Almost three months after the publication of Vanessa Springora's Consent , another teenage woman who had a grieving relationship with pedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff came out of silence Tuesday, interviewing the New York Times .
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Francesca Gee, 62, looks back at the three years spent with the writer, when she was 15 and he was 37, then how he unwillingly used his image and his letters in his writings, including his essay defending pedophilia The under-sixteen . "He has not stopped using me to justify the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents," she wrote in a manuscript refused in particular by Grasset, editor of the Consent ".
His relationship with Matzneff, "a cataclysm"
Like Vanessa Springora before her, Francesca Gee first met Gabriel Matzneff in 1973, when she was with her mother, and lived with him three years with the consent of his parents. From this experience which she describes as a "cataclysm", in 2004 she drew a manuscript from it, refused by all the publishers contacted.
It was the shock caused by the publication and the success of the Consent that led her to break the silence. "She did the job, I don't have to worry about it anymore," she thought first, before changing her mind. "A week or two later, I realized that I was totally part of this story."
Francesca Gee works on a new manuscript
A former journalist, she is currently working on a new manuscript after spending years asking for photos of her and her old letters to be removed from Matzneff's books. In the interview, Francesca Gee also evokes the former Minister of Health Michèle Barzach (1986-1988), gynecologist by profession, claiming to have consulted her half a dozen times, always in the company of Gabriel Matzneff, when she was minor, especially to be prescribed the pill.
The publication at the beginning of the year of Vanessa Springora's autobiographical novel provoked an electric shock, highlighting the subject of sexual violence against minors and the complacency which Matzneff benefited from in the literary world. In 2013, he won the Renaudot essay prize. The 83-year-old writer, who has long claimed his attraction to the "under 16s" and sex tourism in Asia, said at the end of January "to regret" his past pedophile practices, while arguing that "at era "," no one ever spoke of a crime ". Targeted by an investigation for rape of minors, he took refuge in Italy when the scandal broke out. He must be tried in September 2021 for "apology" for pedophilia.
Francesca Gee first met Gabriel Matzneff in 1973,