Alice Munro's 'disturbing' reaction after daughter accused the literary icon's husband of sexually abusing her
Nobel prize-winning author Alice Munro screamed at police and told them her daughter was a liar when they arrived to charge the novelist's husband with sexual abuse, it has emerged.
The literary world has been reeling since Andrea Skinner revealed last week that her celebrated mother stood by husband Gerald Fremlin after he was convicted of abusing her own daughter from the age of nine.
The detective who arrived to lay charges against Munro's husband has now revealed that the Canadian author was 'yelling, she was mad' when police arrived at her Ontario home in 2004.
Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled being stunned at her response and said he 'couldn't wrap my head around 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 of it
Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich recalled this week being stunned at the writer's response to the abuse against her own daughter
Fremlin, a cartographer, received a suspended sentence and probation for two years in after admitting indecent assault in 2005, but Munro stood by him until his death in 2013 - the year she 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 in his 50s.
She said the first sexual assault happened 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 following years, Skinner says Fremlin often exposed himself to her, told her about her mother's sexual needs, and 'about the little 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 preventing abuse by averting my eyes and ignoring his stories.
Skinner added that Fremlin lost interest in her when she became a teenager, but she continued to suffer 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 accusations against her late stepfather Gerald Fremlin in a harrowing 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 was not until she was in her 20s that Skinner directly confronted her mother about the abuse that had happened after reading one of her short stories about a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
'She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity,' Skinner recalled.
'As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me.
'She said that she had been 'told too late', she loved him too much, and that our misogynistic culture was to blame if I expected her to deny her own needs, sacrifice for her children and make up for the failings of men.
'She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her.'
Munro returned to her husband after a short separation but Skinner went to police in 2004 after being revolted by a gushing magazine piece Munro had written about her cartographer husband.
Fremlin had written letters to the family in which he admitted to the abuse but blamed it on Skinner, describing her as a 'homewrecker' and accusing her of going into his bedroom 'for sexual adventure.'
'If the worst comes to worst I intend to go public,' he wrote in one letter.
'I will make available for publication a number of photographs, notably some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely eloquent, one of Andrea in my underwear shorts.'
Skinner's siblings corroborated Fremlin's confession but Munro went 'sideways, totally against her daughter, and all pro for him,' when police arrived.
'That the guy was a nut,' Lazarevich recalled. 'A lot of guys like him, they don't write letters — in fact, he's the only guy I came across who wrote letters. Mostly the guys just say, 'She threw herself at me'.'
And he is struggling to understand why the revered writer chose to stand by the man who had abused her daughter.
Alice Munro, laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, represented by her daughter Jenny Munro (L) 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 rocked her fans
'Obviously this tarnishes her legacy,' he told the Star Tribune.
'If I would have had her book at home I would have thrown it into the garbage.
'From that point on, until she passed away, she'd be getting different awards and honors, and it always bugged me.
'It bugged me for years.'
