Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Alice Munro, talks about her stepfather’s sexual abuse

The daughter of famous Canadian author Alice Munro, who died in May, has written about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and the pain that came from her mother staying with him.

Andrea Robin Skinner, Ms Munro’s daughter, wrote in the Toronto Star on Sunday that in the summer of 1976, when she was nine, her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, “climbed into the bed I was sleeping in and sexually assaulted me.”

She also recounted her experience in an undated blog post later that summer, saying that Mr. Fremlin “got me to tell him about my ‘sex life’ – the usual innocent explorations with other children – and he told me about be sex life.”

In the post, Ms Skinner wrote that she soon told other family members about the incident, but not Ms Munro: “I was terrified she would blame me anyway, as she seemed jealous of the attention I was getting.” Later, Ms Skinner wrote, Mr Fremlin exposed himself to her during car rides, talked about “little girls in the neighborhood he liked” and described her mother’s sexual desires to her.

Ms Skinner, now an artist and mediation leader, says she wrote a letter to her mother in her twenties describing what had happened.

“My mother reacted as if she had learned of an infidelity. I felt she was working hard to forgive me,” she said in the blog post. Ms Munro stayed with Mr Fremlin in the decades that followed, which her daughter said cast a dark shadow over the family.

After reading a magazine interview in the early 2000s in which her mother described Mr Fremlin as “gallant”, Ms Skinner decided to contact the police. “I wanted to know the truth in a context where it was claimed I did not deserve it,” she wrote, adding that she had lived estranged from her family for years.

According to court documents, Mr. Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault in 2005, was convicted by an Ontario court and sentenced to two months’ probation. The documents show the incident occurred in Clinton, Ontario, where the family lived near Lake Huron.

Mr Fremlin, a cartographer and geographer, married Ms Munro in the 1970s after her previous marriage to Ms Skinner’s father, Victorian bookseller Jim Munro, broke down. Mr Fremlin died in 2013 aged 88, the same year Ms Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ms Skinner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday.