t like it.
The woman, whose testimony was given under condition of anonymity, says he had sex with her in her flat in 1978 when she was 18 and then nonchalantly left her on the bed while he went to watch a World Cup Game.
She was sent to live there when she was 14 following the breakdown of her mother’s marriage.
She decide to challenge him in her early 40s, and after contacting him at the House of Commons after he saw her again.
“The child that was denied in me has been with me all my life and has orientated my life.
And so I’m doing it for the girl in me that wants to be recognized having told the truth and for any others that have not got quite the courage but would like to”, she said.
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She describes the pain she has carried throughout her life as the result of the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of Freud, which included multiple instances of inappropriate fondling and worse. She said he had invited her on trips to Parliament, and later raped her and attempted to lock her and a friend in a basement.
