Paris (AFP)

The Paris prosecutor's office opened an investigation on Friday against the writer Gabriel Matzneff, implicated for his relations with minor partners in a book by the editor Vanessa Springora published on Thursday, announced the public prosecutor of Paris.

This investigation was opened for "rape committed against a minor" under the age of 15 and entrusted to the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence Against Persons (OCRVP), said Rémy Heitz in a statement.

"Beyond the facts described by Vanessa Springora", the investigations "will seek to identify any other possible victims who may have suffered similar offenses on national territory or abroad," said Mr. Heitz.

This procedure is launched 24 hours after the release of an accusing book by Vanessa Springora, recently appointed director of Editions Julliard.

In this autobiographical novel entitled "Consent", the 47-year-old editor tells how she was seduced by Gabriel Matzneff when she was not even 14 years old and the weight of this story on her life, punctuated by depressions.

Vanessa Springora said in an interview with the Parisian that she did not plan to file a complaint. But the Paris public prosecutor's office decided to take over the case as part of an "own-initiative inquiry".

"At fourteen, you are not supposed to be expected by a 50-year-old man at the end of his college, you are not supposed to live in the hotel with him, nor find yourself in his bed, his rod in mouth at snack time, "says Vanessa Springora in this book.

"Why couldn't a 14-year-old girl love a man 36 years older than her? (...) It was not my attraction that I had to question, but hers," added the writer, who claims to have been in control during his relationship.

Vanessa Springora is the first to testify among the adolescent girls seduced by Gabriel Matzneff, author long celebrated by the French literary community and awarded the Renaudot essay prize in 2013.

The self-proclaimed taste of the writer, now 83 years old, for the "under 16" and for sex tourism with young boys in Asia, which he had told in numerous books, had so far very little blinking.

© 2020 AFP