Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro screamed at police and told them her daughter was a liar when they arrived to accuse the novelist’s husband of sexual abuse, it has emerged.
The literary world has been reeling since Andrea Skinner revealed last week that her celebrity mother stood by her husband Gerald Fremlin after he was convicted of abusing his own daughter from the age of nine.
The detective who arrived to lay charges against Munro’s husband has now revealed the Canadian author was “screaming, she was angry” when police arrived at her Ontario home in 2004.
Retired Ontario Provincial Police detective Sam Lazarevich recalled being stunned by her response and saying he “couldn’t wrap his head around her attitude.”
—That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend her? —he asked.
The daughter of literary icon Alice Munro says she was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of nine and that her mother kept him with her after finding out.
Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled this week that he was stunned by the writer’s response to the abuse of her own daughter.
Fremlin, a cartographer, was given a suspicious sentence and two years’ probation after admitting indecent assault in 2005, but Munro stood by him until her death in 2013, the year he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The conviction was not reported at the time and Skinner only decided to reveal her mother’s betrayal after the author died in May this year at the age of 92.
In a harrowing essay for the Toronto Star In her essay, Skinner wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was 50.
She said the first sexual assault occurred during a visit to Munro and Fremlin’s home in Ontario, after Fremlin climbed into the bed she was sleeping in.
Skinner said she told her stepmother, Carole Munro, who told her father, Jim Monro, but he, too, did nothing to confront his daughter’s abuser.
In the years that followed, Skinner says Fremlin would often expose himself to her, telling her about his mother’s sexual needs and “about the girls in the neighborhood he liked.”
“At the time, I didn’t know this was abuse,” Skinner wrote. “I thought I was doing a good job of avoiding the abuse by looking away and ignoring their stories.”
Skinner added that Fremlin lost interest in her when she became a teenager, but continued to suffer the consequences of the abuse and developed bulimia, insomnia and migraines.
Just weeks after the Nobel laureate’s death at the age of 92, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner detailed the allegations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a heartbreaking essay.
Skinner, photographed as a child, wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was 50.
It wasn’t until he was in his twenties that Skinner directly confronted his mother about the abuse that had occurred after reading one of her short stories about a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
“She reacted exactly as I feared she would, as if she had found out about an affair,” Skinner recalled.
‘It turned out that, despite her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me.
‘She said she had been told ‘too late’, that she loved him too much and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if it expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice herself for her children and make up for the failings of men.
“She insisted that what had happened was a matter between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.”
Munro returned to her husband after a brief separation, but Skinner went to the police in 2004 after being outraged by a magazine article Munro had written about her cartographer husband.
Fremlin had written letters to the family in which she admitted the abuse but blamed Skinner, describing her as a “homewrecker” and accusing her of entering her bedroom “in search of sexual adventures”.
“If the worst happens, I intend to make it public,” he wrote in a letter.
‘I will be making available for publication a number of photographs, in particular some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely telling, one of Andrea in my underwear.’
Skinner’s brothers corroborated Fremlin’s confession, but Munro turned “totally against his daughter and totally in favour of him” when police arrived.
“That guy was crazy,” Lazarevich recalled. “A lot of guys like him don’t get letters written to them; in fact, he’s the only guy I ever knew who wrote letters. Most guys just say, ‘He jumped on me.'”
And he is struggling to understand why the revered writer decided to stand by the man who had abused her daughter.
Nobel Prize winner in Literature Alice Munro, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro (left), receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 2013
Munro remains a revered figure in her native Canada, but the allegations have shaken her fans.
“Obviously this tarnishes his legacy,” he said. Star Tribune.
If I had had my book at home, I would have thrown it away.
‘From that moment on, until he passed away, he received different awards and honors, and that always bothered me.
“It bothered me for years.”
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