
(IntegrityTimes.com) – On May 13, renowned Canadian author Alice Munro at the age of 92 after suffering for many years from dementia. Less than a month later, the literary world was rocked the revelation that Munro’s second husband, Gerald “Gerry” Fremlin, was a child sex abuser. He assaulted Munro’s daughter Andrea in 1975 when she was nine years old and continued sexual harassment of her and other young girls for years. Now 58, Andrea Skinner says she doesn’t want to see any more discussion of her mother that does not include that reality.
After the assault in the summer of 1976, a family secret was born. Skinner told her stepbrother what happened, who encouraged her to tell his mother. She informed Skinner’s father what happened, after which he told everyone in the household not to speak about it. In 1992 Skinner wrote to her mother detailing the abuse, which resulted in Munro briefly leaving Fremlin. However, she returned to him and indicated that her husband’s sexual abuse of children had nothing to do with her.
After Skinner’s letter to her mother, Fremlin wrote to her father and stepmother in which he admitted to the abuse but blamed it on Skinner. Skinner finally reported the sexual abuse to the police using his letter as proof. Fremlin was charged in 2008. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years of probation. He and Munro were together and still married when he died in 2018. Munro had told her daughter that society’s “misogynistic culture” was to blame, and she was unwilling to make up for the failings of men by sacrificing her own needs.
While many of Munro’s friends and colleagues have expressed shock, Canadian academic and author Robert Thacker, who wrote “Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives,” says that he knew. Skinner had written to him in 2005 before his book was scheduled to be released. As it is understood that Munro often drew from real life when writing her short stories, Thacker claims many suspected a secret of this kind in light of her 1993 story “Vandals”. The story, published after she had received Skinner’s letter, was about a woman who is repressing the knowledge that her partner sexually abused children.
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