RED LETTER DAY

Thomas Markle Scandal Reveals Why Meghan Ditched Him

Markle was accused of child abuse in a letter that the royal couple kept secret for more than six years. Why?

The author of the mysterious letter at the heart of the latest Thomas Markle story was his first wife.

The late Roslyn Loveless, who was married to Markle from 1964 to 1975 (she is the mother of Samantha Markle and Thomas Markle Jr.), wrote to London’s Metropolitan Police accusing her former husband of being a pedophile.

This is the letter Meghan referred to in the statement she issued on Friday. The letter, she said, “made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father and I was given assurances that these were being investigated.” She said she had kept her father away from her children to protect them, adding, “I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families.”

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On Saturday, the Met confirmed it had received the letter. It also admitted that it did nothing with it. It did not investigate Thomas Markle, nor did it refer him to the authorities in the United States.

“Following a thorough review of Met Police systems and records,” the force said, “we have confirmed that in January 2019, we received a letter containing a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom.” (Meghan had dated the letter to 2018; her spokesperson says that, without a diary entry or contemporaneous record, “it is understandable that she may have been mistaken by a few months.”)

The letter went to the Met’s Protection Command “to raise concerns in relation to the security of the Duchess of Sussex,” was reviewed, and was passed to the Sussexes’ office “for their awareness.” However, “The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

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The Met now says it is “reviewing the handling of this matter,” including whether to refer itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

Meghan’s camp has made it clear to me that they believe the Met did not fulfill its duties. A friend told The Telegraph she is “upset and really frustrated that, having effectively been told to stay quiet and having been given assurances it would be investigated, it appears nothing was done,” and “obviously pleased” the force is considering referring itself to the watchdog.

Two other key revelations emerged in the U.K. Sunday newspapers. The Telegraph reports that the letter Meghan sent her father after his leg was amputated last December accused him of being unsafe around children, told him he would never be permitted to meet her own, and urged him to seek professional help.

And Thomas Markle, in a lengthy interview with The Mail on Sunday from the Florida nursing facility where he is learning to walk again, has denied having sex with underage girls but admitted using prostitutes. “I have never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” he said, adding that when he was single he traveled to the Philippines at least twice and “slept with prostitutes.”

“I like Asian women but that is not a crime,” he said. He claims any images found on his devices were “planted,” suggests his son may be behind it, and says he will speak to investigators and take a lie detector test. Of the letter, he said, “She never said a word to me about this letter accusing me of such terrible things. If Meghan or anyone else had come to me in 2018 and told me about the letter, I would have had a chance to defend myself.”

The Royalist finds it odd that the Mail on Sunday thinks today is a good day to hand Thomas Markle a platform to plead his innocence in a piece written by Caroline Graham, who was at his hospital bedside in Cebu last year.

At the same time, The Sun reported that the vile stash of evidence handed to police in the Philippines includes a 35mm negative showing Thomas Markle on a bed with an Asian girl, which the paper says shows Meghan’s father sexually abusing her, and a second image of the same man, then in his late forties or early fifties, partly obscured by the girl’s arm.

The Sun, which has photographs of the many boxes of material being carted off to the police station by Thomas Markle Jr., has run pages and pages on this. It is unfathomable that a reporter of Nick Parker’s experience would put his name to so much coverage accusing Thomas Markle of child sex abuse on the word of Thomas Markle Jr. alone.

Thomas Markle Jr. is a deeply compromised witness (because of the arrests, including one for allegedly pulling a gun on his girlfriend, the drinking, the unhinged YouTube videos attacking Meghan). It’s odd that he took The Sun with him to the police station, but if The Sun says it saw the pictures, I think you have to believe the reporters who were in the room.

Whether any of this ever reaches a courtroom, in the Philippines or the United States, is another matter. Markle is 82 and in poor health.

It is perfectly fine for him to complain that nobody told him about the letter in 2018. Of course they didn’t. The allegations were defamatory, and the police had told Meghan not to discuss them.

Harry and Meghan’s blame game

At the same time, it is also true that Harry and Meghan portrayed the fallout with her father as the product of media manipulation and harassment, because it suited their agenda. That is a real problem for them now.

In the 2022 Netflix series Harry & Meghan, discussing the staged paparazzi photographs Thomas Markle sold before the wedding, Harry said, “It’s amazing what people will do when offered a huge amount of money… $50,000, $100,000, to hand over photographs, to create a story… Of course it’s incredibly sad what happened. She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father. And I shouldered that because if Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.”

In the 2021 Oprah Winfrey interview, Meghan, discussing the same episode, said, “I’ve lost my father.”

Those are the on-the-record examples. Off the record, the consistent line from their camp was that it was the media that wrecked her relationship with her father.

One can completely understand why they couldn’t say the real reason, but instead of letting the estrangement speak for itself, they peddled a different narrative: that it was all about the photographs, the breakdown of trust that followed, and, above all, the wickedness of the press.

Harry goes into it at some length in his memoir, Spare. That now looks like a misrepresentation, deployed because they were determined to use anything to hand to attack the media, and that’s before you ask whether it was fair for Meghan to lay her immense unhappiness in the years after her marriage at the feet of her husband’s family, when she was harboring such a dark and agonizing secret about her own family.

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I suspect the other reason they never so much as hinted at this to journalists is commercial. It has always looked odd that a lifestyle brand was being sold on a model of family unity by a woman so very publicly estranged not only from her own father but from the British royal family. It is hard enough to sell a lifestyle brand at the best of times. It gets harder still with associations of pedophilia lurking in the background.

None of this is Meghan’s fault, but it is a commercial reality that people will be less inclined to buy a jar of As Ever fruit spread knowing what’s been going on with Meghan’s dad.

For what it is worth, The Royalist has thought for years that Thomas Markle’s behavior toward his daughter was inexplicably cruel: the endless interviews, going on television in the early days to speculate whether she was pregnant, the 90-minute Channel 5 film in which he announced, “Harry owes me, Meghan owes me.”

The way he attacked her always seemed very strange. Those who aligned themselves with him over the years, who called him a gentleman and a humble soul cruelly maligned by his daughter, who interviewed him and gave him those platforms, may come to deny their sympathies.

Dai Davies, the former head of Scotland Yard’s royal protection command, told The Telegraph he was “frankly astounded that, the Police, having received this material, did not contact other relevant forces,” adding that the allegations “would have made them duty-bound to liaise with Harry’s protection team, the FBI and other police forces, where the alleged offences were said to have taken place. I’m gobsmacked that they didn’t.”

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Davies also expressed surprise that the Sussexes did not follow up themselves, saying, “This would have been the obvious thing to do, especially as they shortly after went on to have children of their own.”

My own hunch is that there is a limit to how far one can blame a British police force for not pursuing allegations against a U.S. citizen who had never set foot in the United Kingdom. But Meghan was a working royal at the time, and given what we now know about Prince Andrew, The Royalist has to ask: did the Met not pursue Thomas Markle to limit embarrassment for the royals?

Meghan, for her part, is relieved. “After so many years of living with deeply troubling concerns,” a friend told The Sun, “there is also a real sense of relief that these matters are now being properly investigated.” She “has been guided by legal advice about what she could say publicly and has had to live with the frustration of not being able to speak openly, while trusting that the appropriate authorities would do their job.”

Andrew in court?

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor can be called to give evidence in a High Court fraud trial, a judge ruled on Friday. Turkish businessman Selman Turk, who is being sued by Nebahat Isbilen over a £750,000 payment he made to Andrew in 2019 (later repaid), was given permission by Mr Justice Adam Johnson to seek to call the former prince as a witness at the 11-week trial, which begins in November. The judge said a witness summons “will likely” be needed to compel him, observing that it was “highly unlikely” someone in his position would volunteer.

Want more royal gossip, scoops and scandal? Follow all Tom Sykes’ reporting at The Royalist on Substack or listen to The Royalist podcast on YouTube.

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Tom SykesEuropean Editor at Large

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