Was Meghan Lying Then or Lying Now?
Either the duchess believed the letter that detailed allegations about her father and lied to Oprah, or she didn’t, and last week was opportunism.
Jonathan Brady/via REUTERS
Undeterred by the unsavory claims swirling around her father, Meghan has just launched a $550 “Library basket” in her product line, As Ever, and announced she is filming a series of MasterChef Australia (hinting that her children could go with her).
This is while her staff is simultaneously telling friendly outlets that she has fled the U.K. to cope with the trauma of the revelations (which just happens to coincide with British schools being out for a week) and that she keeps bursting into tears whenever she looks at her daughter Lilibet and thinks of the allegations around her father.
Harry and Meghan’s return to the U.K. has been marked by drama, but this one initially drew public sympathy.
Annabel Lee-Ellis/via REUTERS
Thomas Markle, 82, was reported to police in the Philippines by his own son for allegedly owning a vast hoard of child sex abuse images. He denies all the claims, calling them “sick lies” and “the worst thing anyone could accuse me of.”
Hearing your father accused of such a thing must be unbelievably painful. But one can’t help but wonder how Meghan (and, to a lesser extent, Harry) handled the events of the last week, and what the public verdict is. The answer so far looks grim: if possible, people are even more furious and disgusted with Meghan than before. And this time, they can’t blame the mainstream media, which have by and large reverted to parroting the Sussex line.
Meghan’s people have made it clear she was not sexually abused by her father herself. This has also changed the context of her inaction over her stated conviction that her father was a danger to her children: many survivors of sexual abuse have contacted me to say that they are revolted that Meghan never followed up on the accusations to protect other children if she really and truly believed the allegations from the outset, as she has spent all week vehemently suggesting she does.
This story really begins with an accusatory letter, allegedly sent to the police in January 2019 from Thomas’s first wife, Roslyn Loveless, whom he divorced in 1979, in which she informed British police that Thomas had told her he traveled to the Philippines for legal sex with children (the legal age of consent in that country was, at the time, 12). A copy of the handwritten letter, we are told, was passed to Meghan and Harry via their police bodyguards.
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According to Meghan’s statement, they reacted to the note by cutting off all contact with her father. She said last week: “In 2018, a letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police and Royalty and Specialist Protection. That letter was subsequently shared with me. It made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father and I was given assurances that these were being investigated.
Meghan has explained why she has ignored Thomas Markle's previous pleas to meet his grandchildren.
ITV/ Good Morning Britain
“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.”
It then emerged that the police had lost the letter so thoroughly that they had to go to the Sussexes and ask for a copy, which Meghan duly produced. Her office said she is a great “record keeper.”
So then a copy of this letter goes back to the Met, who then say it was actually sent in 2019. At this point Meghan’s legendary record-keeping collapses, and she has to correct her dates, with her spokesman saying: “In recalling events from more than seven years ago, without the benefit of a diary entry or contemporaneous record, it is understandable that she may have been mistaken by a few months. If the MPS holds a time-stamped record confirming that the letter was reviewed in 2019, that should be treated as the accurate reference point for when it was received and shared with the Duchess.”
Er, OK.
You can understand why people are feeling rather skeptical about this letter at this stage. Given its importance to Meghan’s narrative, and its complicated provenance, it would probably be a good idea for Meghan and Harry to publish it, because it seems to me we are being asked to take an awful lot on trust, and Meghan’s history of truthfulness and veracity is abysmal (just ask the archbishop of Canterbury). It feels like someone going, “I have this letter which proves everything I am saying, but I’m not going to show it to you; I’m just going to read out some bits of it to you.”
The fact that neither the cops nor Meghan followed up on it suggests to many that both dismissed it at the time as the irrelevant and embittered scrawlings of an ex. Meghan may have decided to keep it safe, however, as a smoking gun to produce after Thomas was dead, when he could no longer sue her over the allegations, to justify cutting him off. The Sun’s reporting of Thomas’ alleged crimes, in this reading, merely advanced the timeline for (partial) publication and allowed a convenient symbiosis of shared aims between these two once-sworn enemies.
Meghan has returned to Australia, where she and Harry had a successful tour this year, to appear on MasterChef.
Pool/Getty Images
Meghan has also made great play of the fact that, she says, the British police “assured” her they would handle the complaint appropriately, but then failed to alert foreign police forces or Interpol to Thomas’ alleged crimes.
This seems like a carefully constructed excuse to head off criticism that she “should” have alerted the U.S. or Mexican authorities herself. A lot depends on what the police said to her, doesn’t it?
I fail to see how you can blame a British police force for not getting that agitated by a single letter about an American citizen living in Mexico, penned by a person with a grudge. Lots of people send mad messages to the royals. Given that Meghan was at that time a working royal with a full-time police detail, and would be for another year, it also seems odd that she simply “trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families, as her statement says.” Could she not have asked any of the FIVE policemen constantly around her and Harry what had happened? For example: “Hey, has that letter been forwarded on?”
But if no one actually took the letter seriously, it explains a lot.
It would explain why Meghan never followed up. It would explain the “daddy’s girl” comments to Netflix. It would explain why Harry praised Thomas in his book, and why, in court, Meghan’s lawyers said the estrangement was all the tabloid media’s fault. And it would explain the business with the friends who talked to People magazine in February 2019 (a month after the letter is supposed to have arrived), and whom Meghan allowed to state that she had written to her father: “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.” Who would send that to a man they are convinced is an abuser?
Harry and Meghan focused on their treatment by the British press and the Royal Family before The Sun revealed allegations about her father.
Joe Giddens/via REUTERS
Everybody’s actions suggest that neither the Met nor Meghan Markle found the letter credible enough to follow up.
So that’s the “lying now” case.
What about “lying then”?
Well, if they did believe the letter, and Meghan knew instantly that it was right and from 2019 onwards adamantly believed her father was an alleged abuser, and vowed never to speak to or see him again, then that means they were lying through their teeth when Meghan chose to lay the entire blame for her anguish and suicidal ideation at the feet of an evil chimera whose head was the media and whose body was the uncaring institution of the royal family. In that scenario, she in fact was harboring a horrific secret about her father.
But Meghan and Harry were selling a very different story at the time, into which the tale of an abusive father didn’t fit.
Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the Sussexes created a furor on both sides of the Atlantic.
Handout/Getty
When Meghan told Oprah that in January 2019 she had contemplated suicide, she blamed her state of mind on racist media coverage of her, and the palace’s alleged dismissal of the coverage and her anguish. She didn’t mention a single other personal issue that affected her state of mind. It was all laid at the feet of the royal family and the hated media. Meghan was very clear to Oprah about the problem at the time: media “lies,” and the “firm” playing “an active role” in “perpetuating falsehoods about us.”
It is outrageous, frankly, that Harry’s family were traduced by Meghan and Harry for damaging their mental health through these unbelievably trivial domestic matters, when in fact one imagines that hearing that your father was alleged to have been a pedophile would be quite upsetting. But any such disclosure would have completely destroyed the very, very profitable narrative that their mental anguish in 2019 was exclusively the result of a rapacious British tabloid media and a heartless and cruel royal family working in lockstep with them.
The “lying then or lying now” problem is also an issue for Harry and Meghan in the context of how they sought at the time to portray the estrangement from her father as exclusively the result of the reptilian media, and not the allegations about her father.
Meghan said in her Oprah interview that it had fallen to her to “tell the truth,” adding: “And if that comes with risk of losing things, I mean, I’ve lost... there’s a lot that’s been lost already. And I grieve a lot. I mean, I’ve lost my father.”
I have been criticized in the last few days for saying that the allegations about Meghan’s father make me feel sympathetic towards her. Let me clarify: I thought, “God, poor woman, what an awful thing to discover about your dad,” when I read the first reports. That’s as far as it goes.
If you believe she accepted the import of this unpublished letter, that absolutely justifies her cutting off her father, but it makes many times worse the horrible lies she told about the cruel and unfeeling and racist royal family and the British press.
Observers have begun to question whether Meghan should publish the letter in question.
POOL/Dominic Lipinski/REUTERS
If you don’t believe she took this letter seriously, as her inaction and fond words to her dad suggest, then last week’s statement starts to look horribly opportunistic.
My opinion is that Meghan was ashamed of her ghastly family, hadn’t told Harry more than the bare minimum about his new relations, took the first opportunity to cut her father off (the staged pictures and media interviews), then used the great gift of the Loveless letter to bolster her decision to Harry, whilst keeping a copy as an insurance policy.
It seems likely there are many significant causes of trauma and unhappiness in Meghan’s chaotic childhood and her family, but that she chose to keep quiet about them while she snagged a prince, and then she and Harry built a global brand on the proposition that the people who had really traumatized her were in Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace and Fleet Street, not her own shabby family.
In Spare, Harry tells us that his brother urged him to take his time to get to know “this girl.” Harry was furious at the phrase. He has never forgiven it. Well. If only Harry had listened to William and taken a little more time to get to know this girl and her family.
If you or a loved one are struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.
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