The editor and writer Vanessa Springora lamented Thursday the “blindness” of the intellectual world of French was tolerated and even defended in his time— the sexual intercourse of adults with minors as that told in his first book, Le Consentement (Consent). The story of their relationship, at 14 years of age, with Gabriel Matzneff, a writer of 50 that in his books he recounts his sexual encounters with teenage girls and even boys and girls, has shaken the world of French letters since well before its arrival in the bookstores this Thursday. In an interview with the daily Le Parisien, Springora also criticizes the “failures” of all the institutions that should have alerted and acted before a individual trends are openly pedophiles.

“there Was a failure of all the institutions: school, police, hospital... that Is what is amazing to a militant of the pedophilia that has published texts in that sense in which glorifies him,” says Springora. “The law might have acted”. But he did not.

His account of that year of relationship it had in 1986 with a man 36 years her senior is also the complaint of an environment that is an accomplice, with your consent, or your silence, an experience that has haunted all his life.

Because it is the mother, who knew everything from the beginning and not only consented to the relationship of her daughter, only 14 years, with a man of 50, but even protected it and regretted its end. The father, who despite outraged to learn of the relationship and threaten to go to the police, never makes it and becomes to disappear from his life, as he had always done before. Is the environment of family, friends, and neighbors who knew of an unequal relationship and that he never said anything or, those that did, very few, were in mere words. They are doctors, they also knew details without report. And the police, who in spite of having received several anonymous tips never made a real effort to investigate this case of alleged illegal with a minor. And it is, above all, that means “artistic”, that France intellectual still influenced by the “non-ban” of May ' 68 that he knew of the relationship of the writer with a teenage girl, not much less was the first and, further, not only quiet, but up clapped and edited the works of the author in recounting minutely his “conquests” with girls and boys of 14, 13 or 11 years.

“The thing to rethink is the hypocrisy of an entire era,” says Springora in Le Parisien. And that lingers still, at least in certain areas, says. Because although in recent days there have been numerous convictions and mea culpa to both of the French authorities as some of those that knew and kept their mouths shut, or not condemned, as the well-known journalist Bernard Pivot, who interviewed him on several occasions about their books content child molester in his literary program tv Apostrohpes, the others still silent, he recalls. “I have not received any signal of his editors. I think of Gallimard, which published her diaries. And in (the editor), Léo Scheer, which re-released in 2005 Les moins de seize ans (those under The age of 16 years, where his sexual encounters with minors) with a new foreword by Gabriel Matzneff that says that if you should get back to writing that book, would not change a comma. In 2013, when he received the prix Renaudot, no journalist literary, not a single one, we questioned the justification of such a reward. The life of a teen anonymous is nothing to the status of a writer”, he criticizes. “It is on this blindness that there are that ask themselves collectively: why no one did anything for so many years?”.

For the author, it would have been necessary for someone to stop the feet and that is also the role of the law, though in France follow without having an age of consent. “It is important that the law be manifested in the construction of the teenager,” he says. Because the consequences can last a lifetime, as she well knows and has in his book. “I am loaded with guilt, and not he, because nobody came to me so clear: you must not live this story. And, above all, no one said to him,” he insists.

Matzneff said victim as Woody Allen and Roman Polanksi

On the same day it goes on sale Le Consentement, L'express published a long response Matzneff, in which, as highlighted by the journal, “makes no mea culpa, nor asks for forgiveness”, but that is limited to lamenting what it calls a “stab in the heart”.

Springora “you try to make me a deviant, a manipulator, a predator, a pig. It is a book that seeks to hurry in the cauldron cursed the that have been launched these last times the photographer Hamilton, the filmmakers Woody Allen and Roman Polanski,” says the writer, today 83 years old.

The reply of the author is in the book itself, which concludes with a reflection on the changing times and in the that replicates, to the “whip puritanism” today as he, that what has changed is “that, after the release of the customs, also the word of the victims is being released”.