Sir Clement Freud, former broadcaster and British politician, has been exposed as a paedophile who sexually abused girls as young as 10 for decades. Police are reportedly assessing this information as part of Operation Grange, the investigation into Madeleine's 2007 disappearance, though Freud's son reportedly said his father had been in the UK on the night she vanished. Two women have claimed abuse at the hands of Freud in an ITV documentary which aired on Wednesday in the UK. Sylvia Woosley said Freud had befriended her family in the south of France in 1948, when she was 10. After a family crisis she lived with him from age 14. He molested her over five years, she said. "I just want to clear things up before I die," Ms Woosley – who is now in her late 70s – said in the documentary. "I don't want to take this to my tomb. I would like to just return to the child I was before I was molested physically, before I was introduced to that side of life too early."

Tthree-year-old Madeleine McCann went missing in 2007. Credit:AP She said she had confronted him 30 years ago at the House of Commons and asked him why he had abused her. She said he replied "Because I loved you. You were a very sensual little girl". A second, anonymous, woman said the Liberal politician had abused her as a child in the 1970s, beginning when she was 11, and violently raped her when she was 18. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in 1938. His grandson Clement has been exposed as a child sex offender. Credit:AP At the time of the rape Freud was an MP and shared an office with Cyril Smith, who was also unmasked as a paedophile after his death.

When she was 14, she said, Freud asked her and a friend of the same age "Would you like to get naked and have some fun?" In a statement, Freud's widow Jill Freud said she was "shocked, deeply saddened and profoundly sorry" for what had happened to the women. "I sincerely hope they will now have some peace." Clement Freud, grandson of the founder of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and younger brother of artist Lucian, was a Liberal MP and a celebrity chef who featured on TV and radio. He was knighted in 1987. He died aged 84 in 2009. In the 1980s he bought a family home in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz – the villa he later invited the McCanns to.

In her book, Mrs McCann wrote they first met at lunch in July 2007, two months after Madeleine's disappearance, while they were still enmeshed in the search for their daughter. He had written Kate and Gerry McCann a letter saying he was "ashamed of the intrusion into your lives by our media", inviting them over with the promise "I cook decent meals". At first they thought it was a hoax, but the next day they turned up for lunch at Freud's villa with their children Sean and Amelie, and three other friends. She recalled his "razor-sharp intellect" as well as strawberry vodka and chicken risotto – "the best risotto we've ever tasted before or since". Warm, funny and likeable, he cheered them up with his "lugubrious wit", she wrote.

He kept in touch by email and called again in August to invite them around for drinks. On the night in September 2007 when the McCanns were formally made suspects in Madeleine's disappearance, he again invited them over for a drink. They turned up and he was watching a cookery TV show dressed in his nightshirt. "It was so ordinary and comforting, a bit like going to see your grandad after a horrible day at school," McCann wrote. "He gave me one of his looks and a giant glass of brandy, and managed to get a smile out of me with his greeting: 'So, Kate, which of the devout Catholic, alcoholic, depressed, nymphomaniac parts is correct?'"

And he raised their spirits by making fun of the sniffer dogs which had detected a suspicious scent in the family hire car, saying "So what are they going to do? Put them on the stand? One bark for yes, two for no?" "A couple of hours later, fortified by our brandies (it was my first-ever taste of the stuff), some useful snippets of advice and several amusing anecdotes, we left our friend feeling quite a bit better than we had when we'd arrived." - with Telegraph, London Follow Fairfax World on Facebook Follow Fairfax World on Twitter