Alice Munro sexual abuse scandal

I just learned today that Alice Munro was involved in a sexual scandal involving her own daughter and her second husband:

The news made landfall in an essay for the Toronto Star in July, less than two months after Munro’s death. In the piece, Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s youngest daughter, revealed that in the summer of 1976, when she was 9 years old, she was sexually assaulted by her mother’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, then in his early 50s.

What followed was a series of failures that are, or should be, impossible to rationalize. Munro’s three children lived with their father, James Munro, in Victoria, British Columbia, for the school year, spending summers with their mother and stepfather in Clinton, a small town in southern Ontario. This is a region Canadians sometimes call “Alice Munro Country,” the setting of many of her stories.

Upon returning to her father’s home, Skinner told her stepbrother what had been done to her. He encouraged her to tell his mother, who told Skinner’s father, who did next to nothing. Alice Munro was not told at the time. The children continued to visit their mother, the older ones now burdened with the instruction not to leave their little sister alone with Fremlin.

Fremlin did not touch Skinner again, but he continued to abuse her for years. Until she became a teenager and his interest evaporated, he would expose himself to his stepdaughter, sometimes masturbating, and proposition her for sex.

Skinner was 25 before she told her mother her “secret” about what Fremlin had done to her in a letter. Munro left Fremlin, but only briefly—leaving her daughter’s letter behind for him to see. Fremlin in turn wrote letters of his own to his estranged wife.

It’s this bleak epistolary exchange that stops this from being a she said-he said story of the kind that’s easy for apologists to dismiss and makes it a she said-he wrote a letter in which he confessed to being an active pedophile story.

Here are excerpts from Skinner's original expose in The Toronto Star:

I was relieved at first that my father didn’t tell her what had happened to me. She had told me that Fremlin liked me better than her, and I thought she would blame me if she ever found out. I thought she might die. As relieved as I was, my father’s inability to take swift and decisive action to protect me also left me feeling that I no longer truly belonged in either home. I was alone.

When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type. In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as “prudish” as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.

By the time I was a teenager, I was at war with myself, suffering from bulimia, insomnia and migraines. I was a high-achieving high school student with a strong wish to help others. But my private pain was taking a toll. In university, my grades plummeted as bulimia took over my life. I dropped out of an international development program at the University of Toronto and gave up my dream of working abroad. By the time I was 25, I couldn’t picture a future for myself.

One day, during that period, while I was visiting my mother, she told me about a short story she had just read. In the piece, a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” she asked me. A month later, inspired by her reaction to the story, I wrote her a letter finally telling her what had happened to me.