Alice Munro suspected her husband was a rapist and murderer, her daughter said, after another woman revealed she had also been abused by him as a child.
The Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author’s reputation has taken a hit since it emerged that she supported her husband Gerald Fremlin, the man who abused his own daughter from the age of nine.
Munro, who died in May at the age of 92, screamed at police and told them her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, was a liar when they arrived to accuse Fremlin of sexual abuse in 2004.
But Fremlin found himself confronted by a “lioness” mother when he exposed himself to the nine-year-old daughter of family friends while staying at her home.
“I was very lucky,” said Jane Morrey, now 64. Toronto Star“I was lucky that my mother never questioned what had happened and believed me instantly.”
Jane Morrey, 64, has come forward to reveal she too was abused by Alice Munro’s predatory husband Gerald Fremlin, who exposed himself to her when she was just nine years old.
The daughter of literary icon Alice Munro (pictured) says her stepfather sexually abused her from the age of nine and that her mother kept him after finding out.
Fremlin, a cartographer, was given a suspended sentence and two years’ probation after admitting indecently assaulting Skinner after she went to police in 2004.
But the case went unreported and Munro supported it until her death in 2013, the year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Morrey’s parents were family friends and Fremlin was a “constant visitor” to their Toronto home, she said.
Morrey’s father, Cliff Webb, had gotten a job as a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto in 1969 and the family had moved into a new house with a studio, which was where Fremlin slept on a camp bed when he came to visit.
“I walked into the studio to ask Gerry what he wanted for breakfast,” Morrey recalled.
‘I sat at my father’s desk while he asked me what the options were.
‘Suddenly, Fremlin pulled back the sheets, revealing his erection, which he was stroking.
“I had never seen an erect penis before and I was in total shock. I instinctively raised my hand to cover my face, but not before seeing his expression.
“It was a look I can only describe now as hopeful. What I remember is how strangely calm he was. I muttered something about oatmeal and left the room.”
Munro defended Fremlin, pictured, after he was found guilty of indecent assault against her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, in 2005.
Skinner, pictured, said her mother told her “our misogynistic culture was to blame if it expected her to deny her own needs and compensate for the failings of men.”
Skinner, photographed as a child, wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was 50.
Morrey fled to the kitchen where Fremlin caught up with her and sat down opposite her.
—Well, Janey, I guess I shouldn’t have shown you my penis, he said.
“I kept staring at my bowl of oatmeal, not knowing what I should do,” she recalled.
‘Then he said, ‘Well, you’ve seen mine, perhaps you’d like to show me yours?’
“So I said, ‘Excuse me a minute.'”
The girl ran upstairs to her mother, who screamed before storming downstairs and throwing Fremlin out of the house.
“Your mother was a lioness,” Webb told her daughter when she asked her about it years later.
“Fremlin started crying,” Morrey said.
‘He said it was supposed to be just a game and he thought I would never tell.
My mother said, “That’s exactly what you pedophiles are hoping for, isn’t it?”
Skinner says Munro suspected Fremlin of raping and murdering 12-year-old Lynne Harper in 1959.
Morrey believed her mother, Nellie Thompson, was already distrustful of Fremlim and warned her daughters to be careful on family camping trips with him.
Morrey’s older sister, Marianne, told the Star: “I remember my mother saying to me, ‘Don’t make shadows. Don’t turn on that flashlight. Gerry will be watching.'”
But other warning signs apparently went unnoticed by parents.
Morrey was just six or seven years old when Fremlin began sending her cards and gifts, one of which was a recording of R. Dean Taylor’s 1968 hit “I Gotta See Jane.”
“When I listen to it now, I’m surprised my parents didn’t wonder why a 44-year-old man would give an eight-year-old a recording like this,” he said.
‘The lyrics tell the story of a man desperate to return to the ‘arms that once held me’ and ‘when love and happiness were mine, I’ve got to find that world of Jane and me the way it used to be.’
“It made me feel special,” she said. “What happened between us was a classic example of sexual harassment.”
In 1976, Morrey’s parents separated and his mother inexplicably reconnected with Fremlin, inviting him and Munro to her new home in Fergus, Ontario.
“While I was shocked that she would reconnect with a pedophile, I never said anything,” Morrey said.
“I knew instinctively that she would no longer support me. It would be impossible to be her friend without denying that what he did, by his own admission, was truly criminal and had an impact.”
But Munro’s possessiveness meant that the renewed relationship did not last.
“My mother told me that one day Gerry called her from a pay phone because he didn’t want Alice to see his number on her long-distance bill,” she said.
‘Alice was consumed by jealousy and made his life miserable.’
It wasn’t until 1992 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 briefly separated from Fremlin and told his daughter that he had been accused of exposing himself to a 14-year-old girl.
She also shared her fears that her husband was responsible for one of Canada’s most infamous child murders.
Twelve-year-old Lynne Harper was found raped and murdered in June 1959 in a forest outside the Fremlin family’s hometown of Clinton, Ontario.
Steven Truscott, then 14, spent nearly five decades behind bars for the crime until he was exonerated in 2007.
Munro was eventually reassured to learn that her future husband had sent letters to his parents from Alaska that summer, and Skinner’s investigative work has been unable to determine his exact movements.
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.
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”.
Skinner wonders whether even rape and murder would have been enough to make Canada’s most celebrated writer turn her back on her husband.
“I thought she would stay with him no matter what he had done to me and others,” she said.