The mysterious letter at the heart of the Thomas Markle scandal was written by his first wife.
Roslyn Loveless, who was married to Markle from 1964 to 1975 (she is the mother of Samantha Markle and Thomas Markle Jr.) and who has since died, is the person who wrote to the Metropolitan Police accusing her former husband of being a pedophile.
This is the letter Meghan was referring to in the statement she issued on Friday, in which she said a letter had been sent to the Metropolitan Police and Royalty and Specialist Protection and “subsequently shared with me.” She said: “It 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.”
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 and it did not 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 said 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.” But, “The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies.”
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 have made it pretty 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 have emerged in this morning’s 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.”
I find it incredible 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, inevitably, by Caroline Graham, the journalist who has spent years presenting herself as his great friend and confidante and who sat at his hospital bedside in Cebu last year.
It does so even though The Sun has now reported that the vile stash handed to police in the Philippines includes Thomas Markle himself: an old 35mm negative showing 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 40s or early 50s, partly obscured by the girl’s arm. The Sun, which has photographs of the boxes and boxes of material being carted off to the police station by Thomas Markle Jr., has run pages and pages on this. As I wrote yesterday, it is unfathomable that a reporter of Nick Parker’s experience would put his name to six pages accusing Thomas Markle of child sex abuse on the word of Thomas Markle Jr. alone. Junior is a deeply compromised witness (the arrests, including one for allegedly pulling a gun on his girlfriend, the drinking, the unhinged YouTube videos attacking Meghan), and while it is odd that he took The Sun with him to the police station, a decision that looks very much like an attempt to market the story, if The Sun says it has seen the pictures, I think you have to believe the reporters who were in the room however they got there.
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. But the idea that he is or was not involved in the criminal abuse of children is, I think, absurd, and for the Mail on Sunday to give him a double-page spread offering to take a polygraph to prove it is outrageous.
It is all very well for him to complain that nobody told him about the letter in 2018. Of course they didn’t. The allegations were potentially actionable, and the police had told Meghan not to discuss them.
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 the media was a cruel and horrible machine dedicated to destroying them. That is a real problem for them now.
In the 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.” (This in a series made under a Netflix deal worth tens of millions of dollars, an irony that appears to have escaped him.) He went on: “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 there has been a great deal more, the consistent line from their camp being that it was the media that wrecked her relationship with her father. It always seemed slightly odd that, for the relatively minor crime of staging a few paparazzi photographs, he was cut off completely, and although we are told the allegations did not reach Meghan until 2019, one can’t help thinking there was a great deal more bubbling beneath the surface even before then.
Rather than letting the estrangement speak for itself, they peddled an entirely 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 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 publicly 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.
I suspect the other reason they never so much as hinted at this to journalists, despite briefing on every other aspect of their lives, is commercial. It always looked dissonant: a lifestyle brand 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 hovering over it. None of this is Meghan’s fault, but it is a commercial reality that people will feel less inclined to buy a jar of As Ever fruit spread knowing the horrible truth of what has been going on with Meghan’s dad.
For what it is worth, I have thought for years that the way Thomas Markle behaved toward his daughter was incredibly cruel and inexplicable in a father: the endless interviews, going on television in the early days to speculate about 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 him.
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.” A former senior Met detective pointed out that “there is a very simple mechanism for passing this kind of information on to Interpol.” A word with the liaison officer at the American embassy would have done it. Davies also expressed surprise that the Sussexes did not follow up themselves: “This would have been the obvious thing to do, especially as they shortly after went on to have children of their own.”
My own sense is that there is a limit to how far one can expect a British police force to pursue a single letter about a US citizen who had never set foot in the United Kingdom and was living in Mexico. But Meghan was a working royal at the time, with the full weight of the institution behind her. And given what we now know about Prince Andrew, whose scandalous behavior was covered up for decades with the complicity of the royal family and the police, the question has to be asked: did the Met not pursue Thomas Markle in an attempt to limit embarrassment for the royals?
Meghan, for her part, is relieved the truth is out. “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.”
Elsewhere
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 made to Andrew in 2019 (later repaid), was given permission by Mr Justice Adam Johnson to seek to call evidence from the former prince 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. Dates in mid-December have been pencilled in for his testimony.
