Canadian writer Alice Munro’s daughter on Sunday said that her stepfather sexually abused her as a child and that her mother was told, 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 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 little girls in the neighborhood he liked and described my mother’s sexual needs.”
Photo: AFP
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 wed in the 1970s.
“She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,” Skinner wrote of Munro.
“We all went back to acting as if nothing had happened. It was what we did,” she added.
At 38, Skinner said she took her allegations to the police after Munro complimented her husband in a New York Times interview. Fremlin pleaded guilty in 2005 to indecent assault.
“What I wanted was some record of the truth, some public proof that I hadn’t deserved what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote. “I also wanted this story, my story, to become part of the stories people tell about my mother.”
Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013, died at 92 in May. Her death prompted glowing tributes.
Victoria-based Munro’s Books, founded by the author, said in a statement it “unequivocally supports” Skinner in sharing her story of sexual abuse as a child.
“Along with so many readers and writers, we will need time to absorb this news and the impact it may have on the legacy of Alice Munro, whose work and ties to the store we have previously celebrated,” it wrote, adding that the shop had been independently owned since 2014.
A separate statement from the Munro family, also published on the Munro’s Books Web site, praised the shop’s owners for being “part of our family’s healing.”
“We wholly support the owners and staff of Munro’s Books as they chart a new future, and respectfully request that they not be asked or expected to answer questions about the Munro family,” it added.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
RSS