Alice Munro’s ‘disturbing’ reaction after her daughter accused the literary icon’s husband of sexual abuse

As it turns out, Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro screamed at police and told them her daughter was a liar when they arrived to charge the writer’s husband with sexual abuse.

The literary world has been rocked since Andrea Skinner revealed last week that her famous mother stood by her husband Gerald Fremlin after he was convicted of abusing their own daughter from the age of nine.

The detective who was supposed to bring charges against Munro’s husband has now revealed that the Canadian author “screamed that she was angry” when police arrived at her home in Ontario in 2004.

Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled being stunned by her response, saying he “couldn’t understand her attitude.”

“This is your daughter. Will you not defend your daughter?” he asked.

Fremlin, a cartographer, received a prison sentence and two years’ probation after admitting sexual assault in 2005. But Munro stood by him until his death in 2013 – the year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The conviction was not reported at the time, and Skinner only decided to reveal her mother’s betrayal after the author died in May of this year at the age of 92.

In a harrowing essay for the Toronto Star, Skinner wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was in his fifties.

She said the first sexual assault occurred during a visit to Munro and Fremlin’s Ontario home after Fremlin climbed into the bed where she was sleeping.

Skinner said she told her stepmother, Carole Munro, who told her father, Jim Monro, but he also did nothing to confront his daughter’s abuser.

In the years that followed, Skinner said, Fremlin often exposed himself to her, told her about her mother’s sexual needs and “about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked.”

“I didn’t know it was abuse at the time,” Skinner wrote. “I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by looking away and ignoring his stories.”

Skinner added that Fremlin lost interest in her when she became a teenager, but she continued to suffer the effects of the abuse, developing bulimia, insomnia and migraines.

It was not until her twenties that Skinner confronted her mother directly about the abuse after reading one of her short stories about a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

“She reacted exactly as I feared, as if she had found out about an affair,” Skinner recalled.

“As it turned out, despite her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother did not have similar feelings for me.

“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.

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

Munro returned to her husband after a brief separation, but Skinner went to the police in 2004 because he was outraged by a gushing magazine article Munro had written about her husband, a cartographer.

Fremlin had written letters to the family admitting the abuse but blaming Skinner, describing her as a “marriage destroyer” and accusing her of going to his bedroom “for sexual adventures.”

“In the worst case scenario, I will go public,” he wrote in a letter.

“I will be making a number of photographs available for publication, particularly some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely telling, one of Andrea in my underpants.”

Skinner’s siblings confirmed Fremlin’s confession, but when police arrived, Munro “turned away, totally against her daughter and all for him.”

“The guy was crazy,” Lazarevich recalled. “A lot of guys like him don’t write letters – in fact, he’s the only one I’ve ever met who wrote letters. Most of the time, guys just say, ‘She threw herself at me.'”

And he finds it difficult to understand why the respected writer decided to stand by the man who abused her daughter.

“This obviously damages their reputation,” he told the Star Tribune.

“If I had had her book at home, I would have thrown it in the trash.”

“From that point until her death, she received various awards and honors, and that always annoyed me.

“This has annoyed me for years.”