Rosie DiManno: In the wake of allegations against her father, some new understanding for Meghan - Toronto Star
The latest disturbing news about Meghan's estranged father might spur some reassessment of Prince Harry's wife.
Thomas Markle, father of Meghan Markle, being interviewed on GB News in 2021.
Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.
The electronic ankle monitor that Thomas Markle cut off at around 1:45 on Tuesday morning was presumably tethered to the one leg he’s got left.
That was merely the latest dumb move for the estranged father of the daughter-in-law of King Charles. He was rearrested immediately, removed from the assisted living facility in Florida where he’d been residing, and had his bail revoked.
Even when he had two good legs, long before amputation in the Philippines last year, Markle wasn’t fit to walk his daughter, Meghan, down the aisle when the American TV actress married Prince Harry in 2018. So Charles stepped up. Emergency heart surgery just days before the nuptials took Thomas Markle out of the frame. But more so because he was persona non grata after staging paparazzi photos — shown getting measured for his wedding duds at a Mexican tailor’s shop — in exchange for cash.
It was an ominous augury of what became a bitter relationship — nonrelationship, more accurately — between father and daughter. Though it was Meghan who was depicted, primarily in the tabloids that made a sport of belittling her, as the cold-hearted and unforgiving child.
Now we know why she kept her distance.
The Duchess hasn’t spoken with her father since the wedding. The Duke of Sussex — Harry — has never met him.
An alleged pedophile-in-law in the Royal Family. And that’s not even the worst scandal of a sexually predatory nature that’s befallen the House of Windsor in recent years. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, stripped of his prince title over his long-standing association with convicted sex offender and Jeffrey Epstein, still holds that distinction.
But it’s bad enough, even if degrees of separation — and ostracism — stand between the royals and Markle. There’s no backsplash splattering Charles, or the Duke and Duchess of Wales, William and Kate. They’re offstage somewhere in this particular melodrama.
Yet if not for the tangential relationship between Thomas Markle and the Windsors, he’d be just one more creepy old guy purportedly interested in prepubescent girls. What he allegedly rationalized to his first ex-wife, as he headed for Thailand. “It’s legal over there. That’s how they support their families, by prostituting them.”
Markle, 82, was arrested in Florida last Friday and charged with one count of possession of child pornography. His arrest followed the seizure of some 78 items, including slides and film negatives of child sexual images, from a storage locker in the Los Angeles area. Reuters reported that the material allegedly included sexually explicit photographs of Markle with underage girls, taken in what appeared to be a motel in the Philippines. Shortly thereafter, Philippine authorities disclosed they’d found more than 7,000 child sexual-abuse images there on devices belonging to Markle.
It’s difficult pulling apart all the strands of Markle’s alleged predation. But it was his first wife, Roslyn Loveless, who was behind a letter sent to United Kingdom police in 2019, detailing “disturbing allegations” of child sex abuse by her former husband. Loveless gave interviews to The Sun that were apparently too risky to publish at the time.
That letter was passed on to Meghan. And that was why she both definitively cut off communication with her father and refused to let him see his grandchildren. Last month, as the story began to surface, Meghan released a statement saying she was “deeply distressed” by the allegations.
It was Markle’s son, Tom, who first raised the alarm with authorities in the Philippines upon finding a cache of disturbing material among his father’s abandoned belongings at his home in Cebu, after Markle had relocated to the U.S. last December. “It’s a huge relief,” Tom Markle told the Sun after his father’s arrest. “I feel vindicated because I’ve been under a lot of pressure this past few weeks. I was devastated to discover who my father really is and it has been an ordeal coming forward.”
Meghan’s mother Doria — recall that dignified Black woman sitting alone in the church, watching her only child marrying a prince — is reportedly also assisting investigators.
What a tragic mess, entangled in one man’s purported depravity.
Meghan and Harry are still notorious grifters who fled England, throwing off their royal shackles for lives as quasi-royal private citizens, subsequently smearing Harry’s family via tell-all biography (“Spare”), television interviews (Oprah) and self-serving documentaries (Netflix). But there’s no doubt that Meghan had been crucified in the tabs, with heavily racist overtones. At the moment, the red tops are delighting in a newspaper war over the Thomas Markle affair, swapping scoops. While Harry and Meghan moved back to England in August, Harry still hasn’t reconciled with brother William and likely there will be no invitation to spend Christmas together at Sandringham.
But maybe Meghan was never quite the shrew, succubus and “Duchess Difficult” as portrayed.
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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.
