This poignant and striking testimony recounts the relationship of influence that Vanessa Springora had as a young teenager with a sexual predator nearly 40 years her senior. She was only 13 when she met this famous writer, who is quoted: GM.


In a clear and analytical story with sincerity and touching frankness, she subtly recounts with distance and without hatred her destructive relationship with this proven paedo criminal, denouncing in passing the complacency of part of the literary and intellectual class, the passivity of the witnesses to this relationship and of an entire society at the time that undoubtedly unwittingly participated in giving her a certain immunity and impunity.


Her loneliness, her inexperience, her lack of self-confidence, her fragility linked to the absence of her father, separated from her mother when she was only a child, will create a fault that makes her more vulnerable to predation. It is through this “interstice” that this “vampire” with its mephitic charm will rush.


The idyll will begin in an epistolary way until the meeting is orchestrated by this fine strategist.

She describes perfectly the mechanism of influence of which she was the victim and the great difficulty of getting out of it.


Vanessa Springora recounts her entire story in a factual manner, from her passionate and promising beginnings to her gradual descent into hell, from the illusion of Prince Charming to the reality of this pervert, from his addiction to the difficulty of getting rid of this pathological and toxic link. The physical and psychic influence is aggravated by the literary “imprisonment” of his intimacy since this predator transposes his relationships with young adolescents into his diaries.


It will take time for the writer to get out of this parasitic relationship bound by the fear of abandonment. However, little by little “the spell wears off” despite the intimidation and harassment of this abuser.


Isolated, dispossessed of herself and of her words, she sinks into depression. The guilt is reversed because she feels, wrongly, a willing accomplice. Yet can there be real consent and discernment at such a young age in this kind of unhealthy and unequal relationship?

A life of painful wanderings follows with heavy post-traumatic sequelae until a saving encounter.


AUTHOR

Maud Jaquet

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