Daughter of Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro says her stepfather sexually assaulted her and she knew

Montreal in Canada:

The daughter of Canadian writer Alice Munro said Sunday that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and that her mother was informed but stayed with him, in a damning account published after the Nobel laureate’s death.

Andrea Robin Skinner wrote in the Toronto Star that she was nine years old when, in 1976, “one night, while she (Munro) was away, her husband, my stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed where I was sleeping and sexually assaulted me. .”

She wrote that when she was alone with Fremlin — who died in 2013 — he “exposed himself during car rides, told me about the neighborhood girls he liked, and described my mother’s sexual needs.”

Skinner said that when she was 25, she shared everything that had happened with Munro – but the acclaimed author decided to stay with Fremlin, whom she married in the 1970s after the breakdown of her first marriage.

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

“We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. That’s what we did,” she added.

The 38-year-old Skinner said she took her allegations to police after Munro praised her husband in an interview with the New York Times. Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to indecent assault.

“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I did not deserve what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote.

“I also wanted this story, my story, to be part of the stories people tell about my mother,” she added.

Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, died aged 92 in May. Her death generated glowing tributes, including from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)