Paris (AFP)
The writer Gabriel Matzneff, at the heart of a controversy around his sexual attraction for minors, denounced Sunday "unjust" attacks against him and defended "the beauty" of his relationship with Vanessa Springora, who publishes a shocking book on his past experience with the writer.
In a message written to the Parisian, the writer, now 83 years old, denounces "such unjust and excessive attacks" and evokes "the beauty of the love that we lived, Vanessa and me".
The self-proclaimed taste of Gabriel Matzneff, now 83 years old, for young girls and young boys has never made the publishing world shine. But the January 2 release of Vanessa Springora's "Consent" is changing the game.
The writer and editor tells in this book how she was seduced by the almost fifties in the mid-1980s when she was 14 and the weight of this story on her life, punctuated by depressions.
The book comes out in a context of denunciation of sexual violence in France, after a new accusation of rape targeting the Franco-Polish director Roman Polanski and those of sexual assault and harassment by actress Adèle Haenel against filmmaker Christophe Ruggia.
The Minister of Culture Franck Riester gave his support on Saturday to "all the victims" of Gabriel Matzneff judging that "the literary aura" was "not a guarantee of impunity".
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