‘I knew this day was going to come’: Alice Munro associates say they knew of abuse
A biographer of the Canadian writer says he was among those who knew that Munro’s daughter had been sexually abused by her stepfather.

By Sophia Nguyen
Updated July 9, 2024 at 6:38 p.m. EDT | Published July 9, 2024 at 11:23 a.m. EDT

Additional dismay reverberated through the literary world on Tuesday as it came to light that a biographer and others had known for years that Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, who died in May at 92, had long kept secret that her second husband sexually abused one of her daughters.

In an essay published last weekend in the Toronto Star, Andrea Robin Skinner, a daughter of Munro’s, wrote that her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, had sexually assaulted her starting in 1976, when she was 9 years old. And after Munro learned of the abuse from her daughter 16 years later, she reacted without sympathy to Skinner and chose to stay with Fremlin; they remained married until he died in 2013.

An extra shock was Skinner’s claim that some who knew Munro had been aware of the story for years.

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