The mayor of a small Ontario town where Nobel Prize in Literature winner Alice Munro lived is considering altering the monument honouring her legacy. Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, in a first-person account published in the Toronto Star over the weekend, alleged her mother’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her when she was just nine years old in the mid-70s. Skinner says her stepfather continued to harass and abuse her until she became a teenager. She wrote that she told her mother about the abuse when she was in her 20s, but Munro swept it under the rug and remained married to him until his death in 2013. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather. It had nothing to do with her,” Skinner wrote.Jim Ginn, mayor of Central Huron, where Munro lived most of her life, expressed shock at hearing Skinner’s story. Now, some members of the public are pushing to have Munro’s monument amended. Ginn says he is not of the opinion the monument at the Clinton Public Library needs to be tampered with, but he would “consider” it given public pushback. Munro will ultimately be remembered as a gifted author and storyteller, and he does not see a change being necessary, the mayor says, per the National Post. Nevertheless, calls for amending the monument continue to grow, “then we would consider it,” he said. It is unclear what “amendments” would be made. Munro died at the age of 92 in May of this year in Port Hope, ON, where she lived out her final years. Despite Fremlin’s letters, Munro went back to him and for years the family skirted around the topic of abuse. No one in the family spoke of it. No one wanted to tarnish Munro’s rising fame and reputation as a writer.But in 2002, Skinner became pregnant with twins and the issue could no longer be ignored. She told her mother that Fremlin would never be allowed near her children and confronted Munro with some of the horrible specifics of the abuse she faced as a child.In March 2005, Fremlin at age 80 pleaded guilty to indecent assault for abusing Skinner in 1976, per the Star. He never went to jail. He got two years of probation, a no-contact order for Skinner and barred from parks and playgrounds. “The family went back to socializing with the pedophile,” Jenny Munro, Skinner’s sister, told the publication. “My mother went on a book tour.”
