Originally published in the Irish Examiner.

Her second husband sexually assaulted her nine-year-old daughter. Many times. This is not in dispute. He did it and later confessed to doing it.

The daughter’s name is Andrea Robin Skinner. In the early 90s, when she had grown past the age when her stepfather was interested in sex with her, she went to the cops in Canada where the family lived, and provided them with letters her stepfather — Gerald Fremlin — had written, not just admitting the repeated crime, which started when he was in his 50s in 1976, but graphically describing it.

The graphic descriptions fitted the Humbert Humbert model of paedophile self-exculpation developed by novelist Vladimir Nabokov: It was all the kid’s fault, it was she who seduced him, she was the evil Lolita, whereas he was as close as you get to an innocent by-stander.

Not only did the perpetrator’s letters seek to portray him as the blameless victim of a nine-year-old sexual predator, they also threatened action against the now grown-up child if the issue went public.

“Andrea invaded my bedroom for sexual adventure,” Fremlin wrote. “If the worst comes to worst I intend to go public. I will make available for publication a number of photographs, notably some taken at my cabin near Ottawa which are extremely eloquent … one of Andrea in my underwear shorts.”

As it happened, he didn’t publish the pictures or make his crazy claims. The police, quite rightly, used the confessional aspect of his letters to convict him of indecent assault.

The story then moved on to Andrea’s mother — the short story writer once described as “Canada’s literary saint”, Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Few fiction writers have come close to the reputation she built in her 92 years living in Ontario.

Apparently, when her daughter told her about what had happened, Munro reacted as if she was hearing of an infidelity. “She was adamant that whatever had happened was between me and my stepfather,” Skinner later wrote. “It had nothing to do with her.”

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