(Paris) A second investigation for rape of minors was opened in Paris against the French writer Gabriel Matzneff, accused of pedophilia following the revelations in 2020 by the publisher Vanessa Springora, after new accusations from a fifty-year-old , the court said on Thursday.
The investigations were launched on October 23 after this woman wrote to the court, claiming that she was raped by the writer from the age of 4 to 13.
The first investigation targeting Gabriel Matzneff, opened after the publication of the book The Consent of Vanessa Springora, is currently being analyzed at the Paris juvenile court.
The investigations in the second investigation “will relate both to the characterization and qualification” of the facts and to the limitation periods, the alleged facts dating back “several decades”, added the court.
The lawyer for the now 86-year-old writer, Emmanuel Pierrat, did not immediately react.
The woman behind the second investigation accuses her adoptive father, who was a doctor, of having been “complicit” in drugging her before her rapes by Gabriel Matzneff, and of having raped her himself, according to her lawyer, Rodolphe Costantino.
The acts were allegedly committed in Paris, in a context of “social circles and influence”.
If they are a priori prescribed, she was also “an eyewitness to sexual abuse, rape” committed by Gabriel Matzneff “on three children, also adopted by families from the same background”, affirms to AFP Me Costantino.
Her client is also concerned that children could still be “in contact” with Gabriel Matzneff today, in particular a minor whose father is close to the writer.
The first to testify publicly against Gabriel Matzneff, an author long celebrated by the French literary community and awarded the Renaudot essay prize in 2013, Vanessa Springora recounted in Le Consent their affair, which began when she had not even 14 years old and he almost 50 years old.
The author, who has long benefited from tolerance from part of the intelligentsia and the media in France, has himself claimed to be a “pedophile”, recounting at length, in numerous works, his relationships with minors and his taste for sex tourism in Asia.
Since then, he has said he “regrets” his past pedophile practices in Asia, while arguing that “at the time”, “no one ever talked about a crime”.