The Sun reports this morning that the material handed to police in the deeply distressing Markle story includes an old 35mm film negative showing a bearded man, identified as Thomas Markle Sr., on a bed with an Asian girl, and a second image of the same man, then in his late 40s or early 50s, partly obscured by the girl’s arm. The paper, under the byline of its foreign editor Nick Parker, says the picture shows Meghan’s father sexually abusing the girl.
When I was thinking, writing and talking about this story yesterday, I said that given how compromised Thomas Markle Jr. is (the arrests, the drinking, the long list of allegations against him), it was unfathomable that a reporter of Parker’s experience would have put his name to six pages accusing Thomas Markle of child sex abuse (CSA) unless he had seen, with his own eyes, evidence that was incontrovertible. Parker is a big beast of Fleet Street. He has been to war, he has been on the front line, he has done everything.