Alice Munro’s daughter alleges sexual abuse by the late Nobel laureate author’s husband
- Andrea Robin Skinner, wrote in an essay published in the Toronto Star that Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin sexually assaulted her when she was 9
The daughter of the late Nobel laureate Alice Munro has accused the author’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin, of sexual abuse, writing that her mother remained with him because she “loved him too much” to leave.
Munro, who died in May at age 92, was one of the world’s most celebrated and beloved writers and a source of ongoing pride for her native Canada, where a reckoning with the author’s legacy is now concentrated.
Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter with her first husband, James Munro, wrote in an essay published in the Toronto Star that Fremlin sexually assaulted her in the mid-1970s – when she was 9 – and continued to harass and abuse her until she became a teenager.
Skinner, whose essay ran on Sunday, wrote that in her 20s she told the author about Fremlin’s abuse. Munro left her husband for a time, but eventually returned and was still with him when he died, in 2013.
She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame
“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Skinner wrote. “She said that she had been ‘told too late,’ she loved him 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.”
