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The second woman to publicly accuse Alice Munroe’s late husband of sexually assaulting her when she was a child says she hopes her story will encourage parents to believe their children.
Jane Murray said she was nine when Gerald Fremlin showed up at her family’s Toronto home, a few years before he married Munro. Fifty-five years later, she spoke publicly for the first time about how Fremlin later sexually abused Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, who was also nine at the time.
Murray, 64, said her experience was very different from Skinner’s. Last month, Skinner described in a Toronto Star article how she was sent back to her mother’s home every summer in the years after Fremlin assaulted her and continued to be abused by him. Her mother’s decision to stay with Fremlin after learning of the sexual abuse tarnished the reputation of one of Canada’s most famous writers. Munro died in May at the age of 92.
She said her mother immediately kicked Fremlin out of the house when he targeted Murray, who did not see him again until adulthood. Looking back now, she said she does not find the incident “particularly traumatic.”
“Growing up, I never felt like I had done anything wrong,” she said in a phone interview on Monday. “I felt completely vindicated because people believed me right away.”
Murray, who first spoke about her experience to the Toronto Star, hopes her decision to speak out will help other parents understand the importance of taking decisive action. “Alice Munro’s fame aside, everything aside, if something is going on and your child tells you, believe them and act accordingly,” she said.
It was not until after Skinner’s article was published that it became known that Fremlin, who died in 2013 at the age of 88, had pleaded guilty in 2005 to molesting his stepdaughter.
Fremlin was a close friend of Murray’s parents. They attended the University of Western Ontario together with Alice and Jim Munro, who would become Murray’s first husband and the father of her three daughters, including Andrea.
Murray’s sister, Marian Webb, said Fremlin was a frequent visitor to their home and she couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t friends with her parents. She said he never made inappropriate advances toward her and she remembered being “a little jealous” that he would send her sister postcards from his travels around the world. Now, she sees that behavior as “subtle flirting.”
Murray, who is seven years younger than Webb, said she loved receiving postcards, gifts and attention from Fremlin and considered him an uncle.
In 1969, when Fremlin was visiting, nine-year-old Maury walked into his room one morning and asked him what he wanted for breakfast. She said he pulled back the blankets and exposed himself to her. She was so shocked that she walked out of the room and started making oatmeal.
She said Fremlin then followed her to the kitchen and told her, “I shouldn’t be showing you my dick.”
“I’ve never heard an adult talk like that, use words like that,” she said. “My parents were very cool about things.”
But she remembers that Fremlin kept going. “And he said, ‘Well, you’ll have to meet me. Maybe you’d like to show me yours.'”
Murray said she left the room and woke her mother to tell her what happened. “My mother got really angry when I told her,” she said, and she immediately asked the two girls to leave the house. Weber said they waited at the end of the street until they saw Fremlin’s car drive away.
When they returned, Murray said, her parents told her that Fremlin would never come home again. After that, “they never mentioned it again,” she said.
It wasn’t until nearly two decades later that Murray saw Fremlin again, at a book launch for Munro in 1986. Munro and Fremlin had been married 10 years earlier. “I walked up to him and said, ‘You may not know me, but I’m Jane Webb,’ and he looked horrified,” she said.
She didn’t confront him about the childhood incident, but she wanted to scare him. “He scared me when I was a kid, and I wanted to look him in the eye and watch him squirm. I wanted him to be afraid of what I might do or say,” she said in an email. “I guess I wanted him to know that he wasn’t the only one with power.”
Murray has not spoken to Skinner, who was attacked by Fremlin in 1976, and Murray said Fremlin attacked Skinner several years ago. But Murray said she has always wondered if Fremlin had other victims and if anything happened to Munro’s daughter. “It was always on my mind, but I had never really thought about it seriously until I saw (Skinner’s) article,” she said.
Now, she hopes other potential victims will feel safe enough to come forward. “There’s nothing shameful about being a victim,” she said.
Years after the incident, when Murray was an adult, her mother struck up a new friendship with Fremlin. She said her relationship with her mother was strained at the time and she never confronted her mother about the friendship, which was short-lived. Webb also suspected their father of maintaining a secret friendship with Munro’s husband. Both her parents have since died.
“The real mystery is how my parents continued to enjoy his friendship even though they knew he was a pervert and needed to keep him away from their daughter,” Murray said in an email. “How he could find a wife and at least two friends who knew of his abhorrent and criminal behavior and turned a blind eye to it is beyond belief.”
But ultimately, she thanked her mother for “doing the right thing at the time,” especially when she contrasted her experience with Skinner’s.
“That was probably the most important thing she ever did for me,” she said. “It gave me the confidence to be believed, and that was so important.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Aug. 7, 2024.
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