Alice Munro's Daughter Says Stepfather Sexually Assaulted Her, And Mother Knew (image: facebook.com/alicemunroauthor)
Nobel prize winner Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Robin Skinner on Sunday alleged that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child, and her mother knew about the same, but she stayed with him.
Skinner revealed the shocking account in an essay on Canada’s Toronto Star, revealing how her stepfather Gerald Fremlin, sexually assaulted her when she was nine years old and he was in his 50s. She recounts that in 1976, one night, while Munro was away, Fremlin got into a bed, where she was sleeping at her mother’s home in Clinton, Ontario, and sexually assaulted her.
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She also writes, during car rides, he exposed himself and told her about “the little girls in the neighborhood he liked.” He stopped assaulting her when she became a teenager, but Skinner says she developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines, as a result of the abuse.
Skinner writes that when she first told her mother about the abuse in 1992, in a letter, Munro “reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity”.
“She [Munroe] was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” she wrote.
In 2005, after reading Munro’s interview where spoke she positively about marriage with Fremlin, Skinner took the allegations to the Ontario Police. Fremlin, was then charged with indecent assault against her. He pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence and two years’ probation. Alice Munroe stayed with Fremlin until he died in 2013.
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“I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she wrote int the essay.
Continuing further, she added: “I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t wrestle with the reality of what had happened to me, and with the fact that my mother, confronted with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with, and protect, my abuser.”
As the literary world continues to pay tribute to the death of Alice Munro, one of the greatest short story writers of all time, the dark episode in her personal life poses questions about the importance of supporting survivors.
