"I feel like a living dead man, a walking dead man, walking along the seafront," says writer Gabriel Matzneff, under investigation for rape of a minor, in an interview published Tuesday on the New York Times website . The writer was interviewed by the American newspaper on the Italian Riviera where he has taken refuge since the case broke out.
The article is published while the Paris prosecutor Rémy Heitz announced that a "call to witnesses" would be launched on Tuesday to find "victims" in the context of the investigation opened for rape of a minor under 15 years old targeting him.
"For a long time he was celebrated because he did not hide anything, precisely"
The daily recalls that before his blacklisting, the writer, aged 83, had been received at the Élysée in 1984 by President François Mitterrand, that he had frequented Jean-Marie Le Pen or even that 'he had benefited from the “generosity” of Yves Saint Laurent and his companion Pierre Bergé. The title of the New York Times article is "a pedophile writer - and the French elite - on the dock."
“Mr. Matzneff is not used to hiding. For a long time he was celebrated because he hid nothing, precisely, neither his hunt for young girls in front of Parisian colleges, nor his sexual relations with eight-year-old boys in the Philippines, "writes the newspaper.
"I'm too unhappy"
Interviewed by the New York Times reporter, Matzneff said he felt "very, very alone". He gets mad at those who want to judge him. "Who are they to judge their fellow men? These associations for virtue, how do they sleep, what do they do in bed and with whom do they sleep, what are their secret and repressed desires? Asks the writer. He says he has insomnia, no longer writing. "I'm too unhappy," he complains.
An investigation had been opened by the prosecution on January 3 the day after the publication of the autobiographical novel "The Consent" in which the editor Vanessa Springora denounced her relationship under the influence of the writer Gabriel Matzneff when she was a minor, in the 1980s .
Vanessa Springora was the first to testify among the adolescent girls seduced by Gabriel Matzneff, whose behavior, described in his own books, has long been tolerated in the Parisian literary world. In 2013, he won the Renaudot essay prize.
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