Norimitsu Onishi reports on the criminal prosecution and
upcoming trial of a noted French author, Gabriel Matzeneff (now 83, hiding out in Italy), apparently for “promoting
pedophilia” in his books. This New York
Times story follows another one January 8 (linked).
The author had been “renowned” although his books had
stopped selling. The trouble is that some of them, as far back as 1974, had
described sexual activity with girls (15 is the legal floor in France) and some
books circulated in the Philippines had included boys.
Nevertheless, the issue did not come to light until recently
when one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, had a book called “Consent” (“Le
Consentement”) about her experience with him, published in 2019. The whole narrative fits into the “Me Too”
movement, the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein and Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and
Kill” (2019, Little Brown, 448 pages), which I am reading now (as well as the
film “Scandalous”).
The New York Times article notes that the French “aristocracy”
had gotten away with behavior not normally considered acceptable. But it’s rather puzzling that establishment
trade publishers (as opposed to porn publishers) would have accepted these
books and bookstores would have sold them for so long.
The books, if they contained only words and not photos
(drawings would be on the legal edge) would not have been illegal in the United
States.
Again, this bizarre story related to printed books, not to
websites and social media, where usually terms of service violations would get
this content taken down or drive it to the dark web.
On the other hand, the French prosecutors are blaming the
author for his influence on impressionable young men who then, perhaps lacking
impulse control, go out and commit crimes.
This is a similar moral dilemma that we have on the Internet with
radicalization (especially on the Right). People are to be held responsible for the acts of others if they are in able to function as a public influencer, perhaps.
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