London Alice Munro’s local legacy 'doesn't excuse what went on behind closed doors' in historical sex assault case An Alice Munro sign at the edge of Wingham on July 9, 2024 (Scott Miller/CTV News London) Share Like most Huron County residents, Victoria Leddy could hardly believe the news that broke over the weekend – that Alice Munro’s youngest daughter had been sexually assaulted by her stepfather during summer visits to Clinton, in the late 70’s. “Of course, I was shocked. Disheartened.
I was heartbroken for her daughter,” said Leddy. The decorated author’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner said that the abuse at the hands of Munro’s partner, Gerald Fremlin, lasted from when she was nine, into her teens. She worked up the courage to tell Munro in her 20’s, and was met with no support, disdain in fact, she said.
"I ...
was overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself," Skinner wrote in a first person essay published in Saturday’s Toronto Star. “She believed my father had made us keep the secret in order to humiliate her. She then told me about other children Fremlin had 'friendships' with, emphasizing her own sense that she, personally, had been betrayed.
Did she realize she was speaking to a victim and that I was her child? If she did, I couldn't feel it,” said Skinner in the published essay. Skinner reported the abuse to the Huron OPP in 2005, and Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault that same year, but the revered Munro stayed married to Fr.
