Family Healing

My Story Within Andrea’s

Andrew Sabiston

This is a longer version of my essay that appeared in the Toronto Star on July 13, 2024, which had to be shortened for the paper’s word count limit.

Forty-nine years. How could the truth about the horrors suffered by my stepsister Andrea have been kept silent for so long? In the nearly five decades I’ve spent inside this story, I knew about just one of those horrors – the first assault that started it all – but I learned volumes about silence.

Silence can seem like the best way to protect someone you care about (as in: don’t talk about painful things and you won’t hurt them). Or silence can be tribal, insidious, and used to protect the wrong people (as in: a conspiracy of silence right out of a Hollywood movie). Silence is learned generationally. It masquerades as a treatment but is in fact a cancer.

I can’t speak to the motivation of others and their silence in Andrea’s story. I can speak to mine. It goes back to my childhood with her.

I was 10 years old in the summer of 1975 and visiting my father in Ontario when my mother called from Victoria with news. She’d met someone and fallen in love. His name was Jim. In a few weeks, when I’d be returning from my dad’s, we’d be moving from the little house she and I lived in, to Jim’s much bigger house. Best thing of all… I’d be getting a new sister. Andrea.

Since my parents’ divorce when I was an infant, I’d been an only child spending most of the year with my single mother. Episodes of The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family spoke to me. I’d longed for a sibling close in age to grow up with, to have that kind of fun with, and now I had one, close even in name. Andrea even had two older sisters, Sheila and Jenny – though they were already out of the house and beginning their grown-up lives. What a big family I suddenly had!

Andrea and I instantly got along. She was warmth and love and laughter – my best audience, who cracked up at all my dumb jokes and antics. She made me happy in this new home. Even our lives as children of divorce followed a curious kind of symmetry, with both of us spending the summers with a parent in Ontario and the school year together in Victoria. We marveled that we were like twins. The way our lives were entwined gave us both a sense of belonging. Everything was just right.

When we returned from our respective Ontario parents the following summer, 9-year-old Andrea told 11-year-old me what her stepfather had done to her. She tried to make light of it. But I knew that what she was telling me was bad, very bad. I told her she had to tell my mother. Right now. Jim was at work, but my mother was home upstairs. I remember following Andrea up the stairs and listening from the hallway.

I heard her cries and my mother asking her what happened. “He touched me.” “Where?” “Here.” Her cries became screams, sobs. It was terrifying. But once this was over, I thought, everything would be okay. Our parents would take charge.

After her harrowing disclosure, Andrea and I didn’t speak of it together any further. She didn’t bring it up with me, and I knew that I never wanted to cause her that kind of pain again by making her talk about it. Besides, there wasn’t any need. There was nothing left for us kids to do.

Building on the bond we’d formed before that summer, our happy and close sibling relationship continued to grow. The resilience of children astonishes me, when now, as an adult, I look back on that time and see how the two of us put Andrea’s abuse into a silo and set it aside. This wasn’t the least bit conscious. We were probably just following our parents’ lead in what kinds of conversations happened in our house, and what didn’t. There was never a family discussion about it. And there was certainly never a family pact entered into to deliberately keep the abuse a secret from the famous writer, as some who seek to sensationalize have implied. At this point, our family’s story was, sadly and simply, a textbook case of childhood sexual abuse within a family, where the silence around the incident became hardwired circuitry.

The next summer came; Andrea was 10; I, 12. I assumed things had been dealt with by the adults, and Andrea and I once again returned to be with our Ontario families. I know what you’re thinking: WTF? How could that possibly have happened? It would be years until I’d find out.

Returning to Victoria after that summer, there was none of the upset of the previous return. Andrea seemed fine, and my life with her going forward from there continued to be close, with lots of shared friends between us, loads of laughter, and the two of us as best friends in the home we lived in.

I left that home at 18. Andrea followed me to Toronto after her high school graduation two years later. It was 1984. Sticking to our established norms, I eagerly introduced her to my new friends, she instantly fit in, and we still never spoke about her abuse. To bring it up would be to hurt her. It wasn’t something I could even imagine her wanting to talk about. It was so far in the past now. Dealt with. I had no idea that’s not how she felt.

Her own silence kept her from telling me that the reason she’d followed me to Toronto was to be near someone she felt safe with. It broke my heart years later to find that out. Still does. How could I have been so clueless? When I asked her this very question recently, Andrea – who loves a good analogy – said of the two of us in our early twenties then and just starting our adult lives, “We were like hatchling turtles, scrambling our way to the sea. They don’t have time to look up and check to see how everyone else is doing. They’ve gotta just go, go, go.” Life certainly was that. I moved to LA, she traveled in South America, and we were off now on our own journeys.

In the years from 1992-2005, when I heard about Andrea’s letter to her mother telling her what Gerald Fremlin had done to her, about the appalling letters he’d sent to Jim, my mother, Sheila and Jenny, and about Andrea formally charging him, I assumed all those events were related to the 1976 assault that Andrea had told me about. When I gave my statement to the police recounting Andrea’s disclosure to me, it felt good to support her in the action she was now taking publicly. It felt like the end of the silence around her abuse. It wasn’t.

In this whole time since my mother’s marriage to Jim, the number of occasions I’d seen Andrea’s mother and stepfather was in the single digits. The two families weren’t close, and because of the incident I’d known about since childhood, I never felt pride, comfort nor the desire to tell people that the famous writer was a part of my family. That feeling set like concrete when I learned of her mother’s choice to stay with the pedophile. The lack of closeness between our families made me think that the toxins of Andrea’s mother’s family didn’t spill over into ours. Wrong.

When Andrea’s estrangement from our family began in 2006, I connected it more with other family dynamics than her ’76 assault. The outward indicators to my eye were that the latter had been dealt with: Andrea had returned again and again to Ontario for her summers as a child and a teen; she’d travelled to Australia with her mother and stepfather on a holiday in her late teens; she’d worked in her father’s bookstore as a young woman in her 20’s. Through it all I’d known her has happy and content. I’ve since learned just how many contortions she’d put herself through to appear that way with the aim of trying to live quietly with what had happened to her, to avoid bringing hurt and shame upon others. Or, as she’s said in her Gatehouse essay, “For so long I’d been telling myself that holding my pain alone had at least helped other family members in important ways, and that the greatest good for the greatest number was, after all, the greatest good.” How many others have lived, or are living right now, in families while performing this untenable altruistic charade?

It hurt that Andrea wanted not to be contacted. Here was silence, now amplified. Total. But when that request came from her, I saw respecting it as my way to help her. The hardwired circuitry of not talking about difficult things kept me from stepping over the boundary she was establishing. Looking back now to those years in the late 2000s, I wish I’d asked her if her request was related to her abuse in ‘76. But I didn’t. We respect boundaries. We don’t cross them.

Knowing now that there was so much more suffering Andrea had endured than that first assault is my deepest point of pain in our shared story. What would she have told me if I’d asked? Anything? Everything? All of the horrors I’ve learned about this year? Talking about it today, Andrea herself says she isn’t sure how much she might have told me. Neither of us had the tools then. Those wouldn’t come until The Gatehouse.

It was 2014 when Jenny told me and Sheila about this place she’d found: The Gatehouse. The three of us went there for a healing circle to share our grief over not having Andrea in our lives. So ingrained was the silence around the story of her abuse that this was the first time the three of us had spoken about it.

Entering that room to sit in our circle, I still believed my young boy’s version of events – that the abuse had been dealt with by the adults by the time the summer of ’77 came. I was shocked to learn what had really happened. Jim had refused to call Alice and tell her what Andrea had told my mother. He’d also forbidden (his word) my mother and Jenny, each separately, from contacting her. They’d both argued with him and he had yelled at them; he feared telling Alice would “kill her.” It breaks my heart for them that they were bullied into inaction. And I was horrified to learn that the way Jim insisted on dealing with 10-year-old Andrea’s wish to return to see her mother that second summer was to send her older sister Sheila back with her to Ontario as her chaperone. What an impossible position for their father to put both girls in. Lastly, I was disgusted to hear some of the details in the letters Gerald Fremlin had written to the family. I became profoundly upset at myself for having known about those letters, but never asking to see them. My reaction to seeing photos of excerpts of them printed in The Sunday Star was visceral. I averted my eyes and couldn’t read them. I didn’t want that man in my head, not for a second. But that’s protecting me, not Andrea. I needed to face this monster, and I have now.

Following our Gatehouse-led therapy, Jenny, Sheila and I were guided to write to Andrea separately, expressing our feelings. We were counselled to have no expectation of hearing back from her. The messages weren’t sent with strings attached. They opened the door to healing and change.

When Andrea reestablished contact I was grateful to have her back in my life. She seemed healed. She seemed happy. We resumed our close relationship. But that circuitry of silence remained soldered around the subject of her abuse. I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t want to upset her, didn’t want to damage all that private healing she’d done. I’ve since learned from Andrea that while there was now more trust for us than there’d been, she was still waiting for us to break that damned silence.

In April 2024, I saw the video Andrea, Jenny and their friend, filmmaker Rebecca Garrett, made in 2018 (now posted on The Gatehouse website). It hadn’t been shared with me until that debut screening that Jenny and Andrea had invited me to. It was devastating to see Andrea speak of her suffering in that video. I’d never heard her speak about it. Then, a few weeks later, when Andrea shared the article she’d written for The Gatehouse with me, my mother, Sheila and Jenny, I was shocked all the more to learn how much I didn’t know. Horror on horror. I wrote Andrea this text:

<< How you endured all of that to be who you are today, and still every bit the treasure you were in our childhoods, is a miracle. YOU are a miracle in the strength and power you found to heal. You telling your story will shock. It will inspire. It will save. And it will move mountains. Your power is only just beginning. I love you with all my heart. Can’t wait to talk with you when you are ready. >>

We’re talking now. All the time. All of us. About it all.

As Andrea says in her Toronto Star essay, “Children are still silenced far too often. In my case, my mother’s fame meant that the secrecy spread far beyond the family. Many influential people came to know something of my story yet continued to support, and add to, a narrative they knew was false.” I have never been among those whose silence was motivated by protecting Alice Munro. When this story began, I was 11 years old – too young to have read any of her works. As I grew older, knowing what I knew and further came to know, I felt an aversion to reading her. I’ve never read her works, and so to me, she’s not a writer whose talent I need to grapple with. To me, she’s a parent who failed her daughter. That she used the misery of that failing as material for some of her works means I will never read them.

There are very big takeaways in our family’s story: healing takes courage; healing is bloody hard work; healing takes a village; healing can’t happen in the presence of silence. My silence was motivated out of wanting to protect Andrea from the hurt of speaking about what she’d suffered. It wasn’t a comfortable silence. There was a fog of immobility around it. The Gatehouse, and society’s progress around bringing the issue of childhood sexual abuse out into the open, has helped me see how misguided that thinking was. I hope our family’s story can help others in similar places see the biggest take away of all… healing is possible.

Jenny – my Toronto Star story, revised

When my sister Andrea was eight, our mother introduced her to Gerry. They talked about feminism. Gerry shot down Andrea’s argument that girls could do anything boys could do. Afterward she was in tears. “See?“ said her mother, “You’re so intelligent, he treats you like an adult.”

The sexual assault happened the next summer. She was nine, he was fifty-two. “Don’t tell your mother” he said.

I was not around much by then. I’d left home at 18 and got work in Montreal. I knew that Mom was crazy about Gerry. I was surprised she wanted to live with him in rural Ontario, having left over twenty years ago, never wanting to return. Gerry impressed me as somewhat pompous and arrogant, but he could be amusing.

One night I had a dream that my little sister was at the door of my Montreal apartment. Her eyes were wide and she said nothing, just stood there in the hall like a ghost, and raised her hands, palms out. Bloodless strips of skin hung from her arms. I thought she had harmed herself and needed help. When I woke up I called my mother in Clinton, Andrea was out with Gerry, everything was fine. I wanted to believe that.

A year later when I heard Dad’s vague version of the abuse (You know little girls, they like to flirt and jump around) I ran to the phone to call my mother. He grabbed the receiver from my hand. “Don’t you dare tell your mother! You’ll kill her!”, a familiar phrase throughout my childhood. Whenever we misbehaved it was, “You’re killing your mother!”

I let it go. This is a giant, sickening mistake that I turn over in my mind.

In the next half hour Dad explained he’d recovered from the emotional breakup with Mom.  Now they both had new partners. He was afraid she would crack up and did not want to be blamed for wrecking her new relationship. He also thought Andrea might have made the story up, or exaggerated. Last but not least, Mom was famous, and it would be a huge scandal.

Certainly there was no fear of ongoing psychological harm to my sister. No-one had heard of such a thing. No-one bothered to research the problem. It was just an embarrassing thing that shouldn’t have happened. They wanted to forget about it. Dad’s new wife conducted intense interviews with the child, who began to retract and minimize the story.

When my sister was 12 Gerry started a strange conversation about how they hadn’t “seen” much of each other lately. As if a break-up was happening. After that it was still a sick relationship, with the mental torture that this type of predator specializes in.

My sister showed a compassion far beyond what Gerry was capable of, something he used to gain advantage. It was her maturity and forgiving nature that later on brought her need to tell the story into question. “Why did you wait so long? What is to gain? Here’s this poor old person whose life you’re going to ruin.” “Do you want to be defined by this your whole life?” Meanwhile, the child’s brain’s amygdala has been enlarged with stress, and neural pathways already laid down in patterns of fear and panic. So yes, it defines you.

When she was 25 in 1992 my sister tried again to break the silence and get free. She had some help from a psychologist and finally, some support from her family. She wrote a loving letter to her mother, minimizing what had happened. She apologized for keeping “the secret” so long, as if that were her fault. But this news always feels like a bomb, and she dropped a bomb.

My mother left him immediately, leaving the letter on the table for him to read. The rest of the family breathed a sigh of relief, thinking things would be different, difficult, but truthful. Mother and child reunion. No more secrets and lies. Instead, Andrea’s needs were cast aside as frantic phone calls went back and forth between my mother and Gerry. It was TOO LATE. They’d loved each other for too long! While her daughter was grown up and could live without her, Mom’s partner was threatening to kill himself. Meanwhile he sent revolting letters to the family, admitting his guilt and defending himself for being “unconventional” sexually, and that my sister was a“Lolita”.

I wrote to Gerry shortly after Andrea did and received this reply:

“I think that Alice and I are by and large psychological basket cases of some kind, as evidenced by the rows we have… But basket case or not, Alice is one of the greatest artists of this age.

We had a sort of a pedagogical theory to the effect that Andrea was a person, not a child i. e. not a child as we were children in a very repressive adult world. The general idea was that no subjects, questions or language were barred…I came to the conclusion that on her own initiative she was sexually interested in me…The sexual event was largely in continuity with our pedagogical theory of treating children as persons.

All I can think of day and night is that I have lost Alice and we are ruined. I would have no difficulty committing suicide except… what it would do to her.”

Here followed about 3 months of hysteria. Letters from Gerry sent to the family blaming Andrea and me for revealing “the secret” in order to shorten our mother’s life, get rid of him and collect Alice’s money. These letters were finally a chance to see what a sicko he was. My dad was horrified, but then he put the letters in a drawer and seemed to forget them right away.

How different things would have been if 16 years before, I had done the right thing and told Mom that Gerry was abusing her daughter. It would have been awful, but it would have been so much better.

Before going back to Gerry Alice had relied on Andrea as confidant and comfort. Andrea even agreed to see them both occasionally after a few years. The rest of the family accepted the way things stood. But when my sister became pregnant she could not bear to be near her abuser, her mother or her father. They all wondered, Why was Andrea being such a tyrant?

In 2005, her abuser was 80. The Ontario Provincial Police brought charges. When police came to the door, Alice screamed, defended Gerry and called her daughter a liar. They charged him under the law as it stood in 1976 when the penalty was lighter than it is now, and it was lighter for molesting girls than boys. He couldn’t be charged for other things like indecent exposure. A few hours at the police station, and later, a day in court. He pleaded guilty, as his own letters detailing the abuse were proof enough. Travel restrictions, psychological counselling, parole hearings.

I was one of the few who had spoken to Gerry about the abuse and his vile letters. When confronted he had said “I was crazy at the time I wrote those letters”. But he had, true to his bureaucratic custom, typed and copied them in triplicate. Adding addenda, and even a colophon! The tone was grandiose, as if defending an upstanding citizen from a crude feminist mob. They had all the rationality of a psychopath. I was happy to learn of them and taped them up where Andrea had cut them to ribbons. Here was our proof. We gave them to the police in 2005. Later I sent copies to Mom before I estranged myself for two years.

Alice and Gerry never married but she proudly referred to“my husband” to the media, and how tolerant he was of her writing habit.

I remember Andrea on the phone one time. She was in her thirties, but what I heard was a nine- year-old’s desperate need. I had been visiting Alice and Gerry, and though I could no longer stay in their house, I had lunch with them. “But they’re DISGUSTING!” she cried. “I deserve love! I deserve love!” That cry for help will never leave me. I can never excuse the fact of my attachment to my mother, how that made me still attached to him.

I told my mother and Gerry how Andrea shook with fear knowing that they were going to come to a family event, welcomed by all. How for years she reacted physically with terror to seeing an envelope from either one of them, or to her mother’s voice on the radio. I was often trying to bridge the impossible gap between Mom and Andrea, to get Mom to understand how serious and life-long it is, not to protect your child. I think she believed her own childhood, being scared of beatings, was as bad or worse, and that excused her. At times she was remorseful. She was getting more confused. Gerry, the absolute mastermind of our family’s destruction, was now acting as her servant, and trying to figure out what went wrong with everything. Then he went ahead and died.

The family suffered from Andrea being estranged. Her silence was the perfect response to the people who silenced her, who demanded she live a lie, the lie that everything was fine, the lie that kept us safe. We didn’t want to know how bad things actually were for her.

In October 2014, I was worried about my own sanity. I couldn’t live with what I had done. I found the Gatehouse by googling adult survivors of CSA. My brother and older sister Sheila came too. We were not even sure that we, as siblings of the victim, deserved to be helped. We sat in a circle and really listened to each other. After that I spoke at the 2015 Gatehouse conference. I hoped, but did not expect to be forgiven by the little sister I did not protect. We built a beautiful walking labyrinth at the Gatehouse, and Andrea came to the opening. I felt such joy then, and I still do, at the reunion. Our parents were told about it, and were glad.

Now, like so many I am overwhelmed by the courage of my sister Andrea in reaching out to media. Her mission, and our part in it, has never been about knocking down the great author. It is about helping a child, whether he or she is still a child, or grown up, or grown old. I feel if our family’s story helps one child crawl out of a shameful dark place it has been worth telling, and I am grateful beyond words.