Author allegedly supported husband after sexual abuse

Alice Munro’s daughter claims that she was sexually abused by her stepfather and that the Nobel Prize winner supported him.

In an essay published in the Toronto Star on Sunday, Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter from her first marriage to James Munro, said she was sexually abused by Gerald Fremlin, her stepfather and Munro’s second husband, in 1976. She was nine years old at the time.

In 2005, Fremlin received a two-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty in a Canadian court to attacking Skinner.

The assault occurred when Skinner visited Munro at her Ontario home over the summer. Fremlin also “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,” she wrote. At one point, in front of Munro, he “told me that many cultures in the past were not as ‘prudish’ as ours and that it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by having sex with adults,” Skinner claimed.

Years later, at 25, Skinner wrote a letter to her mother telling her about the sexual abuse, but Munro couldn’t believe him. According to the essay, Fremlin told Munro he would “kill her if I ever went to the police.” Despite what Skinner told her, the short story writer remained married to him until Fremlin’s death in 2013.

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“She said she was ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and our misogynistic culture was to blame for my expecting her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children, and make up for men’s mistakes,” Skinner wrote. “She insisted that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

Skinner also said that Fremlin’s former friends had told her mother that he had exposed himself to her 14-year-old daughter.

Skinner cut off contact with her mother after she told her that Fremlin could never be near her own children, and the two were never able to repair their relationship.

Although she wrote that she was “pleased” with Fremlin’s guilty plea to sexual assault, Skinner also wanted her story to be told and that Munro’s future interviews and biographies would address the fact “that when confronted with the truth of what had happened, my mother chose to stay with and protect my abuser.”

But Skinner said that did not happen and because of her mother’s fame, “the silence remained.”

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The essay comes after Munro, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, died in May at the age of 92 after suffering from dementia for over a decade.

“I want so much for my personal story to focus on patterns of silence, the tendency for that in families and societies,” Skinner told the Toronto Star. “I just really hope that this story isn’t about celebrities behaving badly… I hope that… even if someone watches this story for the entertainment value, they take something away from it that applies to their own family.”

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