Andrea Robin Skinner, the youngest daughter of Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, has come forward with revelations that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was a child — and accuses her late mother of staying with him even though she was aware of the situation. Skinner described the abuse and her mother’s response in an essay published in the Toronto Star on Sunday that rocked the literary world.
Skinner says that in 1976 — when she was 9 years old and visiting her mother for the summer — Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, who was in his 50s at the time, climbed into her bed and sexually assaulted her. Skinner, now 58, claims that over the next several years, Fremlin “made lewd 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 admitting to the abuse but blaming it on Skinner. Skinner says she distanced herself from her family in 2002 after reading an interview where Munro spoke affectionately about Fremlin. “She was painting a new reality (where) my stepfather was the heroic figure of her life,” she writes. That’s when Skinner decided to go to the 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 Star article accompanying Skinner’s essay. Fremlin, who was 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 said she found out about the abuse “too late.” She recalls that Munro told her that she loved Fremlin “too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.” Skinner says her mother treated the abuse “exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity.”
The essay comes nearly two months after Munro died at 92. That the celebrated Lives of Girls and Women author’s stories and poems often explored men’s abuse of power, child sexual abuse, and complicated family dynamics made her daughter’s revelation all the more stunning. The obituaries and tributes that lauded Munro’s work in recent months seemed to play a part in Skinner’s decision to go public with her experience, and it’s already spurring some Munro admirers to reevaluate the writer’s legacy. As Skinner wrote in Sunday’s essay, “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
