Weeks After Alice Munro’s Death, Daughter Tells of Dark Family Secret

Andrea Robin Skinner, a daughter of the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, said that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child — and that her mother knew about it, and chose to stay with him anyway.

Skinner, who is now an adult, detailed these accusations in an essay in the Toronto Star on Sunday. According to a separate article in the Toronto Star, Skinner went to the Ontario police, and in 2005, her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, was charged with indecent assault against her. He pleaded guilty.

By then, he was 80 years old. He got a suspended sentence and probation for two years. Munro stayed with him until he died in 2013.

Because of her mother’s fame, Skinner wrote, “the silence continued.” Munro died on May 13 at 92.

“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote of going to the police in 2005, about 30 years after the abuse began.

“I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” Skinner continued. “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.”

Attempts to reach Skinner on Sunday were unsuccessful.

Skinner wrote that the abuse began in 1976, when she was 9 years old and went to visit Fremlin, then in his 50s, and her mother, who was in her 40s. She said he climbed into the bed where she was sleeping and sexually assaulted her. Skinner said she told her stepmother, who then told Skinner’s father. Her father did not confront Munro.