Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro screamed at police and told them her daughter was a liar when police arrived to charge the author’s husband with sexual abuse.
The literary world has been in an uproar since Andrea Skinner revealed last week that her famous mother supported her husband Gerald Fremlin after he was convicted of abusing her own daughter from the age of nine.
The detective who charged Munro’s husband has now revealed that the Canadian writer 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 reaction, saying he “couldn’t understand her attitude.”
“That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?” 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 stayed with him after she learned about it
Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled being stunned this week by the writer’s reaction to the abuse of her own daughter
Fremlin, a cartographer, was sentenced to two years in prison and probation in 2005 after admitting sexual assault. Munro, however, remained supportive until his death in 2013, the year she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The conviction was not announced at the time, and Skinner only decided to reveal her mother’s betrayal after the author died in May of this year at the age of 92.
In a moving 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 in his fifties.
She said the first sexual assault occurred during a visit to Munro and Fremlin’s Ontario home, after Fremlin climbed into the bed where she was sleeping.
Skinner said she told her stepmother, Carole Munro, who then told her father, Jim Monro. But he, too, did nothing to confront his daughter’s abuser.
Skinner says that in the years that followed, Fremlin often exposed himself to her, telling her about her mother’s sexual needs and “about the little girls in the neighborhood he liked.”
“I didn’t know at the time that this was abuse,” Skinner wrote. “I thought I was doing the right thing to prevent abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories.
Skinner added that Fremlin lost interest when she became a teenager, but she still suffered from the effects of the abuse, developing bulimia, insomnia and migraines.
Just weeks after the Nobel laureate’s death at age 92, Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner described the allegations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a moving essay
Skinner, pictured as a child, wrote that Fremlin began sexually abusing her in 1976, when she was nine and he was in his 50s.
It wasn’t until she was in her twenties that Skinner directly confronted her 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 had feared, as if she knew of the infidelity,” Skinner recalled.
It turned out that despite my mother’s sympathy for a fictional character, she had no similar feelings for me.
“She said she was ‘told too late,’ that she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to ignore her own needs, sacrifice for her children, and compensate for men’s shortcomings.
“She was adamant that whatever happened was 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 police in 2004 after she rebelled against a laudatory magazine article Munro had written about her cartographer husband.
Fremlin had written letters to the family admitting to the abuse, but he blamed Skinner, describing her as a “homewrecker” and accusing her of visiting his bedroom “for sexual adventures.”
“If there is really no other option, I plan to go public with it,” he wrote in a letter.
“I will make some photos available for publication, particularly some photos I took in my cabin near Ottawa. They are very telling, such as a photo of Andrea in my short underwear.”
Skinner’s siblings corroborated Fremlin’s confession, but Munro reacted “strangely, totally against her daughter and totally for him” when police arrived.
“That guy was a nut,” Lazarevich recalled. “A lot of guys like him don’t write letters — in fact, he’s the only guy I’ve ever met who wrote letters. Usually the guys just say, ‘She threw herself at me.'”
And he struggles with the question of why the beloved writer chose to support the man who abused her daughter.
Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro (L), receives her Nobel Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden in 2013
Munro remains a respected figure in her native Canada, but the allegations have shocked her fans
“It’s clear that this tarnishes her legacy,” he told the Star Tribune.
‘If I had had her book at home, I would have thrown it in the trash.
‘From that moment on, until she passed away, she received all kinds of awards and honors, and that always bothered me.
‘It has bothered me for years.’