Canadian author Alice Munro established a celebrated and award-winning career with her short stories. However, more than a month after Munro’s death, her estranged daughter says that the writer failed to acknowledge one key narrative: Her second husband was a child sex abuser. Andrea Robin Skinner, one of Munro’s three daughters with ex-husband James Munro, revealed in an opinion column for the Toronto Star published Sunday that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin.
Skinner also alleged that her mother stayed quiet and remained married to Fremlin, despite knowing about the abuse. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner wrote.
In the column, Skinner said that Fremlin assaulted her when she was 9 years old in 1976, the same year Munro married the geographer. Skinner said the abuse occurred at the author’s home in Clinton, Ontario, when her mother was out and she was left alone with Fremlin. When Skinner returned to her mother’s Clinton home every summer as a child, Fremlin made “lewd jokes, exposed himself during car rides, told me about the little girls in the neighbourhood he liked and described my mother’s sexual needs” when they were alone, she wrote.
“At the time, I didn’t know this was abuse.” Fremlin had also allegedly exposed himself to a friend’s 14-year-old daughter, but denied those allegations. When she was 25, Skinner wrote a letter to her mo.
