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The Duchess of Sussex disclosed that she was informed by the Metropolitan Police about disturbing allegations against her father in 2018, according to a statement reported by the BBC on 23 October 2026. Meghan Markle described herself as deeply distressed by the development, which centres on images of child sexual abuse allegedly belonging to Thomas Markle that were reportedly found at his former home in the Philippines. The BBC reported that she called the claims more sickening than one could ever imagine, marking her direct response to the allegations first published by The Sun.
Thomas Markle has lived away from the United Kingdom for years, with previous BBC reporting from 2018 placing him in Mexico at the time of his daughter’s wedding to Prince Harry. Court documents from a later privacy lawsuit, as detailed in a 2020 BBC article, showed the extent of the breakdown in communication during the weeks before the May 2018 ceremony. Those records indicated Thomas Markle had admitted to staging photographs with a photographer, an action that prompted text messages from Prince Harry urging him to avoid further media contact.
Meghan Markle wrote a private letter to her father in August 2018 that expressed her sense of betrayal over his engagement with the press, according to filings in her successful High Court case against Associated Newspapers. The 2021 judgment, covered by the BBC and other outlets including Sky News, ruled that the Mail on Sunday had breached her privacy by publishing extracts from the correspondence. Lord Justice Warby determined the letter was a personal document, ordering the publisher to pay damages in a case that drew international attention to the family dispute.
The BBC reported in 2018 that Thomas Markle had undergone heart surgery shortly before the royal wedding and ultimately did not attend, a decision that coincided with the emerging controversy over the staged images. In a December 2018 interview with ITV covered by the BBC, Thomas Markle said he had been unable to reach his daughter and felt she was ghosting him despite his daily attempts to make contact. He expressed a wish to resolve their differences, a sentiment he has repeated in subsequent years without any reported reconciliation.
Samantha Markle, Thomas Markle’s daughter from his first marriage and Meghan Markle’s half-sister, has spoken publicly about the family situation on multiple occasions, according to earlier BBC interviews. In one 2018 appearance on Good Morning Britain carried by the BBC, Samantha Markle defended the staged photographs as having good intentions and suggested the media had distorted her father’s image. Samantha Markle has also been involved in separate legal proceedings with the Duchess of Sussex, adding to the public narrative around the estrangement that dates back to the pre-wedding period.
The Metropolitan Police have yet to issue any formal statement on the timing or substance of information provided to Meghan Markle in 2018, the BBC noted in its 23 October 2026 article. The Sun newspaper first brought the allegations to light in its reporting, though the BBC story indicated that further details on the claims were still emerging. Meghan Markle’s statement represents one of the few direct comments from her on this specific matter amid the ongoing absence of any public relationship with her father.
