Daughter of famous writer Alice Munro says her mother knew her stepfather had sexually abused her as a child – and still stayed with him

The daughter of famous writer Alice Munro says she was sexually abused by her stepfather as a child – but her mother chose to stay with him even after learning of his horrific crimes.

Andrea Robin Skinner, 58, describes in a heartbreaking new essay in the Toronto Star how she was just nine years old when her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, “climbed into the bed I was sleeping in and sexually assaulted me” at Munro’s home in Ontario, Canada, in 1976.

And that was just the beginning.

Over the next few years, Skinner says, Fremlin, the cartographer, engaged in a series of disgusting acts, including exposing himself to her, asking the underage woman about her “sex life,” telling her about her mother’s sexual needs, and describing little neighborhood girls he liked.

“I didn’t know at the time that it was abuse,” wrote Skinner, whose late mother won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 and is considered one of the greatest short story writers in history.

“I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by looking away and ignoring his stories,” said the woman, the youngest of Munro’s three daughters.

She said she told her father, Jim Munro, about the abuse.

He did nothing, she said about her father, who died in 2016.

Years later, she wrote a letter to her mother detailing the horrors she had endured at the hands of her stepfather. Munro was 88 when he died in 2013. He died in May at the age of 92.

“I have carried a secret with me for 16 years,” Skinner wrote, according to an excerpt. “Gerry sexually abused me when I was nine years old, while you were in China. … I was afraid my whole life that you would blame me for what happened.”

Munro briefly separated from Fremlin after the explosive allegations, Skinner said.

But when Munro asked her husband about Skinner, he “assured” her that Skinner was not his type – and described the nine-year-old girl as a “marriage destroyer” who “invaded my bedroom for sexual adventures,” the daughter said.

Munro eventually returned to him and the couple remained together until his death.

“She said she was ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and it was our misogynistic culture’s fault that I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s mistakes,” Skinner wrote of her mother.

“She insisted that whatever happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

At one point in the story, Fremlin told Munro he would kill Skinner if she ever spoke to police and wrote her a series of letters blaming her for the abuse, the daughter said.

“Andrea’s claim that she was ‘scared’ is simply a lie,” Fremlin claimed. “Andrea has brought ruin to two people who love each other. … If the worst happens, I will go public.”

Others have told Munro similarly sick stories over the years, including a former friend of Fremlin’s who testified that the stepfather exposed himself to his 14-year-old daughter, Skinner said.

Fremlin denied this, she said.

His constant abuse left Skinner with a litany of physical and mental health problems—including bulimia, insomnia, and migraines—that forced her to drop out of college and nearly destroyed her life.

Years of therapy helped her recover, Skinner wrote, but her relationship with her mother remained fragile.

“I tried to forgive my mother and Fremlin and continued to visit them and the rest of my family,” she wrote. “We all went back to pretending nothing had happened. That’s what we did.”

But things turned completely ugly when Skinner told Munro that she would never let Fremlin near her recently born twins.

Her mother replied that this would be very inconvenient for her as she does not drive a car and a visit would therefore be difficult.

“I exploded and told her our relationship was over,” Skinner wrote.

Two years later, the daughter finally went to the police.

“For so long I had told myself that by leaving my pain alone I would have at least helped my family, that I would have done the most moral thing, contributed to the greatest good for the greatest number,” Skinner wrote. “Now I claimed my right to a full life, took the burden of abuse upon myself, and gave it back to Fremlin.”

In February 2005, authorities charged him with “sexually harassing” Skinner sometime in the summer of 1976.

In March of that year, he pleaded guilty, she wrote, and the court sentenced him, among other things, to two years’ probation.

Skinner was estranged from her family for years after the conviction, she said, but she eventually reconciled with most of her relatives and together they embarked on the long road to recovery.

The situation was different with Munro, with whom Skinner never reconciled.

“Because of my mother’s fame, the secret spread far beyond the family,” she wrote in the essay, without saying why she decided to describe Fremlin’s crimes in detail now.

“Many influential people learned some of my story, but continued to support and add to a narrative they knew was false,” Skinner said.

“It seemed as if no one believed that the truth should ever be told, that it would never be told, especially not to the extent that it amounted to lying,” she continued. “Until now.”