Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro, has revealed that she was raped by her stepfather when she was a child. Her mother, upon learning the facts, chose to cover up for her partner rather than protect her daughter.
Skinner recounted the events in an article published Sunday in the Canadian newspaper ‘Toronto Star’. She says she went to the police to report the abuse, and that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, was found guilty and sentenced.
Fremlin was 80 at the time, so the sentence was suspended and she was placed on probation for two years. Despite being aware of the incident, Alice Munro continued her relationship until Fremlin died in 2013.
“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I didn’t deserve what happened to me,” Skinner wrote, explaining why she reported the abuse in 2005, 30 years following it happened.
“I also wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell regarding my mother. I never wanted to see another interview, biography or event that didn’t grapple with the reality of what had happened to me, and the fact that my mother, faced with the truth of what had happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him,” Skinner added.
The Nobel Prize winner’s daughter says the abuse began in 1976, when she was nine years old and visited Fremlin, who was 50. She says her mother’s partner got into the bed she was sleeping in and sexually assaulted her. She also says that Fremlin continually talked to her regarding “girls from the neighbourhood that he liked”.
A decade later, Skinner decided to tell her mother everything she had suffered. To justify the abuse, Fremlin accused her stepdaughter of being provocative.
“He described my nine-year-old self as a ‘homewrecker’ and said the fact that my family didn’t intervene suggested they agreed with him,” Andrea explains.
However, Munro did not want to end her relationship with the man who had abused her daughter.
“She said she had been told ‘too late’. She loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if it expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children and make up for the failings of men. She insisted that what had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner said.
