Alice Munro’s daughter reveals sexual abuse by stepfather

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Andrea Robin Skinner, the youngest daughter of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, has revealed that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child – and accuses her late mother of staying with him despite knowing about the situation. Skinner described the abuse and her mother’s reaction in an essay published in the Toronto star on Sunday, which shook the literary world.

Skinner says that in 1976, Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, then in his 50s, climbed into her bed – when she was 9 and visiting her mother for the summer – and sexually abused her. Skinner, now 58, claims that in the years that followed, Fremlin “made offensive jokes, exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked and described my mother’s sexual needs.”

Fremlin also reportedly wrote letters to the Munro Family admitted abuse but blamed Skinner Skinner says she distanced herself from her family in 2002 after reading an interview in which Munro spoke fondly of Fremlin. “She painted a new reality (in which) my stepfather was the heroic figure in her life,” she writes. That’s when Skinner decided to go to police. She reported the assault in 2005 and showed Fremlin’s letters to Ontario police, after which he was charged with indecent assault, according to a separate Toronto report star Article accompanying Skinner’s essay. Fremlin, then 80, pleaded guilty and received a reduced sentence of two years probation.

Munro remained married to Fremlin until his death in 2013. Skinner writes that her mother found out about the abuse “too late.” She recalls Munro telling her that she loved Fremlin “too much and that 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. She insisted that whatever happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.” Skinner says her mother treated the abuse “exactly as I feared, as if she had found out about infidelity.”

The essay appears almost two months after Munro’s death at the age of 92. The fact that the celebrated Lives of girls and women The author’s stories and poems often address abuses of power by men, child sexual abuse and complicated family dynamics, which made her daughter’s revelation all the more astonishing. The obituaries and tributes praising Munro’s work in recent months seemed to play a role in Skinner’s decision to go public with her experiences, and it’s already causing some Munro admirers to reassess the author’s legacy. As Skinner wrote in her Sunday essay, “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t grapple with the reality of what happened to me and the fact that when confronted with the truth, my mother chose to stay with and protect my abuser.”