Munro accused daughter of lying: ex-cop

Retired OPP officer recalls author’s angry reaction to husband’s sexual abuse charge

- BETSY POWELL AND DEBORAH DUNDAS

Andrea Skinner, one of Alice Munro's daughters, filed a sexual abuse complaint against her mother's husband, Gerry Fremlin, in 2004. OPP detective Sam Lazarevich investigated the complaint.

For years, celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro and her family lived with the secret knowledge that her husband, Gerry Fremlin, molested her daughter when she was a child.

Then came a knock on the door in late 2004.

The Ontario Provincial Police detective was invited into the white cottage-style home in Clinton, Ont. Inside, he informed the couple that he intended to charge Fremlin with sexually abusing Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner.

Thirteen years earlier, Skinner had written a letter to her mother describing how Fremlin had molested her in an upstairs bedroom of the home where the future Nobel laureate now stood alongside her 80-year-old husband, facing the detective.

Fremlin “didn’t say a word and just kind of stood there,” retired OPP detective Sam Lazarevich said.

Munro exploded. She went “sideways, totally

against her daughter, and all pro for him,” Lazarevich recalled this week. Munro was “yelling, she was mad”; she accused her daughter of lying and called her names, he said.

Earlier this month, the Star published Skinner’s account of Fremlin’s sexual abuse, which began in 1976. After she disclosed the abuse to her mother in a letter in 1992, when she was 25, Fremlin responded with letters of his own, admitting to sexual touching but claiming Skinner initiated it — when she was nine.

In 2004, Skinner turned those letters over to police, leading to Lazarevich’s investigation and Fremlin’s quick guilty plea.