Munro's Books employee quits after Alice Munro abuse revelations

Two words written anonymously in a guest book set off a chain of events that led a longtime Munro's Books employee to quit her job, disillusioned by her literary hero and her former employer.

Two months ago, Justina Elias would have described her job at Munro's in Victoria as a fairy tale. She admired the life and works of store co-founder Alice Munro, and gladly gave "starry-eyed" interviews about the literary icon as the store's head of fiction and social media manager.

After Munro died in May at age 92, the store put out a book for customers to share their memories of the author, and prepared for an event to celebrate Munro's life, which Elias was slated to moderate.

That's when the fairy tale began to unravel.

Someone had written "child abuser" in the guest book.

Store president Jessica Walker explained to Elias in an email obtained by CBC News that this was related to the sexual abuse of Munro's daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, at the hands of Munro's former husband — which Walker and "a few" others at the store had known about.

"This is 'out there' in the public, but it hasn't obviously been picked up by media, though I would imagine that at some point it will be. It is their story to tell, but our position is that we support Andrea," Walker wrote in the email. 

Elias says she was "in shock" hearing this for the first time, and told Walker that she was not sure she could moderate the event in good conscience.

"I had just learned this unimaginably awful thing in which we had apparently been complicit as a business. And then the reaction among my superiors at work seemed to be like, 'Well, what's the big deal?'" she said.

"That was a rift that I never really felt that we ended up bridging. I feel like there was a gap in understanding there."

The store cancelled the event within hours of Elias expressing her concerns.

Walker explained in an email to CBC News that she had heard "extremely limited" details about the abuse years ago from store co-founder Jim Munro, Alice's first husband, who died in 2016. She said she did not know about Alice's response to the situation, or the ensuing criminal case, and would have made different decisions about upholding the Munro legacy if she had known "the extent and nature" of Jim and Alice's failures. 

When organizing the event in June, Walker was sent a copy of a blog Skinner wrote about the abuse, which included details she was not previously aware of. 

Munro's fans expressed shock and horror when Skinner spoke out about the sexual abuse weeks later in a Toronto Star column. Skinner wrote that she was nine years old when her step-father, Munro's second husband Gerald Fremlin, first sexually assaulted her in 1976.