Canadian officer says Alice Munro claimed her daughter was lying about being abused by stepfather

A retired police detective involved in the arrest 20 years ago of the husband of Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro, said Friday he was disturbed by the writer’s reaction 20 years ago when she learned her husband would be charged for sexually assaulting her daughter.

Retired Ontario Provincial Police Detective Sam Lazarevich remembers a very angry Munro accusing her daughter of lying when he visited Munro’s home in 2004 to inform the husband that he was going to be charged.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Lazarevich said Munro was furious, defended her second husband and the detective recalls being “quite surprised” by her reaction.

“’That’s your daughter. Aren’t you going to defend your daughter?’” he recalls.

The Toronto Star first reported what the now retired detective thought at the time.

Andrea Robin Skinner, Munro’s daughter with her first husband, wrote in an essay published in the Toronto Star that she had been sexually assaulted at age 9 by Munro’s second husband, Gerard Fremlin.

She alleged that he continued to harass and abuse her for the next few years, losing interest when she reached her teens. In her 20s, she told her mother about Fremlin’s abuse. But Munro, after leaving Fremlin for a time, returned and remained with him until his death, in 2013. She would explain to Skinner that she loved him too much to remain apart. Fremlin was Skinner’s stepfather.

When Munro died in May at age 92, she was celebrated worldwide as a genius whose short stories documented rare insight into her characters’ secrets, motivations, passions and cruelties, especially those of girls and women.

Munro was a source of ongoing pride for her native Canada, where a reckoning with the author’s legacy is now concentrated.

“Obviously this tarnishes her legacy,” Lazarevich said.

Lazarevich said he couldn’t wrap his head around Munro’s reaction at the time of Fremlin’s arrest. He said he was fully aware of who she was, noting she was a “local celebrity.”

“If I would have had her book at home I would have thrown it into the garbage,” Lazarevich said.

Shortly after The New York Times’ magazine published a 2004 story in which Munro gushed about Fremlin, Skinner decided to contact Ontario Provincial Police and provided them letters in which Fremlin had admitted abusing her, the Toronto Star reported in a companion news story also published last Sunday. At 80, he pleaded guilty to one count of indecent assault and received a suspended sentence — one that was not reported for nearly two decades.

Lazarevich said he has “no idea” why the arrest didn’t receive media coverage back then and that the prosecutor at the time should be asked that.

The news stunned and grieved the literary world this month.

Munro’s alma mater said Friday it has paused the endowed chair program that bears her name over the revelations the writer protected her husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter.

Western University said Andrea Robin Skinner had the school’s “unwavering support” after coming forward about her stepfather’s abuse and mother’s silence.

“At this time, we are pausing the Chair appointment as we carefully consider Munro’s legacy and her ties to Western,” said a short statement posted on its website Friday.