Even if the facts told by Vanessa Springora in her story "The Consent", the Paris prosecutor's office opened, Friday, January 3, an investigation against the author Gabriel Matzneff for rape committed against a minor. "Beyond the facts described" by the editor, the investigations "will seek to identify any other possible victims who may have suffered offenses of the same nature on national territory or abroad," said the prosecutor. Republic of Paris, Rémy Heitz.
This procedure is launched 24 hours after the release of an accusing book by Vanessa Springora, recently appointed director of Éditions Julliard.
In this autobiographical novel, 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.
The author, who has never made a secret of his relationships with young adolescent girls, is at the heart of a controversy triggered by the publication of this book, in which he is described as a pedophile predator.
The editor has indicated that she does 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". It was entrusted to the Central Office for the Suppression of Violence Against Persons (OCRVP).
Taste for the under 16s and sex tourism in Asia
"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 to end up in his bed, his rod in mouth at snack time, "says Vanessa Springora in her book.
She 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.
With AFP and Reuters
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