Books|The youngest daughter of Nobel laureate Alice Munro wrote an essay in which she told about years of sexual abuse by her stepfather. According to the daughter, her mother Alice Munro did not intervene.
Nobel laureate Alice Munro according to the daughter, her stepfather sexually abused her as a child. My own mother Munro knew about it, but did nothing.
The youngest daughter of Canadian Alice Munro Andrea Robin Skinner wrote about it in his personal essay, which was published In The Toronto Star on Sunday. In it, she told in detail about her stepfather’s sexual abuse over the years.
They also tell about it The New York Times and the Canadian news agency The Canadian Press.
In his essay Skinner tells his stepfather by Gerald Fremlin of having started sexually abusing her in 1976, when the girl was 9 years old. The abuse continued until the girl’s teenage years, until the stepfather’s interest in her waned.
The daughter dared to tell her mother about the abuse only in her twenties, after fearing that her mother would accuse her of the abuse. The daughter’s fears turned out to be correct, to the extent that Munro finally decided to side with her second husband instead of her child.
“He was adamant that whatever happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with him,” Skinner wrote in his essay.
Eventually in 2005, Andrea Robin Skinner reported the abuse to Ontario police in Canada. Fremlin was charged with sexual assault. He pleaded guilty.
At the time, the 80-year-old man received a suspended sentence and ended up on two years’ probation. Munro remained together with her husband until his death in 2013.
Skinner’s according to the case remained an open secret in the family for years. The silence continued because of the mother’s fame, he wrote.
Alice Munro had slowly grown into one of the world’s most respected short story writers, who depicted ordinary women in her texts. Munro, who shunned the public, received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013, at the age of 82.
The daughter was already estranged from her mother, who treated the abuse experienced by her daughter mainly as an insult directed at herself.
Now Skinner, who became public with the case, said that he and his siblings wanted to give Canadians a more complete picture of their mother, who is considered a literary icon.
“I didn’t want to see any more interviews, biographies or events that didn’t address the reality of what had happened to me. And the fact that my mother, having learned of what had happened, chose to stay with my abuser and protect him,” Skinner wrote in her essay.
On the other hand, Skinner told about the abuse initially also for his own sake.
“I wanted some kind of record of the truth. Some kind of public proof that I didn’t deserve what had happened to me,” Skinner wrote, describing her escape from police in 2005, some 30 years after the abuse began.
Skinner’s essay was published just under two months after Alice Munro’s death. Munro died aged 92 on 13 May. According to his family, he suffered from dementia for the last ten years of his life.
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