2 Women Claim Sigmund Freud’s Grandson Sexually Abused Them
Clement Freud Image by Getty Images
— Two elderly women in Britain said that they had been sexually abused, one of them as a child, by a late lawmaker who was a grandson of the Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
The accusations were leveled against Clement Freud, a celebrated British broadcaster and politician, to ITV in a documentary scheduled to be aired Wednesday, the television channel revealed Monday.
Clement Freud, who died in 2009, was never convicted of the offenses, which fall outside Britain’s statute of limitations.
One complainant, Sylvia Woosley, said Clement Freud, who was a close family friend and 14 years her senior, initially started to touch her inappropriately when he lived near her parents’ house in the south of France in 1952.
“He’d stroke me and he’d kiss me at the back of the bus on the mouth. … It was horrible and I didn’t like it. I was disgusted and upset,” she said.
Woosley said Freud continued to abuse her when her parents’ marriage broke up when she was 14 and she was sent to live with Freud, his new wife and baby daughter.
Another unnamed woman said that in 1978, when she was 18, Freud raped her at her parents’ home, where he showed up to cook dinner when they were away.
Freud’s widow, Jill, 89, told Exposure she was “shocked and deeply saddened by the claims.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
