A retired police detective involved in the arrest 20 years ago of the husband of , said Friday he was disturbed by the writer's reaction 20 years ago when she learned her husband would be charged for sexually assaulting her daughter. Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich remembers a very angry Munro accusing her daughter of lying when he visited Munro’s home in 2004 to inform the husband that he was going to be charged. In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazarevich said Munro was furious, defended her second husband and the detective recalls being “quite surprised” by her reaction.
“'That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?'” he recalls. first reported what the now retired detective thought at the time.
Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter with her first husband, wrote in an essay published in the Toronto Star that by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin. She alleged that he continued to harass and abuse her for the next few years, losing interest when she reached her teens. In her 20s, she told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse.
But Munro, after leaving Fremlin for a time, returned and remained with him until his death, in 2013. She would explain to Skinner that she loved him too much to remain apart. Fremlin was Skinner's stepfather.
When Munro died in May at age 92, she was celebrated worldwide as a genius whose short stories documented rare insight into her characters’ secrets, motivations, passi.
