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.”