Terry Prone: Hidden dread over allegations against father cast Meghan Markle's image in new light
Meghan Markle, pictured this year on a trip to Australia.
Nobody in the reputation-minding business, if they were asked to improve Meghan Markle’s image, would have dreamed up what’s emerged in the past few days about her father. Nobody.
Paradoxically, though, the revelations that her father faces allegations of possessing shoe boxes full of pornographic pictures of little children — children being grievously abused by adults — could change perceptions of the jam-peddling duchess for the better.
It is clear now that all the global pleas from Thomas Markle Sr for a chance to see his grandchildren were never going to bear fruit, because his only daughter had been appraised at least eight, maybe nine years ago, of a shocking letter, sent to the Metropolitan Police’s Protection Command, who deemed it of sufficient significance to justify sharing with the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The letter put the former cameraman front and centre in a criminal investigation for “alleged offending outside the UK.”
Consequently, Meghan’s constant ignoring of her father’s wishes in that regard now take on a different hue.
Admittedly, some media-haters of the flower-petal-scattering non-working royal have come speedily out of the traps to point to things Meghan has said, down the years, about her estrangement from her father, and wonder about why she said those things when the truth would have served her so much better.
Things like that she was always a “daddy’s girl”. Things like blaming the determined distance on his ridiculous cosying up to papparazi before her wedding. Things like her not saying anything in public about the issue in the many years since she was told about it.
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But the facts come before all that. The facts establish that she knew of the allegations from 2019. Not in the detail vouch-safed to the world by her half-brother, who more recently claims to have found hundreds if not thousands of child-abuse images when he was going through his father’s belongings in the Philippines looking for an unused phone to give to his girlfriend.
He charged up the phone which, he says, promptly presented pornographic images that, in turn, prompted a wider search.
The Duchess of Sussex knew nothing of that when the Met first informed her about the letter in the year after her marriage. But she knew the drift of the accusations against Markle, Sr.
So why didn’t she come out and say that the real reason she wouldn’t correspond with him, the real reason why she wouldn’t let him meet her children, was not that he invaded her privacy but because of something much more serious?
The answer, it’s fair to assume, is that she felt she could not, at that point, denounce her father for offences for which he had not been tried in court, and for which he still remains innocent until proven guilty.
She kind of had enough challenges to negotiate, at that time.
In fairness, the facts indicate that, right throughout the controversies about herself and Prince Harry — the majority self-created — she knew about the most horrific allegations about her father.
They must have been running like minor key music beneath her already chaotic life. Complicated minor key music.
One of the complications was that the initial letter was sent by his former wife, with whom she had a less than positive relationship. Another complication was the expectation of police action.
At any time during almost 10 years during which she moved to the US, tried to create a new career, had a miscarriage and gave birth to two babies, it must have seemed likely that either the FBI or the Filipino police, informed by the Met, would charge her father with egregious offences.
While she waited in fear, staying silent so as not to prejudice a later trial and portraying the estrangement in other ways, nothing emerged from a police investigation, for the good reason that there was no police investigation, and so her public image as the cold, estranged daughter of an old man pleading to meet his grandchildren became cast in stone.
Although it might be a bit of a stretch, this background threat might also have contributed to Meghan’s ridiculous insistence, in her Netflix series, on guests using 'Sussex' as her surname.
If you believe 'Markle' is a surname shortly to become notorious globally through association with allegations relating to brutal crimes against children, 'Sussex' would take on a preferred significance outsiders could not appreciate.
The fact that the Met didn’t bother to liaise with international police forces is a lapse so severe as to spark self-examination within the force and speculation as to whether or not they should report themselves to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
But whatever about the outcome of such a referral, the reality is that the Met, by inaction, has demonstrably added to the stresses in this woman’s life and has probably contributed to her lousy image.
Even now, she is constrained by whatever investigation is belatedly going on and by the possibility of inadvertently damaging a legal case against her father.
The woman who is a byword for explaining her feelings cannot do it in this case, and, if the dementia supposedly affecting her father prevents him having a day in court, may not be able to talk openly about it for years.
We now know Meghan Markle has been aware of these allegations for almost a decade and that can't have been easy. It does cast a slightly different light on the duchess.
It will not, of course, radically change her image.
Just as you can’t unring a bell, you can’t unstick an established reputation, especially when that reputation has more strings to it than this particular issue.
Some sympathy would be appropriate, especially from us in media. What she has experienced over eight dread-filled years, is a concealed, silent suffering she neither caused nor deserved.
That’s what the facts tell us.
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