Vanessa Springora

The Girl Who Became the Woman Who Changed France

In 1986, a 14-year-old Vanessa Springora met one of France’s most celebrated writers at a Paris dinner party. Gabriel Matzneff was 49, famous, and charming. He took a shine to her and then began to send her handwritten letters of adoration, comparing her to literary heroines. He told her she was unlike anyone he had ever known and she believed him. He essentially groomed her into a sexually inappropriate relationship for over two years while everyone around her applauded it.

Matzneff wrote about Vanessa in his published diaries, referring to her as “V.” He appeared on national television discussing his attraction to girls and boys as young as 10, framing it as artistic freedom, intellectual sophistication, a refusal to be bound by ordinary morality. Publishers printed his books. Academies gave him prizes, including the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2013.

When a Canadian journalist named Denise Bombardier confronted him on live television in 1990 and asked about his proclivity for young lovers and whether he cared about the damage he may have caused them, the French press turned on her, harshly. The Parisian literati called her provincial, puritanical, a bitch, and a frustrated woman. No one had ever dared to call out Matzneff’s pedophilic behavior. Before the interview Bombardier was warned not to question him about his sexual adventures but she boldly dove in and was slapped back. You can read more about that shocking interview in this BBC article.

What is disappointing and very telling is that no one even considered asking Springora how she felt about Matzneff or their ‘relationship.’ No one checked in to see how this all may have affected her.

Meanwhile Springora was suffering in unsupported silence. She spent the next three decades alone with her memories, carrying the weight of what had happened and the slow, painful realization that what had felt like being chosen had actually been carefully orchestrated by a man who had done this to many girls before her. She had been groomed, used, and then written about in detail without her consent, her teenage life turned into literary material for his celebrated diaries.

She was not alone in this. Matzneff did not hide his sexual exploits. In 1974, he decided to publish Les Moins de Seize Ans (The Under-16s), in which he celebrated his conquests. He wrote, “To sleep with a child, it’s a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure” and “When you have held in your arms, and kissed, caressed, possessed a thirteen-year-old boy, a fifteen-year-old girl, everything else seems dull, heavy, insipid.” Absolutely vile! Yet, it did not cause an alarm instead the celebration of his writing continued.

But, in January 2020, Vanessa Springora published a memoir documenting the abuse she suffered as a teenager, at the hands of a man three times her age. She let the world know exactly how she felt about it. That memoir was Consent.

This was not revenge; it was the brutal, unassailable clarity of thirty years’ fermentation. With precise methodology, she dissected the mechanics of a predator. She exposed exactly how a powerful adult stalks a vulnerable child, how reverent admiration is weaponized into absolute psychological enslavement, and how an entire cultural syndicate including publishers, critics, prize committees, television elites, the whole gilded pantheon of French intellectual life, conspires to shield a monster, provided his prose is beautiful enough. It struck a deep nerve throughout France.

Soon every publisher stopped distributing Matzneff’s books within weeks. A criminal investigation was opened, based not on new allegations but on his own published writings. His own words, in print, for decades, describing exactly what he had done were now the basis of his lawsuit. In terror, he fled to Italy to escape the criticism and the charges.

France was left with an uncomfortable question: how had the most sophisticated literary culture in the world spent 40 years celebrating a man who openly described abusing children? The answer simple and disturbing. It was complicity on every level from institutions, critics, and gatekeepers who had confused transgression with genius and mistaken silence for sophistication.

Because of Vanessa Springora’s explosive memoir, in 2021, France changed its laws. Children under 15 are now legally protected from sexual acts with adults, a protection that had not existed when Vanessa was 14. The worst part is that Matzneff, now 89, continues to live on the Italian Riviera a free man as the cases against him were dropped due to the statue of limitations. But his career and reputation is in ruins.

Springora, now 54, is a celebrated author, publisher and film director. You can read more about Vanessa Springora here and here.