Alice Munro’s Daughter Andrea Skinner Shares “Terrible Secret” Of Stepfather’s Sexual Abuse—And Munro’s Silence.

Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of the late Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, revealed that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, sexually assaulted her as a 9-year-old, and that her mother knew about the abuse and chose to stay with him, in an essay for the Toronto Star published Sunday.

The news comes weeks after Munro’s death on May 13, following a flood of remembrances and praise for her incisive prose. Skinner, her two older sisters, and her stepbrother revealed the family secret that has been swept aside and concealed from the public during a nearly 50-year timeline of confessions, threats, estrangements, and trauma. Fremlin sexually assaulted Skinner in 1976, and Skinner told her mother in 1992, after which Munro remained married to Fremlin until his death in 2013.

In 2005, Skinner reported the past abuse to police, using Fremlin’s own threatening letters as evidence. Fremlin pleaded guilty on arraignment without trial to “indecently assaulting” Skinner. Fremlin, then 80, was sentenced to two years of probation, she wrote.

Alice Munro divorced her first husband and Skinner’s father, Jim Munro, in 1972, and Alice married Fremlin in 1976. She lived with Fremlin in Clinton, Ontario, where Skinner would spend summers, living in Victoria, BC with her father during the school year.

It was that first summer of 1976, Skinner wrote, on a night her mother was away, that Fremlin climbed into her bed and touched her and himself while she pretended to sleep. Other times, he’d make inappropriate comments to her, talk to her about his and her mother’s sexual activities, and ask her about her own.

Skinner said she told her stepbrother Andrew about the assault, as well as inappropriate comments and questions from Fremlin, when she returned to the Victoria home they shared with her father, “trying to make a joke of it.”

“He didn’t laugh,” she wrote. “He said I should tell his mother right away. I did, and she told my father, who decided to say nothing to my mother.” Her father never spoke directly to Skinner about it, and he told her two older sisters to not say anything to their mother either. Her older sister Sheila Munro said that she was sent along with Skinner to make sure she wasn’t left alone with Fremlin.

“I don’t remember the exact conversation, but my father told me that Andrea had been molested, or something to that effect,” Sheila said. “There wasn’t a lot of detail about what happened to her.”

Still, on those summer visits, Fremlin would make inappropriate comments and sexual advances. He didn’t touch her again, Skinner said, but he would expose himself when they were alone and sometimes masturbated.

“I thought I was doing a good job of preventing abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories,” she wrote.

Through the years, Skinner suffered debilitating migraines—the first of which struck her the morning after Fremlin’s sexual assault, the one he said her mother couldn’t find out about because “it would kill her,” she wrote—and grappled with bulimia. When she told her mother she was struggling at the University of Toronto, Skinner said that Munro cried and told Skinner she was wasting her life. Finally, in 1992, a 25-year-old Skinner decided to tell her mother, in the form of a letter, what had happened all those years ago.

Initially, upon learning of the assault, Munro left Fremlin, fleeing to a condo in Comox, BC. In her wake, Fremlin found the letter. When Skinner spoke to her mother, she wrote, it seemed that Munro was “overwhelmed by her sense of injury to herself.”

“When I tried to tell her how her husband’s abuse had hurt me, she was incredulous,” Skinner wrote. “‘But you were such a happy child,’ she said.”

One of Skinner’s sisters, Jenny Munro, called the immediate aftermath “chaos and mayhem and hysterical actions all around…But the focus was not on Andrea.”

Instead, there was concern that Fremlin would follow through on threats to kill himself. Then, he sent a series of letters that described the abuse and directly compared Skinner to Vladimir Nabokov’s titular Lolita. He felt “dishonorable and deeply disgusted with myself,” he wrote, but not for assaulting his stepdaughter, which he detailed in the letter, but “for having been unfaithful to Alice after I had committed myself to her,” he wrote. He called Skinner a “home wrecker” and threatened to kill her if the police were contacted. Munro, too, was devastated, but according to Skinner, more focused on her own pain than her daughter’s.

“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Skinner wrote.

After a few months, Fremlin came to visit Munro, and when he returned to Clinton, Munro went with him.

“She said that she had been ‘told too late,’” Skinner wrote of Munro. “She loved [Fremlin] too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and make up for the failings of men. She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”

The family continued to have a relationship with Munro and Fremlin, sidestepping the subject at least partly due to Munro’s public profile and what Jenny called “the fame factor. That was a big deal.”

In Skinner’s words, “We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. It was what we did.”

In 1994, Munro granted a lengthy interview to The Paris Review for the publication’s “The Art of Fiction” series. She admitted to worrying about her children and acknowledged that she’d prioritized writing over motherhood.

“Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that.” she said. “Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.”

In 2002, however, something changed: Skinner became pregnant with twins, and told her mother that her stepfather could never be allowed to be around the children. A screaming match ensued, with Munro saying it would be “inconvenient,” since Munro didn’t drive. The next day, Munro called Skinner, she said, “to forgive me for talking to her like that … and I realized that I was dealing with someone who had no clue who needed to be forgiven. And that was the end of our relationship.”

An October 2004 New York Times Magazine profile of Munro, in which she spoke glowingly and frequently of Fremlin, agreeing he was the love of her life, and described herself as having “no moral scruples,” admitted ambivalence as a parent, and said that she was close with her three daughters (including Skinner, no mention of their estrangement) who got together “mostly to discuss me,” was the next catalyst for Skinner: She reported Fremlin’s abuse to the Ontario Provincial Police and gave them the letters he had sent as supporting evidence. In March 2005, he pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence, and was ordered away from parks, playgrounds, and all contact with Skinner, as well as being ordered to submit a DNA sample for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s database.

Skinner remained estranged from Munro and the rest of her family of origin after the conviction, she wrote. In Munro’s sphere, despite Skinner’s hope that “this story, my story, [would] become part of the stories people tell about my mother,” the conviction didn’t make its way into the media or public eye, and the family danced around the topic.

“The family went back to socializing with the pedophile,” Jenny said. “My mother went on a book tour.”

Fremlin died in 2013, the same year Munro was selected for the Nobel Prize for literature. She was unable to travel to accept the award.

Skinner never reconciled with her mother.

“I made no demands on myself to mend things, or forgive her. I grieved the loss of her, and that was an important part of my healing,” she wrote.

By coming forward with her reality, Skinner is working toward the same goal she stated about reporting Fremlin’s abuse to the authorities in the first place: “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother. 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.”

Now, after Munro’s death, Skinner and her siblings have reconciled. Her children worry about the impact that this will have on her legacy, but the need to air the truth is greater. “I still feel she’s such a great writer—she deserved the Nobel,” Sheila Munro, that eldest daughter whom Munro recalled shooing away from her typewriter, said. “She devoted her life to it, and she manifested this amazing talent and imagination. And that’s all, really, she wanted to do in her life. Get those stories down and get them out.”

Which is also what Skinner wants to achieve now.

“I want so much for my personal story to focus on patterns of silencing, the tendency to do that in families and societies,” she said. “I just really hope that this story isn’t about celebrities behaving badly … I hope that … even if someone goes to this story for the entertainment value, they come away with something that applies to their own family.”