A week ago, the case against Meghan’s father rested on the word of an estranged son with a drink-driving record and a grudge. Then the Daily Mail opened a storage locker in Mexico. Nothing has been tested in court, but this is no longer just a family feud, and Scotland Yard is now under independent investigation itself.
Storage units are where Americans keep the things they cannot bear to throw away and would rather not look at. Row upon row of corrugated-steel boxes on the edge of town, holding a broken exercise bike, a late mother’s crockery and twelve years of tax returns. The 5ft by 10ft unit in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, three miles from the gated community where Thomas Markle lived for the best part of fourteen years, held, according to the Daily Mail, rather more than that.
The Mail, which has spent most of the past decade acting as the Markle family’s unofficial notice-board, says it has now reported the Duchess of Sussex’s father to the FBI. Its reporter went down to Rosarito, ten miles south of the US border, heard that Markle had rented a unit and stopped paying for it, and was let in after two years of missed payments. Receipts, the paper says, show he rented it in 2017. Among the family mementoes, letters and photographs, the Mail says, were magazines printed in Asia that depict children being sexually abused, books about paedophilia, and loose photographs of naked Asian girls, some of whom look conspicuously young.
Let me be clear about two things before we go on. The first is that possessing images of children being sexually abused is not a lapse of taste or a family embarrassment. It is among the vilest crimes a human being can commit, because every one of those images is a crime scene with a real child in it. If Thomas Markle Sr is guilty, his age, his missing leg and his famous daughter should count for precisely nothing.
The second is that he has not been charged with anything, let alone convicted. He denies all of it. Nobody yet knows what is on any of the devices, and a newspaper reporter rummaging through an abandoned locker is not a forensic examiner. I have spent much of this saga urging everybody to wait for the evidence. That still applies. But it would be dishonest to pretend that the evidence, or at least something that looks a great deal like it, has not started to arrive by the boxful.
First, the man. Thomas Wayne Markle was born in Pennsylvania in 1944 and spent four decades lighting American television. He lit General Hospital and Married… with Children and won two Daytime Emmys, which is two more than most of the people now passing judgment on him. He had Samantha and Thomas Jr with his first wife, Roslyn Loveless, and Meghan with his second, Doria Ragland, whom he divorced in 1987, when he was 43. By most accounts, once including Meghan’s, he was a devoted father, helped along by a $750,000 lottery win in 1990. By 2016 he had filed for bankruptcy for the second time, which may go some way to explaining his later career as a supplier of photographs.
He moved to Rosarito in 2011 and lived in a rented house in the gated community of San Antonio del Mar, which is now being rebuilt. Locals told the Mail he was rarely seen, apart from the odd trip to an expat bar, a minimarket and Walmart. “Frankly, he seemed to live like a hermit,” said one. “Nobody in all the years he was here really got to know him.” It was from there that he wrecked his relationship with his youngest daughter. Days before the royal wedding in May 2018, he was caught secretly working with a paparazzi photographer to stage supposedly candid pictures, at the very moment Prince Harry was begging the press to leave his future father-in-law alone. Then came two heart attacks, he missed the wedding, and the then Prince of Wales walked the bride down the aisle at Windsor. Mr Markle never got back in the room. He gave interviews to anybody with a microphone, and in 2019 let the Mail on Sunday print a private letter from his daughter, which he called “a dagger to the heart”. She sued the paper and won.
In January 2025 he moved to Cebu in the Philippines, where his son Thomas Jr looked after him. That December his left leg was amputated after a blood clot turned it black. In May he was flown back to America, leaving his belongings with his son, and he now lives in a rehabilitation centre in central Florida, learning to walk again.
Then, last week, the Sun published Thomas Jr’s account. In July, he says, while looking through four boxes of his father’s things for a phone for his fiancée, Rose, he found “hundreds, if not thousands” of images and videos of child sexual abuse on hard drives and phones, including, it is alleged, videos of girls no older than ten or eleven involved in sex acts, a 15-minute video of naked girls on his father’s old phone, and pictures of children as young as toddlers. One 35mm photograph reportedly shows a bearded man resembling his father having sex with a young Asian girl.
“When I found this material I was horrified and I had no option but to report my dad,” he said. “I have supported, cared for him and helped him for years, but that stops now. I won’t speak to my father ever again unless I’m called to give evidence against him.” He went further. “I’m so, so sorry Meghan. I now know I have been protecting the wrong person for the past nine years. Having seen what I’ve seen, I believe the man I’ve been defending and caring for is a monster.”
The father’s response, delivered from Florida to the Daily Mail (where else?), was unequivocal. “Sick lies.” “I have never downloaded anything like that in my life.” The accusation was “the worst thing anyone could accuse me of.” Of the photograph, he said: “I have never been in a photograph like that.” He said he would do “whatever it takes” to clear his name, and that the computers had not been in his hands since he left Mexico with his son in 2025.
Then, two days later, in a further interview with the same paper, he volunteered that he had paid for sex in the Philippines when he was single. “I never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” he said. “I like Asian women but that is not a crime.” It is not. Paying for sex with adults is grubby, but it is not what he is accused of. As a defence strategy, however, it has the air of a man who has been told by his lawyer to stop talking and has taken it as a challenge.
Samantha, never knowingly understated, called her brother’s claims “disgusting lies” with “no merit whatsoever”. She took to X to claim, without a shred of evidence, that he had been paid $80,000 to do this to their father, and that he had turned on the old man only after being caught out over money. When the Mail knocked on her door this week to ask about the Mexican locker, Samantha could be seen in the background, but it was her boyfriend, Mark Phillips, who did the talking. “The only statement that you’re going to get is that Thomas Markle doesn’t even have fingerprints on the stuff in the Philippines,” he said. “He didn’t even ever touch it the whole time it was there, he can’t be charged. Markle never had it in Mexico either… The FBI has no jurisdiction in Mexico. Thomas Markle Sr hasn’t lived in the States in 10 years. Even if there was bad [material] then the statute of limitations ran out five years ago. This is all bulls**t.”
Whether any of that is good law, I leave to the lawyers. As public relations, it is a catastrophe. When a family’s defence moves, in a single breath, from “he never had it” to “even if he did, you can’t touch him for it”, it has rather lost the thread.
Now to the locker, because what the Mail says it found there changes the shape of this story.
There are 20 boxes. Among them are 31 black-and-white prints, roughly ten inches by eight, most of which appear to date from when Markle was in his forties or fifties. Nearly half appear to show the same girl. In one, a bearded Markle, in a polo shirt and jeans, sits on a hotel bed beside her, cigarette in hand, staring into the camera; she is smiling, in a white lacy top and dark jeans, clutching a small bag. In another, taken in what looks like the same room, she is naked, leaning forward, a heart-shaped pendant around her neck. Sixteen more prints show various other naked girls. The Mail is careful to say there is no evidence that Markle had sex with any of them, and we do not know how old any of them were. That will matter.
There are 35mm negatives that show, in the Mail’s words, apparently random, voyeuristic pictures of children on a beach, and others of a woman bound and “hogtied” while a man directs the shoot. There are more than 50 videotapes, with titles such as “Boys – Brother and Sister – Russian XX” and “Manila Nites”. Nobody yet knows what is on them.
There are the books, which deserve a moment, because they are not all of a kind. Some would be found on the shelves of any second-hand bookshop. The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, by Irving and Amy Wallace, was a bestseller in 1981 and sat in many a downstairs lavatory, though its index, with headings such as “incest”, “baby fetish” and “men who enjoyed girls 16 years old or younger”, reads rather differently in this context. The Invisible Children, by Gitta Sereny, is a serious, campaigning piece of investigative journalism about child prostitution, written by one of the great reporters of the last century, and owning it proves nothing except an interest in the subject. Stews and Strumpets, from 1961, is a history of prostitution.
Others are much harder to explain away. Victorian Children, published in 1972, is full of pictures of semi-naked youngsters in suggestive poses, and was co-authored by the English photographer Graham Ovenden, who was jailed in 2013 for abusing children as young as six in the 1970s and 1980s, and whose personal collection a judge later ordered to be destroyed. There is David Hamilton’s Private Collection, the work of the photographer whose soft-focus pictures of young girls were once sold in every high-street poster shop, and who killed himself in 2016 after several women accused him of raping them when they were teenagers, which he denied. There is Young Aphrodites, the photographic companion to a 1963 Greek film about a 12-year-old girl raped by a shepherd. There is Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality, a 1962 book by the sexologist Robert Masters with a whole chapter on paedophilia, since criticised for brushing aside the harm done to victims. There is Le Fairy, a soft-cover book printed in the Far East containing naked photographs of girls who appear to be pre-pubescent. And there is Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome in the Movies, of which Markle apparently owned at least two copies. The other, the Mail says, was in one of the boxes the police took away in the Philippines.
That last detail matters more than it might seem. It links the hoard in Mexico, which he rented, paid for and visited, with the boxes in Cebu, which his family insist he never touched.
Then there is the hardware. Seven hard drives, stripped out of computers. Four pen drives. Two digital cameras from the early 2000s and two cameras made for children. An old Apple computer. An old computer tower bearing a paper note reading “Overheated… Virus!”, together with instructions for running WinCleaner, a program that wipes hard drives clean, and an activation code. And a paper plate on which somebody has written “DARK WEB” in red ink, alongside a list of web addresses. What is on any of these devices, nobody yet knows. That, again, is for the forensic examiners. But it is not, you would have to concede, the usual contents of a pensioner’s lock-up.
Who had access? The Mail is told that Markle visited the unit a couple of times a month in the early years, bringing things in and taking others away; that he was last seen there in March 2024, when he renewed the lease for three months; and that neither Thomas Jr nor anybody else ever went there. If that is true, it rather complicates the theory, which I was prepared to entertain and which his defenders have pushed hard, that the whole thing is a stitch-up by a vengeful son. It is one thing to imagine a man planting material in boxes in his own house in Cebu. It is quite another to imagine him planting it, years earlier, in a padlocked unit in another country that he never visited.
There is a proper caveat, though, and it is not a small one. The material in Mexico was not found by police. It was found, handled and photographed by a newspaper. Whatever else that is, it is not how evidence is supposed to be gathered, and any defence lawyer worth his fee will spend a happy afternoon asking a jury who touched what, and when. That the Mail, which only last week was Thomas Markle’s favourite confessional, is now the one reporting him to the FBI tells you something about how this family’s relationship with the press works. It also tells you something about how well the actual investigating authorities have been doing their job, if the newspapers keep getting there first.
So what are the authorities doing? In the Philippines, quite a lot. Police seized the boxes and a laptop, and on Thursday a court in Cebu granted them a warrant to open the devices and examine what is on them, who owned them and who used them. The regional prosecutor says it will not take long to establish whether a crime has been committed. If Markle were charged and convicted, he could face ten to twelve years in prison. The Interior Secretary, Jonvic Remulla, has already announced that “all signs point to a possible sex offender of the grossest kind”, which is a remarkable thing for a politician to say about a man who has not been charged, before the forensic results are in. One does not have to have any sympathy for Thomas Markle to think that a government minister ought to wait for his own detectives. The FBI says it is aware of the allegations and will support the Philippine authorities, and is said to be poised to join the investigation.
And then there is London, where the story stops being merely sordid and turns into a British farce.
It is now understood that the letter the Metropolitan Police received in January 2019 was written by Roslyn Loveless, Markle’s late first wife, the mother of Samantha and Thomas Jr. Let that sink in for a moment. The woman whose children are now at war over these allegations appears to have been the first to raise the alarm, seven years ago. Her granddaughter, Noelle Rasmussen, who is, of all people, Samantha’s daughter, told the Telegraph last week that her grandmother “would go to the ends of the earth to protect you”, that she herself had felt uneasy around Markle as a child because “your body tells you when something’s off”, and that she supported both her uncle’s decision to go to the police and Meghan’s decision to keep her children away. She has not said that he ever abused her.
What did the Met do with the letter? Commander Adam Slonecki, who runs its Protection Command, has now explained. It was addressed to the Fixated Threats Assessment Centre, the unit that deals with stalkers and obsessives who pose a danger to public figures. “The author of the letter suggested they were writing to raise concerns relating to the security of the Duchess of Sussex,” he said. “While the letter did not actually contain any information specifically related to security matters, it did contain a number of claims about alleged offending outside the United Kingdom. The letter was assessed and subsequently passed to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for their awareness. The details of the allegations in the letter were not shared with other law enforcement agencies.”
Read that twice. Britain’s most famous police force received a letter from a man’s former wife accusing him of serious offences abroad. It concluded, correctly, that the letter had nothing to do with anybody’s security. And then, instead of passing the allegations to the FBI, or the Mexican police, in whose jurisdiction Markle was living, it posted them to a royal private office “for their awareness”, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. The Met has now referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and the IOPC has confirmed that it will carry out an independent investigation into the force’s “failure to pass on allegations of serious offending… to relevant overseas authorities at the time”. It has also sent back to the Met, to deal with itself, a second matter, “relating to an alleged data breach where information was passed on to a third party”. The third party being the Sussexes.
So, in a single envelope, Scotland Yard managed to fail to tell the people it should have told and to tell the people it should not have. It now says that “a number of referrals to relevant overseas law enforcement agencies” will be made “in the coming days”. In the coming days. Nearly eight years after the letter arrived. If the allegations in it turn out to be true, the failure to act on them will be a scandal in its own right, and it will not be a Markle scandal. It will be Scotland Yard’s.
Which brings us to the Duchess.
On 23 October she issued a statement. “I am deeply distressed at the news that has come to light in the last 24 hours, and my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed,” she said. “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. I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. Although the breadth of what has now been uncovered is more sickening than one could ever imagine, my sincerest hope is that justice will be fully served and that the priority remains the safety and protection of innocent children.”
She said she had been given assurances that the “troubling and disturbing” allegations were being investigated and had been advised that speaking out might jeopardise a legal case. She originally dated the letter to 2018. It was in fact 2019, and her camp now says she simply misremembered, which is plausible and does not much matter.
What matters more is this. I have been as rude about the Duchess of Sussex as anybody, and I dare say I shall be again. But if what was in that locker is what the Mail says it is, then on the central question she may well turn out to have been right, and the rest of us, who spent years casting her father as a lonely, wronged old man frozen out by a heartless daughter, wrong. That is worth saying plainly, because it is the sort of thing columnists rarely say at all.
It does not, however, make the questions go away. The first is the obvious one. “I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families,” she says. But if you genuinely believed, in 2019, that your father might be a danger to children, and seven years went by without a knock on his door, did nobody in the Sussex household think to ask the Met why? Did anybody pick up the phone to the FBI? Perhaps they did. If so, now would be a very good time to say so.
The second is the story we were told in the meantime. In 2021 the Duchess sat opposite Oprah Winfrey, before an audience of tens of millions, and explained that she had cut off her father because he had lied about the paparazzi pictures. In December 2022, in the couple’s Netflix series, she described herself as having “been a daddy’s girl my whole life”, and Prince Harry, reflecting on her estrangement, said: “She had a father before this and now she doesn’t have a father.” According to People, he went further, blaming himself: “If Meg wasn’t with me, then her dad would still be her dad.” By then, nearly four years had passed since the Met posted the letter to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. His office. Either Harry knew and chose to tell the world a different, rather more self-flattering story, or Meghan never told him, which would be a remarkable thing to keep from the man whose office received the letter and whose children she says she was protecting. There may be an innocent explanation, such as lawyers’ advice or a reluctance to accuse a man publicly of crimes nobody had proved. But neither of them has yet offered one.
The third is last December. When her father lay in a hospital bed in the Philippines with his leg freshly amputated, the world was told, via a Sussex spokesman, that Meghan had “reached out”. It was a tender little phrase, and most of us pictured a get-well card. What she actually reached out with, it turns out, was a letter, delivered to his bedside by hospital staff while he was photographed and filmed receiving it. The letter reportedly told him that she, and the authorities, knew he had abused young girls, and that he would never meet Archie, now seven, or Lilibet, five. His response this week: “If Meghan says that’s what she wrote, then she’s probably right.” Two things strike me about this. If that account is accurate, the authorities knew nothing of the sort; by the Met’s own admission, they had done nothing at all. And a letter of that kind, served on a hospital bed in front of a camera, may have been entirely justified, but it was not “reaching out”. It was a writ with a ribbon on it. Allowing the world to believe otherwise is precisely the kind of spin the Sussexes complain about when newspapers do it.
And then there is the accuser, Thomas Jr, who until last week was the weakest link in this whole story. He is 60, a former window fitter from Grants Pass, Oregon, with a colourful record. In January 2017 he was arrested after a drunken row with his then fiancée, during which, it was reported, he held a gun to her head; I can find no report of a conviction. In January 2019 he was arrested for drink-driving. Weeks before the royal wedding he wrote an open letter to Prince Harry calling his sister a “jaded, shallow, conceited woman”, and he spent the next several years firmly in his father’s corner, nursing him after his 2022 stroke and briefing the Mail from the hospital corridor. He reported his discovery to the FBI in July and heard nothing for three months, then turned up in Cebu with a man from the Sun at his elbow. Samantha says it is all about money. None of that makes him a liar. It made him an accuser whose word needed testing, and I said so. What has changed is that, if the Mail is right, his word is no longer all there is.
So where does that leave us? Exactly where it should have left us all along: with the evidence. In Cebu, the forensic examiners now have a warrant and a timetable. In Mexico, there is a locker full of hard drives that somebody with a badge, rather than a press card, needs to look at. In London, the police watchdog is investigating the police. And in a rehabilitation centre in Florida, an 82-year-old man with one leg insists that none of it is what it looks like.
He may yet be right. The devices may contain nothing. The girls in the photographs may all have been adults. The magazines may be less than the Mail says. The books, after all, are only books. If so, a great many people, in Florida, in Cebu, in the Sussex household, at Scotland Yard and in more than one newsroom, will have a great deal of explaining to do.
But I would not put money on it. When this story broke it smelled like a kipper left on a radiator: a tabloid splash, an accuser with an axe to grind, a family that has turned the public feud into a cottage industry. It still smells. The trouble is that the smell is now coming from a storage unit in Rosarito, and it is not the Sussexes who rented it.
Thomas Markle stopped paying for that unit two years ago. Things put into storage, it turns out, have a way of outlasting the excuses.
And then there is the other, perhaps more conspiratorial yet not impossible explanation.
Could the items found in the storage unit have been planted there?…