Nobel Prize-winning author's daughter harassed by her stepfather: Who is Andrea Robin Skinner?

Andrea Robin Skinner, the daughter of Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, who died about two months ago, announced that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was a child and that her mother continued their marriage even though she learned this years later.

Alice Ann Munro (10 July 1931 – 13 May 2024) was a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Her work tends to move forward and backward in time, with integrated short fiction cycles. Munro's fiction is most often set in her native Huron County in southwestern Ontario. Her stories explore human complexities in a simple prose style.

Explaining her allegations in an article published in Canada's Toronto Star newspaper, Skinner wrote that she was abused in 1976 when she was nine and her stepfather was in his 50s. Skinner stated that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, attacked him while she was sleeping. According to the article, Skinner told his real father, James Munro, but did not tell his mother. In later years, Skinner said Fremlin propositioned her, exposed himself to her, and told her about little girls in the neighborhood he liked. Skinner stated that Fremlin stopped attacking him when she reached adolescence, but she struggled with bulimia, insomnia, and migraine problems, which she attributed to abuse.

In 2005, Skinner went to the police. Fremlin, then 80, was charged with indecent assault against Skinner and pleaded guilty. He received two years probation. However, her mother, Munro, remained with Fremlin until his death in 2013.

Munro, who was considered one of the greatest short story writers of all time and won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2013, died at the age of 92. Skinner also said that she first told her mother about the abuse in 1992, when she was in her 20s, and wrote a letter to her mother after Munro expressed sympathy for a character in one of her stories who was sexually abused by her stepfather.

However, Skinner described his mother's reaction as follows: "She reacted exactly as I feared as if she had learned of an infidelity." Munro temporarily separated from Fremlin, who acknowledged the abuse in her letters but blamed it on Skinner. Skinner wrote in the article that his mother said she told him about the situation too late and that she was adamant that, no matter what, this was between him and his stepfather.

"Was she aware she was talking to a victim?"

"She believed my father had made us keep the secret to humiliate her," Skinner said. "She then told me about other children the Fremlin had 'befriended,' emphasizing his sense of personal betrayal. Did she realize she was talking to a victim and that I was her child? If she did, I "I couldn't feel it," she said.