French authorities have opened an investigation into allegations that the once celebrated author Gabriel Matzneff, who has written widely about having sex with underage partners, raped a child in the 1980s, reports the Financial Times.
The investigation was triggered by the publication this week of a book called Le Consentement, or Consent, by Vanessa Springora in which she describes the now 83-year old Mr Matzneff as a paedophile and a predator.
In the book Ms Springora details her experience in the 1980s when she says she was Mr Matzneff’s lover, aged 14, at a time when the author was already 50 years old.
The so-called “Matzneff affair” has already been called a #MeToo moment for France’s literary establishment and has sparked a heated conversation about what Ms Springora has called the “hypocrisy of an entire era” when sex with children and the abuse of women was overtly tolerated.
“It was however not very difficult to know who Matzneff was at the time,” said Ms Springora in an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien on Wednesday. “I met him in 1986. We knew him. There was a dysfunction of all institutions: school, police, the hospitals.”
Mr Matzneff could not immediately be reached for comment but has recently lashed out at Ms Springora.