**warning: the following story contains information about the sexual abuse of a child
The daughter of award winning Canadian short story writer and Wingham-native Alice Munro is revealing to the world that she was sexually abused by her stepfather, and that her mother knew of the abuse and stayed with her husband.
Andrea Robin Skinner detailed the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother's second husband in a piece published in the Toronto Star. Skinner wrote that she lived with her father, Munro's first husband James Munro, in B.C. throughout the school year when she was growing up. She spent summers in Clinton with her mother and stepfather Gerald Fremlin.
Skinner told the Star it was on these visits she was abused. She stated that it began in 1976 when she was only nine-years-old. Her mother had gone away and Fremlin got into bed with her and touched her sexually. She said he propositioned her for sex, exposed himself, and masturbated in front of her in the years that followed, until she was a teenager.
Skinner did not tell her mother of the abuse until 1992. She wrote her a letter detailing what Fremlin had done. Munro chose to stay with her second husband despite this accusation from her daughter.
According to the Star, while the abuse was an open secret in the Munro family, Skinner did not go to police until 2005. At the age of 80, Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault in a Goderich courtroom. He was handed a suspended sentence and two years probation for the offence. Fremlin died in 2013.
Munro became estranged from Skinner. She died in May at the age of 92.
Skinner said she wanted the truth to be known, not to take away from her mother's work, but so that Canadians could have a complete picture of the woman she was.
Munro, a Nobel laureate author, penned acclaimed stories including Lives of Girls and Women, Dance of the Happy Shades, and Who Do You Think You Are?