As the allegations mount against Thomas Markle Sr, his daughter, the Duchess of Sussex, has released a statement describing her deep distress, and saying her priority is the protection of children. Is this the point at which Thomas Markle will cease to be an acceptable source for the Sussex character attacks that have become a tabloid staple? The Daily Mail and its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday, have been utterly brazen in their cultivation of the embittered Thomas Snr, using him as a weapon against his daughter since she first married into the royal family. Now, they’ll cut loose from him and describe the charges laid against him with the same outrage as everyone else. It would be institutionally impossible for them to discuss or reflect on their prior relationship with Markle without admitting a long-range and vindictive grudge against his daughter.
Markle denies all allegations against him. His son, Meghan’s half-brother Thomas Markle Jr, described in a video for the Sun the material he claims to have found on his father’s spare mobile phone, after Markle Sr had gone back to the US to have his leg amputated. Markle Jr was in the Philippines, where both men had moved in 2025. He said the material included “the most horrific video of a very young Asian girl … couldn’t have been more than 10 years old”. He almost threw up; he almost dropped the phone. His immediate fear was for what else he might be inadvertently in possession of. “I’m on the hook for this, now,” he said.
As he made contact with the FBI, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the Pennsylvania state police, he reportedly found more and more material: “the most obscene, disgusting, lowest-of-the-low images … thousands and thousands of them.” He said he started to question every aspect of his family history, all the times his father had hastily snapped shut his laptop, “all the locked rooms in all the houses we’ve ever lived in”.
Meghan Markle has been estranged from her father since 2018. In 2019, she was passed a letter alleging that he had sexually abused a child, which she says had been sent to the Metropolitan police. The Met took no action on that letter and it has been reported that they subsequently misplaced it – whether that’s because they could believe no ill of Thomas Markle, or simply because they lose things, is unknown.
But until now, the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday’s trust in Markle Sr and solidarity with him have been without question.
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In 2018, he handed the Mail on Sunday a five-page letter that his daughter had written to him after her wedding, which he had declined to attend, citing health reasons. Meghan successfully sued Associated Newspapers for printing part of the letter, though “printing” doesn’t really encompass the torrent of coverage and insinuation they wrung from its contents. It was the start of a relationship between the newspaper and the now alleged sex offender that was so close by last year that when Thomas Markle learned about his amputation, the first person he told was Caroline Graham, the Mail on Sunday’s US editor (and previously a biographer of Queen Camilla). In photos of the pair together, the emotions are almost laughably legible: Markle looks pugnacious and triumphant, like the guy who’s managed to get public opinion on speed dial. Graham looks serene and also victorious, the first reporter on to Goose Green in the tabloids’ favourite war.
A free press is essential and sometimes it is scabrous. But is this what a free press is for? To groom an estranged parent or other former intimate of someone in public life in order to undermine the latter person’s credibility and standing, seems sadistic. That’s a large word, particularly in the context of the allegations against Thomas Markle, and I use it advisedly. One of the hideous things about family estrangement is the feeling that everyone involved has had their character besmirched. The accused fight back with counter-claims. Nobody’s probity survives unscathed (although most of us could tell that Meghan’s father was exploiting her lovelessly for attention, and probably cash, long before these charges surfaced).
A political or media enemy plundering that dynamic for an easy win, for clicks, for a vendetta, does not even have the fog of emotionality as a defence. Everybody recoils from it. When the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, made an attack ad featuring his opponent’s mother calling her daughter, Amy Acton, a liar, most people didn’t know the history. They didn’t know that Donna Arthur had lost custody of her children decades previously, after her husband, their stepfather, was indicted on charges of child rape. People could nevertheless see how low it was to air a view that was poisonous by definition under the fig leaf of hearing from both sides.
Ramaswamy lost a major endorsement and had venue cancellations within a day of that attack ad. What the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday would have to lose to even reflect on their allegiances in this episode is impossible to guess.
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