More than a year and a half of investigation for rape of minors on Gabriel Matzneff, arriving much too late: one of the accusers of the writer, Francesca Gee, denounces a certain mess in a book to be published on Tuesday.
When the publication in January 2020 of the account of Vanessa Springora, "Le Consentement", recounting the relationship in the 1980s between the teenager and a man nearly fifty years old, the Paris prosecutor's office had opened this investigation.
And he had put in big resources, reveals Francesca Gee.
This former British journalist of Italian origin, who worked mainly for the Reuters agency in Paris, knows this from having also had a relationship with Gabriel Matzneff as a teenager, in the 1970s. She knew this man very well. and his habits.
And officials from the Central Office for the Repression of Violence Against Persons (OCRVP) quickly heard her as a witness.
A policeman quoted in his book on Gabriel Matzneff, "The most murderous weapon", confides to him, at the beginning of 2020: "We are eleven in total and three, four, five full-time on this affair".
Towards the prescription
Little news since then.
Francesca Gee only knows that the investigators, after having seized from her publishers all the literature published by a writer now aged 85, are carrying out a Benedictine work to find possible more recent victims of her taste for "the less than sixteen years ”, as he titled a 1974 essay.
They have not found any at this stage, tell AFP judicial and police sources.
Unless there is a rebound, the investigation is moving, due to prescription, towards a classification without continuation, intervening in the coming months, according to a source close to the file.
Read also The strange response book by Gabriel Matzneff, the writer accused of pedophilia
Another source close to the matter specifies that there are still texts to be analyzed.
The writer will be heard once this work is completed, but not taken into custody, unless the investigators find elements to reproach him with.
Asked by AFP, Francesca Gee is not surprised, but sad, by this announced outcome.
“The investigation is bogged down… It doesn't surprise me.
When I went to testify in Nanterre, I immediately said that they would not find a victim ”.
"Dozens" of complaints
"I was not expecting much from the criminal investigation because I knew very well that it had been years since Matzneff was doing nothing, or, in any case, that he was no longer telling it", adds -she. Francesca Gee's self-published story could not find a publisher. Regarding the functioning of Gabriel Matzneff, it nevertheless provides a useful complement to that of Vanessa Springora at Grasset editions.
Neither of them have lodged a complaint. But “there have been multiple complaints, probably dozens. I don't know how many, but a lot of parents have complained, ”according to the former journalist. "And he benefited from support which for me remains incomprehensible". Twice, in 1994 and 2004, the one who defines herself as "whistleblower" tried to explode the affair, by presenting manuscripts to publishers. She came up against, for reasons that have never been explained to her, with refusals that she recounts in "The Deadliest Weapon".
The story dissects the personality of a man who suffered late opprobrium, but who is still supported today by a few patrons jealous of their anonymity.
“In my opinion, nothing has changed.
What has changed for him?
He no longer lives in the 5th [arrondissement of Paris], he lives in Italy, and there are people who pay for that, ”she underlines.
