Alice Munro’s daughter claims writer kept silent after stepfather sexually assaulted her

The youngest daughter of renowned Canadian author Alice Munro has spoken out about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepfather and the deep pain she felt when her mother chose to support her husband over her child.

In a first-person essay published Sunday in the Toronto Star, Andrea Robin Skinner described how the Nobel Prize-winning short story writer remained married to her second husband Gerald Fremlin even after learning of the abuse.

In the Star article, Skinner said she chose to tell her story so Canadians could get a more nuanced picture of the Nobel laureate, who was revered as a literary icon long before her death in May.

“I wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she wrote. “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 and protect my abuser.”

GRAPHIC WARNING: The following details may be disturbing to some readers.

Skinner wrote in the Star that the abuse began in 1976, when she was nine and visiting her mother in Ontario for the summer, since she spent most of the year in British Columbia with her father. She wrote that Fremlin climbed into her bed and initiated sexual contact while Munro was out of the house.

On the last day of her visit, she said, Fremlin began asking her details about her sex life and sharing aspects of his own while driving her to the airport.

Skinner said she first told her father and half-brother what had happened, but neither she nor her father immediately informed Munro.

She said Fremlin continued to expose himself to her and make sexual propositions until he lost interest when she reached her teenage years.

Skinner said he experienced “private pain” for many years because of Fremlin’s predatory behavior, suffered from bulimia, insomnia and migraines, and dropped out of an international development program at the University of Toronto.

In her twenties, Skinner wrote Munro a letter detailing Fremlin’s abuse, but she said she received no sympathy from her mother.

“I was overwhelmed by the feeling of having been hurt,” Skinner wrote in the Star. “She thought my father had forced us to keep the secret to humiliate her. She then told me about other children with whom Fremlin had ‘friendships,’ underscoring her own sense of personal betrayal. Did she realize she was talking to a victim and that I was her child? If so, I couldn’t feel it.”

Munro remained with Fremlin until his death in 2013. Munro said she was “told too late” that he had been abused, that she loved him too much to leave him and that she could not be expected to “deny her own needs,” Skinner wrote in the Star.

She reported the abuse to police in 2005, and Fremlin eventually pleaded guilty to indecent assault.

She said the abuse she suffered remained an open secret in the Munro family for years and led to a period of estrangement from her entire family.

Skinner, now a meditation and mindfulness teacher, said she has since reconciled with her siblings, but never with her mother.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 7, 2024.