The New York Times had a good story on this last week. Here is a non-paywall site.

Long before Jeffrey Epstein was shuttling underage girls to the U.S. Virgin Islands on his private jet, Gabriel Matzneff was engaging in sexual activities with young adolescents in his Paris apartment, in hotel rooms, and on trips to Southeast Asia—and then writing about his exploits.

“Once you have held, kissed, caressed, possessed a 13-year-old boy, a girl of 15,” Matzneff once wrote, “everything else seems bland, heavy, insipid.”

Such candidly creepy musings weren’t discovered in secret journals or on a password-protected laptop in a basement safe. Matzneff is an acclaimed writer in France and the above sentence was in a book-length essay, Les moins de seize ans (The Under 16s), which was published in the mid-’70s. In it, Matzneff openly discussed his attraction to young teens, and described sex with children as “a holy experience, a baptismal event, a sacred adventure.”

He was even more blatant in his 1990 book, Mes amours décomposés (My Loves Deconstructed), in which he wrote about sexual relationships with kids between 12 and 16 years old, and described an afternoon spent watching child pornography involving children as young as ten. He was in his 50s at the time.