The disgraced CanLit author collaborated in her own daughter's hell. Because stand by your man and it's always the woman's fault, eh?
Canada mourned when revered native daughter Alice Munro died in May. The renowned short story author famously never wrote a novel. Although I never became a Munro fan myself, I will likely look for her short stories as I’m curious as to what I missed when I was young, dumb, and full of cheap beer.
Yes, I’ll read her, even knowing she valued her pedo husband, Gerald Fremlin, over her own daughter when she learned what he’d done to her.
Many artists are deeply flawed human beings who nevertheless produce great, moving work. I regard Michael Jackson as one of the greatest dancers and entertainers of all time. His dancing is second to none. Suck it, Astaire!
Munro’s dirty little secret is tremendously disappointing: That she Stood By Her Man when she learned how her husband had molested her daughter (his stepdaughter). In the time-honored fashion of juvenile incest victims, Andrea now-Skinner didn’t break the silence until 1992, at age 25, when she finally told her mother.
Munro didn’t leave Gerald Fremlin, her second husband, not even when he entered a guilty plea and avoided a trial at age 80 after Skinner filed charges. Munro left him, briefly, in what amounts to little better than an emotional tantrum at the initial revelation; it became all about herself and how humiliated she felt. Others learned of it but one one talked about it. The confederacy of silence extended to the Canadian media, which chose not to report the trial to protect the cherished literary icon.
Munro knew Fremlin’s abuse wasn’t just a one-off; friends informed her that her darling hubby had exposed himself to their own teenage daughter. She asked him about it, and, as Meghan Daum notes on her Substack, he denied it, and when she asked if he’d ever done it to her daughter, he claimed ‘She’s not my type.’
Fremlin once drove Skinner to the airport after molesting her and tried to get her to expose herself to him; she refused. He tried to get her to tell him details about her ‘sex life’. She was nine years old.
He lost interest when she turned into a woman in adolescence. When Skinner finally told the truth, he, in the time-honored manner of child molesters, blamed Skinner. She “invaded my bedroom for sexual pleasure,” he claimed. He compared her to Lolita and called her a ‘homewrecker’.
Munro let it go. She learned of other allegations of exposure in ‘friendships’ with other children. But it was always all about herself rather than her daughter’s insane trauma and the filth she was married to. Munro felt betrayed by her daughter, and suspected her husband had made everyone keep the secret to ‘humiliate’ herself.
Munro stood by her man in the time-honored manner of many mothers with pedophile husbands. Everyone protected her. The ‘love of her life’, himself emotionally distant to Munro, was of greatest importance. The public wasn’t told the truth until weeks after her death.
“Let me tell you something about the rich. They are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked, and the same is as easily said about the famous, rich or not. When you’re widely loved and revered, your many allies will circle the wagons to protect you from your sins. Alice Munro didn’t know about the abuse as it was happening, but she knew she was sleeping with a practicing pedophile. It’s unlikely she did any more to try and protect others than she did her own daughter, who she must have known was at risk.
Her post-crime sin is not uncommon for women of her generation.
A man is more important than your daughter’s safety or right to a sane, happy life.
Mamas can be such good little allies
Andrea Skinner and I both came of age as children of the 1970s, teenagers and young adults of the 1980s. I learned an ugly fact at age fourteen: Incestuous relatives, especially fathers and stepfathers, were far more common than was commonly known.
It might have been a small act of God that I should just happened to have read a Reader’s Digest article on incestuous parents during the summer of 1977, just before I entered high school. The article stated that step/father-daughter incest occurred more than people generally understood, and that the percentage of families with this problem was estimated to be as high as 25%.
Twenty-five percent???
I talked to my mother about it. Shortly after, it came as less of a shock in my freshman year to find the article’s evidence: I knew girls who claimed they were being molested by their fathers.
The late ‘70s marked the beginning of the end of the silence of the lambs. Other articles about the prevalence of incest began peppering the American media and later, in the early to mid'-80s, the Catholic pedophile priest dam broke and the deluge hasn’t stopped since.
Incest was happening right where I went to school in my small midwestern town. It began with my friend Paulina who confessed to me in the smoking area that her father was coming to her bedroom at night.
Then it was others. And more. I told my close friend Bobby about it. Bobby was the school Rona Barrett who knew everything about everybody. He added two more names to the list of girls I knew, or knew of, who were being molested—if not by a father figure than a brother or cousin or not-so-funny uncle.
I learned how prevalent thoughts of suicide were in other teenage girls; my mother and I called the Suicide Hotline together to ask how we could support these girls better. They encouraged us to tell them to tell others. I did. I told Paulina to tell her mother. She did.
Her mother called her a liar.
Paulina’s family went to church, so I told her to tell her minister.
He didn’t believe her either.
The confederacy of silence and denial encircled Paulina at the same time as it enveloped Andrea Skinner across Lake Erie, on the other side of the border.
I only visited Paulina’s house once, and barely glimpsed her father, who I avoided, but he saw me. He told Paulina—as she repeated with a grin the next day at school, having no clue how sick and screwed-up it was—that he’d said I was pretty cute.
I wanted to vomit.
She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t believed.
I imagine the truth back then seemed too horrific, especially within one’s own family. Adults were still plausibly in denial about this formerly dirtiest little secret. My mother had told me briefly about incest during my pre-adolescent facts of life discussion. She told me—because neither she nor anyone else knew better—that incest was actually quite rare. It struck me as one of the most horrible things that can happen to a kid, the worst sort of betrayal. I couldn’t imagine my own father doing that to me. How could any other?
I graduated high school and moved on to college. By then, the mainstream media had latched on to the not-so-rare horror. In fact, it became suspiciously too common; stories proliferated of women divorcing their husbands claiming he was sexually abusing the kids. I began to wonder whether all of them were telling the truth, knowing how contentious divorce is. Some divorced their husbands because of it, others seemed to drag it out as an allegation later as if to convince the court their soon-to-be-exes were monsters.
The tales of terror continued from the Catholic Church. Pedophiles, it seemed, were everywhere. Right where you were.
I was outraged to learn how many mothers learned about the abuse at the time and did nothing to stop it!
They said nothing. They did nothing. Some took out their rage on their daughters, blaming them rather than their loathsome husbands. (It’s always the woman’s fault!)
I was especially outraged to learn that some were even a little relieved, as their own burden of sexual duties decreased.
How can a mother allow this to happen to her child?
Isn’t rape supposed to be, like, a fate worse than death or something? How can mothers look the other way, and why do feminists who damn him, nevertheless defend the guilty collaborator wives with all the classic disingenuous feminist cheesy excuses?
She was afraid of him, she was too financially dependent on him, she loves him, it’s hard to believe, she doesn’t want to believe.
All understandable feelings. How do you reconcile the person you married with a monster?
But this is female collusion. Damning the perps while giving their enablers a free pass ignores the other half of the problem: The women who nevertheless allow this to happen. Alice Munro didn’t know of the abuse at the time, but she should have had a damn good idea her daughter was in danger. Instead she chose to believe Fremlin when he claimed her daughter ‘wasn’t his type’.
What more did she need, to find him in bed with her paralyzed daughter? He all but admitted Skinner, and countless other little girls, were in danger from the man whose bed she shared.
How can a mother continue to allow it, after the shock is over and she’s had time to process the feelings? Not all wives are in danger for leaving a man. Although back then fewer women were able to carry on financially. So I’ll spot them that. But if she knew it’s going on, if it’s a center of panic in her solar plexus on the verge of eruption, how can she do nothing?
How do you have sex with that person, knowing he’s pushed his penis into your daughter? Or your niece? Or the little neighbor girl?
Women, even today, have always collaborated in other females’ private hell.
One story may be just an allegation, but two or more are wake-up calls to investigate further. Children can lie just as adults can, and some do; but many, many kids are telling the truth and, like Paulina’s adult collaborators, some mothers choose not to believe.
I know. Paulina wasn’t the only girl I called the Suicide Hotline about.
Skinner’s biological father learned about the abuse from Skinner’s stepmother, whom she told. He ordered another daughter never to leave young Andrea alone with Fremlin when they visited.
Skinner’s absent father did something, at least.
In the end, the circled wagon owners were many: Skinner’s mother, her siblings, and her extended family. Surely others knew: The neighbors who kept their kids away from Fremlin, but who respected the Canadian Literary Icon too much, or were afraid of the blowback for ‘making a fuss’. At some point after learning the truth about her own daughter’s abuse, Munro fully understood what she was married to, what was sharing her bed. She never gave up on Fremlin, valued his presence more than she did her daughter’s well-being. The private scandal was always about Munro herself; she was annoyed that she couldn’t see her grandchildren across town. Her only ride was her husband, and Skinner had prohibited him from coming anywhere near her kids; not even to drop off their mother.
There was no such thing as taxis back then, of course.
It outrages me still, fifty years after Paulina, to find people who consider themselves good human beings circling the wagons to protect child molesters, whether there’s a celebrity in the family or not. It outrages me that the Canadian media didn’t report on Fremlin’s guilty plea (he avoided a trial) to the indecent assault charges that had begun in 1976, so that people could know while Munro was still alive that she was a protector of a child molester, that she valued the ‘love of her life’ over her own flesh and blood. Fremlin spent no time in jail because, probably, he was Munro’s husband. Munro died eulogized around the world by those who didn’t know she protected her pedophile.
The feminist confederacy of silence and collaboration
What message does it send about pedophilia when women collaborate so easily to protect the abuser rather than the victim? Especially their own flesh and blood? Did these women never imagine how it might have felt had their own father come to their beds late at night and threatened them not to tell? It may have been too painful to consider; but if something sparked the contemplation, then they should have stood up and said, “Not my daughter!”
How traumatic must we believe pedophilia is, really, when so many women and feminists actively collude to protect both the abuser and the collaborators? Girls aren’t the only victims; plenty of boys are too, especially in the Catholic Church. If we’re going to damn the perpetrator, we must equally hold the feminine collaborators responsible too.
Especially today. This is 2024, not 1976.
I don’t know if Alice Munro was a ‘monster’, as Meghan Daum and others have alleged. If she was, there are a lot, and you know plenty of them.
You just don’t know it.
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