Last July, the Toronto Star published Andrea Robin Skinner’s account of her sexual abuse, as a child, by Alice Munro’s husband, Gerald Fremlin—abuse that Munro, her mother, ultimately chose to overlook in her decision to stay with Fremlin. In the days and weeks after that revelation, one other name was added to the ledger of people who had betrayed Skinner: Robert Thacker.
A professor of English and Canadian studies, Thacker is best known for his biography of the Nobel Prize–winning short story writer, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. It emerged that Thacker had been made aware of the abuse before the book’s publication in 2005, the same year Fremlin pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assault, and opted against including it. One critic called it “an astonishingly perplexing decision.”
