The arrest of an ailing 82-year-old man on allegations he had child sexual abuse material in storage lockers may have remained a local crime news story in Florida had it not been for his name: Thomas Markle. On Nov. 6, the estranged father of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and father-in-law of the fifth in line to the British throne, Prince Harry, was charged with one count of possession of child pornography.
This arrest was so high-profile that FBI Director Kash Patel commented on it, saying, “Mr. Markle allegedly targeted innocent children and sought to steal their innocence through his criminal actions.”
Markle’s arrest occurred exactly two weeks after the Sun tabloid in Britain revealed with a screaming headline — “Meghan dad in child sex probe” — that the retired TV lighting director was under investigation after alleged child abuse materials were found by his son in a storage area of a building where they’d recently lived in the Philippines.
While Thomas Markle and his famous daughter have been estranged for years, they are inexorably linked in the public eye, if only because he is constantly talking about her and their relationship to the media. Now, the revelations since that first Sun story have reframed how the public views Meghan’s relationship with her father, and have spawned a re-evaluation of her public persona.
In a statement released shortly after the Sun’s bombshell story, Meghan revealed that police had shown her a letter that “made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father.” It had been sent to the London Metropolitan Police in January 2019, when Meghan was pregnant with her first child, Prince Archie.
Meghan was told that the claims in the seven-page handwritten letter, apparently sent by Thomas Markle’s first wife, whom he had divorced in the mid-1970s, would be investigated. But the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies; now, the London police is considering a referral to the Independent Office for Police Conduct to review its actions.
Meghan stated that the allegations in the letter were the reason she severed ties with Thomas Markle. “I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them.”
In the past weeks, even some of the harshest critics of the Sussexes have expressed sympathy toward Meghan. Children don’t choose their parents. Meghan isn’t responsible for what her father is accused of doing.
They’d been very close when she was growing up in the Los Angeles area as the daughter of divorced parents. For Father’s Day in 2014, she paid tribute to “my thoughtful, inspiring, hardworking Daddy” on her now-defunct Tig account on Instagram, recounting their “club sandwich & fruit smoothie tradition post my tap & ballet class.”
In the Sussexes’ six-part Netflix documentary in 2022, she said, “I was a daddy’s girl my whole life and I was with him a lot.”
By the time Meghan met Prince Harry in 2016, the bond had weakened. She had been living in Toronto while working on “Suits,” while Thomas had retired and was living in Mexico. As far as we know, Harry has never met his father-in-law.
Meghan continues to be close to her mother, Doria Ragland, but her relationship with her father and his family didn’t survive her transition into royal life. Most relatives on her father’s side of the family tree have behaved in a shady and unscrupulous manner. They used their association with Meghan to make money, dishing out faded images of her along with claims and anecdotes about their famous relative to TV shows, podcasts and media outlets around the world. In response, Meghan kept them at a distance.
The Markle family grift peaked in the week before Meghan’s grand royal wedding at Windsor Castle in 2018, when the tabloids revealed that her father had staged fake paparazzi images of himself in Mexico. Thomas Markle ended up in hospital — with TMZ providing exclusive updates — and didn’t fly to Windsor to walk his daughter down the aisle. In the end, then-Prince Charles stepped in, and Meghan’s mother was her only relative to attend her nuptials.
Meghan blamed the media for the scandal. “He’s vulnerable,” Meghan told a friend, according to “Finding Freedom,” a quasi-official biography of the Sussexes published in 2020. “A lot of the tabloid journalists have been coaxing him and paying him. I don’t know if he really even had a chance.”
Early 2019 saw the end of Meghan’s relationship with her father. In January, that accusatory letter was privately shared with Meghan. The following month, there was a very public rupture when Thomas Markle allowed the Mail to publish excerpts of a private letter that his daughter had written to him in August 2018. “Dad, I’m so heartbroken. I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship,” she wrote. Thomas Markle stated in 2021 that her letter “actually signalled the end of our relationship, not a reconciliation,”
In public, Meghan and Harry blamed media pressure on Thomas Markle for the collapse of the relationship. “She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father,” Harry said in their “Harry & Meghan” documentary. “And I shouldered that because if Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”
At the same time, royal watchers noted that she’d abruptly cut off others with whom she’d once been close. “Instead of fighting with people, she’s more likely to ice them out,” claimed “Finding Freedom” authors Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand. The list of those cut off included Meghan’s first husband, Trevor Engelson; Toronto stylist and socialite Jessica Mulroney, who was once so close that her children played prominent roles in Meghan’s wedding; and childhood friend Ninaki Priddy. “There’s nothing to negotiate,” said Priddy. “She’s made her decision and that’s it.”
In addition, years of stories about Meghan churning through staff and bullying underlings to tears helped shape her public persona as someone who could be ruthless. “A dictator in high heels” went the now-infamous description in the Hollywood Reporter.
No one suspected there could be a much darker reason for the estrangement with her father. Though the Duchess of Sussex has done countless interviews, she never opened up about why the rift with her father didn’t heal, despite his repeated pleas for a reconciliation.
The public cannot yet truly understand Meghan’s feelings toward her father, and how they have evolved. Those social media posts and images showing her as an adoring daughter coexist with her more recent determination to never see him in person again — including when he was seriously ill in hospital in the Philippines — layered with the disturbing information we now know she was grappling with.
There’s no “right way” to react in a crisis, especially when it involves a parent accused of a heinous crime. Meghan may choose to reveal more about her thinking about her father. Or not. It’s up to her.
