A woman in her fifties asked the Paris prosecutor’s office in October to interview her. She accuses Gabriel Matzneff of having raped her from the age of 4 to 13. The writer, known for his promotion of child crime, having written in one of his works that the “most sensual” beings he knew were “a boy of twelve and a girl of fifteen”, is already accused of rape of a minor.
The prosecution opened an investigation against him in January 2020 after the publication of the book “Le Consentement” by Vanessa Springora, which describes a relationship under the influence when she was 14 years old. In this context, the counsel of Bérénice*, adopted daughter of a “close friend” of Gabriel Matzneff, wrote to the public prosecutor’s office on October 10 to request the “complaint hearing” of their client so that she could be heard, complaint and provides the new elements that they were able to collect in eighteen months of work.
Exchanges with his father recorded
To date, “the prosecution has not responded”, deplores Me Rodolphe Costantino, who represents Bérénice with Me Marie Grimaud. According to this letter, revealed by RMC and of which AFP was aware, Bérénice has been able, since her adoptive parents moved to an nursing home in September 2020, to find numerous documents “hidden” at their home: correspondence between the adoptive father and Gabriel Matzneff, personal and professional diaries…
Their “discovery (…) authorized her to put into words memories and traumatic experiences that had until then been silently noisy”, explain her lawyers. Bérénice also initiated “a dialogue with her adoptive father”, now deceased. In their recorded exchanges, his father “testifies and confesses to facts of which he himself and certain of his friends, including Gabriel Matzneff, were the authors,” states the letter.
Witness to the rapes of other victims
Bérénice denounces rapes committed in Paris, in a context of “social circles and influences, within which some of their members shared a certain idea of pedophilia or even shared a certain practice of it”, accuses the letter. These acts were allegedly committed at the family home – the former private mansion of the Princess of Salm – where Gabriel Matzneff was “very regularly received”, in an apartment on rue de Varenne and in a room at the Pont Royal hotel, in the 7th arrondissement. borough.
If the alleged facts are a priori prescribed, Bérénice was also “an eyewitness to sexual abuse, rape, committed by Gabriel Matzneff and others on three children, also adopted, by families from the same environment” and whose the prescription has not yet been established, says Me Costantino. Bérénice is also concerned that children could still be “in contact” with Gabriel Matzneff, in particular a minor under the age of fifteen, whose father is close to the writer. When contacted, the writer’s lawyer was not immediately available.