Who is Christian Giudicelli, Gabriel Matzneff's “faithful accomplice”?

• According to information from Mediapart, confirmed by AFP on Wednesday, the investigators are interested in Christian Giudicelli in the Matzneff case.
• Writer and member of the 78-year-old Renaudot jury, Christian Giudicelli is an intimate friend of Gabriel Matzneff.
• Gabriel Matzneff told the New York Times that Christian Giudicelli had agreed to hide documents that could compromise him.

This Wednesday, the headquarters of the Gallimard publishing house in Paris was searched as part of the investigation opened against Gabriel Matzneff for "rape of a minor" under the age of 15. According to Mediapart, who released the information, the search, which began on Wednesday morning, ended early in the afternoon. The site also revealed - and this has been confirmed to AFP - that the investigators are also interested in Christian Giudicelli. The latter was Gabriel Matzneff's travel companion when the writer went to the Philippines to have sex with minors.

Our investigation in the New York Times, in French, on Gabriel Matzneff, the writer prosecuted for his praise of pedophilia, and the elite who supported him. We found the writer, ostracized, for a long interview on the Italian Riviera. https://t.co/bGwfA63N2A

Christian Giudicelli, 78, directs the collection “La fantaisie du Voyageur” published by Rocher where he published Matzneff. He is also a novelist, he is a jury member of the Prix Renaudot which awarded Gabriel Matzneff for the essay Séraphin, c'est la fin! in 2013. Near Le Monde , Patrick Besson, tells how Giudicelli pleaded in favor of the author: "He explains to us that Gabriel is in bad shape, that his books are not selling, that he has a heartache love and he's sick. This support testifies to the friendly bond established between the two men.

"Unalterable Complicity"

In Gabriel infinitely kind , published in 2010, Christian Giudicelli evokes "the unalterable complicity" which unites him to Matzneff since "the end of the 70s". In Les Specters joyeux , which appeared last year, he calls himself Matzneff's “faithful accomplice”. How far did this complicity go? This is the question that investigators are asking.

To the journalist from the New York Times who met him on the Italian Rivieira where he went into exile, Gabriel Matzneff confided that Christian Giudicelli had agreed to hide at home documents which could compromise him. In this case, letters and photos of Vanessa Springora who, in her book Le Consentement , denounced her relationship under the influence of Gabriel Matzneff in the 1980s, when she was a minor.

The Mediapart article notes that Giudicelli and Matzneff referred to each other, in an encrypted manner, in their writings. “They are called 804 and 811 in their respective books. (…) Everything is coded, everything was there before our eyes, ”reported the journalist from Mediapart Marine Turchi on the set of C à Vous , the program for France 5, CE on Wednesday. The figures correspond to hotel rooms.

#Matzneff affair: who is Christian Giudicelli, whom the investigators suspect of complicity with the writer? @MarineTurchi and @FabriceArfi of #Mediapart answer in # CàVous ⬇ pic.twitter.com/FUvxnctHKU

“During our first stay, at the Tropicana hotel, he lived in room 804 (Eight o four) and I in room 811 (Eight one one): so, by chatting, we got into the habit of identifying ourselves rather than by our first names and, when it comes to evoking, here and there, in a short paragraph, small rascality and nonsense of which we hardly feel guilty, my dear Eight o four takes care to hide his dear Christian under the 'Eight one one's protective wing: a sleight of hand that has long since abused its loyal readers,' wrote Giudicelli in Gabriel infinitely amiable .

"Why don't they have to feel guilty?" "

"" Of which [they hardly feel] guilty. " It's a wonderful antiphrase: why don't they have to feel guilty? Asked Fabrice Arfi, co-editor of the Mediapart article, also present around the table from C to You . "We are not saying that we must see in the literature necessarily judicial exhibits," he said. Except that it is they themselves who organize the narrative of their lives according to this stratagem. (…) The facts are there, before our eyes. Around this celebration of pedocrime danced, for decades, a whole cohort of admirers (…) who forgot that there were victims. "

Wednesday, the literary journalist Elisabeth Philippe transcribed on the website of L'Obs the remarks that Christian Giudicelli made to him in December about the coming publication of Vanessa Springora's book. “When it comes to desire, we are often beside the law. Strict rules cannot be applied to intimate affairs. It seems to me that there are much more serious things. I am thinking, for example, of child labor, of what I have seen in different parts of the world, ”he declared then.

"Today, we have a strange idea of ​​desire," he also replied to Elisabeth Philippe. Everything must remain hidden. The times have changed. There is a breath of moraline. The Under-sixteen [by Gabriel Matzneff] would be unpublishable now. However, there are no things that shock me in this book. But everything becomes criminal. Look at Polanski. It all seems a little artificial, this abundance of testimony more than thirty years after the facts. "

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