![](https://new-cdn.mamamia.com.au/mamamia-pwa.appspot.com/cms_images/variations/2789x1859.3333333333335-112750662514.jpg)
Content warning: This article discusses childhood sexual assault.
In 1976, nine-year-old Andrea Skinner, spent the summer at the home of her mother—Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro—in Ontario.
According to the now 58-year-old, as she slept in her bed one night while her mother was away, her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, climbed into the bed alongside her, and sexually assaulted her.
Munro died from Alzheimer's Disease in May this year, aged 92. Two months after her death, Skinner wrote about the rape in an essay written for the Toronto Star.
Watch: Breaking The Silence - Reporting Historical Sexual Assault by Sarah Strong. Article continues after the video.
"I was nine years old. I was a happy child — active and curious — who had only just realized I couldn’t grow up to be a sheep-herding dog, a great disappointment, as I loved both dogs and sheep," she wrote.
"The next morning [after the assault], I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d woken up with my first migraine, which developed over the years into a chronic, debilitating condition that continues to this day."