The second woman to publicly accuse Canadian writer Alice Munro’s late husband of inappropriate sexual behaviour with her hopes her story will encourage parents to believe their children.
Jane Morrey was nine years old when she claims Gerald Fremlin exposed himself naked to her while he was staying at the family home in Toronto, several years before his marriage to M.me Munro.
Fifty-five years later, she has decided to speak out publicly for the first time, after learning recently that Mr Fremlin had later sexually assaulted one of Alice Munro’s daughters, Andrea Robin Skinner, when she was also nine years old.
Jane Morrey, now 64, points out that her story is very different from Andrea Robin Skinner’s. Last month, Mme Skinner described in a post to the Toronto Star how, for years after Mr. Fremlin assaulted her, she was sent home to her mother every summer and continued to be victimized by her attacker.
Her mother’s decision to stay with Mr. Fremlin after learning what he was doing to her daughter tarnished the legacy of one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. Alice Munro died at the age of 92 last May, before her daughter’s public denunciation.
But Jane Morrey says the one time Mr Fremlin attacked her, her mother immediately threw him out of the house and the girl never saw him again until she was an adult. Looking back, she says she doesn’t feel “particularly traumatised” by the event.
“I never grew up feeling like I did anything wrong,” she said in a telephone interview Monday. “I felt like I got complete justice, because I was believed right away.”
Mme Morrey, who first told her story to the Toronto Star, hopes her decision to speak out will help other parents understand how important it is to act decisively in these cases.
“Beyond Alice Munro’s fame, beyond everything, if something happens and your child tells you, believe them and act accordingly.”
It was only after the publication of M’s post thatme Skinner said it was learned that Mr Fremlin, who died in 2013 at the age of 88, had pleaded guilty in 2005 to “indecent assault” against his daughter-in-law.
“A bit like an uncle”
Gerald Fremlin was a close friend of Jane Morrey’s parents. They had attended the University of Western Ontario together, along with Alice and Jim Munro, who would become the writer’s first husband and the father of her three daughters, including Andrea.
Jane Morrey’s older sister, Marianne Webb, said Gerald Fremlin often visited her family and she could not remember a time when he was not friends with her parents.
She stresses that he never acted inappropriately with her and she even remembers being “a little jealous” at the idea that he sent her little sister postcards from his travels around the world. She now considers this behavior as a way of seducing her.
Jane Morrey, who is seven years younger than her sister Marianne, has previously said that as a little girl she loved receiving postcards, gifts and attention from Mr Fremlin, and that she regarded him as something of an uncle.
Then, during a visit from Gerald Fremlin in 1969, Jane Morrey, then nine, came into his room one morning to ask him what he wanted for breakfast. She said he then pulled back the covers and exposed himself naked to the child. Shocked, the girl left the room and began to make porridge. She said Mr. Fremlin then followed her into the kitchen and said, “I shouldn’t have shown you my…”
“I had never heard adults talk that way or use those kinds of words,” she says now. “My parents used anatomical terms.” But Mr. Fremlin kept going, she recalls. “Then he said, ‘OK, so you’ve seen me. Maybe you’d like to show me.’”
At that point, she said, she left the room and woke her mother to tell her what had happened. “My mother went berserk,” she said. She immediately got the girls out of the house, and the sisters waited on the street corner until they saw Mr. Fremlin’s car drive away.
When they returned home, Mr.me Morrey was told by his parents that Mr. Fremlin would never come home again. After that, “they never spoke of it again.”
“He looked terrified.”
Jane Morrey did not see Gerald Fremlin again until nearly two decades later, at the launch of a book by Alice Munro in 1986. The writer had married Mr Fremlin 10 years earlier.
“I walked up to him and said, ‘You probably don’t recognize me, but I’m Jane Webb,’ and he just looked terrified,” she said.
She didn’t confront him, but she wanted to scare him. “He scared me when I was little and I wanted to look him in the eye and see him squirm. I wanted him to worry about what I might do or say,” she explained in an email.
“I guess I wanted to show him that he wasn’t the only one with power.”
Jane Morrey did not speak to Andrea Robin Skinner, who was attacked by Mr Fremlin in 1976, several years after her. But she said she always wondered if he had other victims and whether something might have happened to one of Alice Munro’s daughters.
“It’s always been kind of there, buried in the back of my mind, but I never really thought about it until Andrea Skinner’s post,” she said.
She now hopes other potential victims will feel safe enough to come forward. “As a victim, there’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.
Years after the events of 1969, when Jane Morrey was an adult, her mother reconnected with Gerald Fremlin. At that time, she said, the relationship with her mother was strained and she never told him about the reunion, which was short-lived.
Her sister Marianne also suspects that their father was secretly having a friendship with Alice Munro’s husband. Both parents have since died.
“The real puzzle is how my parents were able to recognize that he was a predator who needed to be kept away from their daughter, yet continue to benefit from his friendship,” Jane Morrey said in an email.
“It is truly astonishing how his wife and at least two of his friends were able to knowingly ignore his despicable and criminal behaviour.”
Ultimately, though, she’s grateful to her mother for doing “the right thing in the moment,” especially when she compares her experience to Andrea Skinner’s.
“It’s probably the most important thing she’s ever done for me,” she says today. “It’s so important, the confidence it gives you to be believed.”