The youngest daughter of Canadian writer Alice Munro published a powerful essay on Sunday, months after her mother’s death, in which she describes being sexually abused by her stepfather, something her mother allegedly chose not to tell.
One night in 1976, while her mother was away, “her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me,” wrote Andrea Robin Skinner in a text published in the Canadian daily Toronto StarShe was 9 years old at the time.
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She said she told her mother everything in a letter years later, when she was 25. Alice Munro “reacted exactly as I had feared, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” her daughter wrote.
She chose to stay with her husband and keep quiet. “We all went back to acting like nothing had happened,” her daughter says.
Alice Munro, a short story specialist who won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, died in May at the age of 92. She married Gerald Fremlin in the 1970s, after her previous marriage ended. He died in 2013.
When she was alone with him, Andrea Robin Skinner alleges that the man would make “obscene jokes,” “expose himself during car rides” and “talk to her about the little girls in the neighborhood that he liked.”
At the age of 38, after reading her mother’s glowing comments about her husband in an interview with New York Timesshe filed a complaint with the police to have “a trace of the truth, public proof that I did not deserve what happened to me.”
Gerald Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to a charge of indecent assault.