Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s daughter claims her mother stayed with her stepfather who sexually abused her

TORONTO — Andrea Robin Skinner, the daughter of Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, says her stepfather sexually abused her when she was a child. Her mother knew about it and chose to stay with him anyway.

Skinner, now an adult, detailed the allegations in an essay in the Toronto Star on July 7. According to another article in the newspaper, she went to Ontario police and in 2005, her stepfather Gerald Fremlin was charged with indecent assault against her. He pleaded guilty.

At the time, he was 80 years old. He was given a suspended sentence and two years probation. Munro stayed with him until his death in 2013.

Because of her mother’s fame, Skinner writes, “the silence continued.” Munro died on May 13 at the age of 92.

“What I wanted was some shred of truth, some public proof that I didn’t deserve what happened to me,” Skinner wrote of his complaint to police in 2005, some 30 years after the abuse began.

“I also wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories that people tell about my mother,” she continued.

“I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t confront the reality of what happened to me and the fact that my mother, faced with the truth of what happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him.”

Skinner wrote that the abuse began in 1976, when she was nine years old and went to visit Fremlin, then in his 50s, and his mother, who was in her 40s.

Skinner said he sexually assaulted her while she was sleeping. She said she told her stepmother, who then told her father. Her father did not confront Munro.

Over the next few years, Skinner wrote that Fremlin exposed himself to her during car rides, described his mother’s sexual needs and “told her about little girls in the neighbourhood he liked.” According to the Toronto Star article, he lost interest in Skinner when she became a teenager.

Over time, Munro’s reputation as a writer grew. By the time of her death, she was widely regarded as one of the greatest short story writers.

Her work often focuses on women at different stages of their lives, blending “ordinary people with extraordinary themes,” according to her obituary in the New York Times. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, at the age of 82.

At the age of 20, Skinner expressed sympathy for a character in a short story who commits suicide after being sexually assaulted by her stepfather. It was after this, Skinner wrote, that she decided to tell her mother about the abuse she had suffered.

In a letter, she told her mother what Fremlin had done to her. Instead of reacting with sympathy, Skinner said Munro “reacted exactly as I had feared, as if she had learned of an infidelity.”

Munro left Fremlin to live in an apartment she owned in British Columbia. Fremlin wrote letters to the family, Skinner said, in which he admitted the abuse but blamed Ms. Fremlin for it.

When she went to the police in 2005, she took the letters. “He described me as a nine-year-old homewrecker,” she wrote.

According to Skinner’s essay and the Toronto Star article, Fremlin accused her of invading his bedroom “for a sexual affair” in one of the letters he wrote to the family.

“Should the worst happen, I intend to make the matter public,” he wrote, according to Skinner’s essay. “I will make available for publication a number of photographs, including some taken at my cottage near Ottawa which are extremely telling… one of them shows Andrea in her underwear.”

Despite all this, Skinner writes, Munro returned to Fremlin and remained with him for the rest of his life.

“She said she had been told too late,” Skinner wrote, “that she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to forsake her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that what happened was between me and my father-in-law. It had nothing to do with her.” NYTIMES