Shortly after his daughter Meghan married Prince Harry, Thomas Markle was the subject of a cover story on America's most notorious supermarket tabloid, The National Enquirer.
Published in October 2018, it gave a compelling insight into why his absence from that summer's royal wedding might, in the great scheme of things, turn out to have been a blessing in disguise.
The article was based on a tape recording of the retired TV lighting director discussing his time in Hollywood, where he'd won three Emmy awards.
Two excerpts stood out. In one, Markle brazenly talked about having dabbled in Class A drugs, confessing: 'In the industry I worked in back in the 70s and 80s there was cocaine around a lot. And I'm sure that I had an occasional sniff of cocaine.'
In the second, he gave a bizarrely equivocal answer when asked if he'd ever consorted with prostitutes in South-East Asia, where he'd holidayed on a number of occasions.
'Have I ever paid for a sex worker? Uh, there was a Playboy Club in the top floor of a hotel in the Philippines [but] I never paid for sex. I would go upstairs and enjoy myself in the Playboy Club, but… not for sex. I didn't get sex out of it,' Markle said.
But at the weekend he admitted to The Mail on Sunday that he had paid for sex in the Philippines.
The tape recording turned out to have been secretly made by Markle's son, Thomas Jr.
The Duchess of Sussex has been estranged from her father, Thomas Markle Sr, 82, since 2018. Pictured: The couple together on the day of Meghan's marriage to film producer Trevor Engelson in 2011
Roslyn Loveless, the first wife of Meghan Markle's estranged father Thomas, pictured outside her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Meghan Markle's half-brother Thomas Markle Jnr pictured hand-in-hand with a woman outside the apartment building where he lived with his father in the Philippines on May 10, 2025
In a separate interview, around the same time, he discussed his father's love life, claiming that in between divorcing his mother, Roslyn Loveless, in 1975, and marrying Meghan's mother, Doria Ragland, in 1979, he'd enjoyed a lengthy relationship with a lady from the Philippines named Marty.
'There's a certain type of woman he likes. He likes Asian women a lot,' said Thomas Jr, before adding enigmatically: 'He likes to go on vacation to Thailand, Vietnam. He likes their culture a lot.'
Fast-forward eight years and Meghan's father, now 82, is once more the subject of a toe-curling sex scandal. The principal setting is, again, the Philippines.
And the most explosive details are, as previously, being made public by Thomas Jr, one of two children from whom he appears to be irreparably estranged.
The whole thing kicked off at exactly 10.04pm on Thursday, when it emerged that Filipino police were investigating Thomas Sr over a huge stash of child sex images that had allegedly been found at his home in Cebu, a tourist island some 350 miles south-east of the capital Manila.
It had purportedly been discovered by Thomas Jr, who told The Sun newspaper that he'd found 'hundreds if not thousands' of images in four cardboard boxes that had been shipped there from Rosarito in Mexico, where father and son had lived before moving out to the Philippines for a 'fresh start' in January 2025. '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.'
Thomas Jr, 60, claims to have come across the material in July, while searching for a mobile phone handset he could give to the father of his fiancée, a 28-year-old Filipino woman named Rose.
Mr Markle faces child sex allegations which he denies and told The Mail on Sunday he was 'not buying' the idea that his first wife, who died two years ago, wrote the letter to the Met Police in early 2019
He says he charged up an old LG device, which had previously belonged to his Dad, only for explicit video of 'naked young girls' to flash up on the screen.
Other images, of what The Sun described as 'victims appearing to be aged no older than ten or 11', were discovered on a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop.
There were also alleged to be explicit DVDs and photographs, some of them secreted in the pages of a couple of coffee table books that belonged to Thomas Sr. One was called Lewis Carroll Photographs Of Children: Four Nude Studies, the other Hollywood Lolitas: The Nymphet Syndrome In The Movies.
According to Thomas Jr, he promptly reported the discovery of the material to the FBI, hoping they would launch an investigation into his father.
Thomas Sr had moved back to the US in May after suffering serious health difficulties, including a stroke and a blood clot, which resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee.
Yet three months passed, without an FBI probe ensuing. So Thomas Jr instead decided to report the matter to police in the Philippines.
On Friday morning, he transported the four cardboard boxes to the police headquarters in Cebu City in a Toyota HiAce people-carrier under the watchful eyes of a Sun reporter.
Thomas Jr, who had until now sided with his father in various public spats with Meghan, then used the newspaper to issue a mea culpa to his estranged half-sister, saying yesterday: 'I'm so, so sorry… I now know I have been protecting the wrong person for the past nine years.'
The Duchess of Sussex had by then set a second hare running. On Friday, she issued a statement declaring herself 'deeply distressed at the news that has come to light in the last 24 hours'.
Thomas Sr recovering in a hospital bed after surgery in the Philippines last December
Meghan added that in 2018, the Metropolitan Police had shared with her details of a letter which 'made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father'.
She was 'given assurances that these were being investigated', and subsequently decided to prevent her children from having contact with their grandfather, in order 'to protect them'.
It later emerged, the letter had in fact been sent in early 2019, shortly after The National Enquirer's revelations about Thomas Sr's previous exploits in an 'X-rated jiggle joint' in the Philippines. The letter's author was Thomas Sr's alcoholic ex-wife Roslyn Loveless, who died in 2024.
She alleged that he had admitted going to the Philippines and Thailand to abuse children, according to sources who have seen the letter's contents.
The Met is now 'reviewing its handling of the matter' and may yet refer itself to the police watchdog.
One odd wrinkle is that the letter seems to have ended up not with officers specialising in child sex abuse but with the Force's 'Fixated Threat Assessment Centre', a unit frequently referred to as its 'stalker and obsessive unit', which deals with people who threaten royals, celebrities and other public figures.
It's unclear whether this means officers concluded that claims made by Ms Loveless suggested she was a potential threat to Meghan, or whether they were instead concerned about Thomas Sr. Either way, an informed source said last night that the Met would almost certainly have had no jurisdiction to carry out further inquiries since Mr Markle was not in the UK and neither was his alleged offending nor the purported victims.
Another tricky factor for the law enforcement agencies might be the fact that the age of consent in the Philippines was only upgraded to 16 in 2022. Prior to that point it was just 12.
Quite how seriously the Duchess of Sussex took the 2019 letter from Ms Loveless is, at this stage, unclear. In February 2019, shortly after it arrived, Meghan authorised five friends to brief her favourite outlet, People magazine, about her estrangement from Thomas Sr. The resulting article suggested the Duchess wished to repair the relationship.
Later, in a 2022 Netflix documentary, Meghan declared that she had been 'a daddy's girl my whole life'. She only appears to have categorically cut him off in late 2025, when Thomas Sr was gravely ill in hospital in the Philippines.
At that point, a representative was dispatched to hand-deliver a letter in a scene witnessed by the Mail's Caroline Graham.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at The Community Recording Studio in Nottingham earlier this month, their first official engagement since returning to the UK
None of which is, of course, to suggest that the Duchess is anything but a victim of this week's appalling developments. One might argue, in fact, she is the only member of her troubled American family who emerges from recent developments with her reputation enhanced.
Thomas Jr's motives are, to this end, very much open to question.
A twice-divorced window-fitter, with two grown-up sons (one is a marijuana farmer in Oregon, where the activity is legal), his chaotic personal CV includes an arrest for allegedly putting a gun to a girlfriend's head during a drunken row (charges were filed in 2017 but later dismissed after they reconciled) and a court appearance for drink-driving.
He also appeared on Australia's version of Celebrity Big Brother in 2022, alleging that he and Meghan had once been close, but that 'money changed her' after she achieved fame.
In recent years, the 60-year-old has been almost entirely financially supported by his father. The duo moved out to the Philippines together in January 2025, and Thomas Jr remains there.
Thomas Sr, for his part, returned to the US in May to recuperate from the health crisis that saw his leg amputated.
He left behind his most recent girlfriend Rio Canedo, a local nurse who he'd met when she treated him in hospital.
At 46, she is three and a half decades his junior.
Meghan's father initially spent time in Pennsylvania but has lately been in a nursing home in Lakeland, Florida, where he is being supported by Samantha Markle, the Duchess's somewhat outspoken second half‑sibling, who is the eldest child of Ms Loveless.
Samantha, a former actress and model who has given a number of unflattering interviews about Meghan over the years, remains very much in her father's camp.
She told the Daily Mail at the weekend that her brother's allegations about their father are 'disgusting', saying they have 'no merit in them whatsoever'.
She described Thomas Jr as a 'liar' who is fabricating the claims to make cash.
Furthermore, she has alleged that his original complaint to the FBI in July followed a family row over money: shortly after returning to the US in May, Thomas Sr changed passwords to a bank account his son had access to.
'My brother first came out with these lies days after the cash from my Dad was cut off. He has used Dad as a cash cow for years, and once the money stopped he made up the most outrageous lies he could to make money from the media,' was how Samantha put it.
She further described her brother as a 'delusional alcoholic' and said the devices said to contain illicit material had been untouched by her father since he'd arrived in the Philippines, where they had been kept in storage.
'Dad had no access to those computers for two years. Who knows who could have had access to them? Anyone could have set Dad up. There is no merit in these disgusting allegations whatsoever and my brother is disgusting for making them up.'
In remarks which may do little to improve her father's reputation in the court of public opinion, Samantha added that one of the photographs at the centre of the investigation, which purportedly shows her father on a bed with a young-looking Asian woman, 'may be one of his girlfriends'.
She went on: 'Dad dated a wonderful Japanese woman called Carolyn who I loved. She was in her 30s but she looked like a teenager. Asian women have great skin and are small and petite. They look much younger than they are.
'Dad had another girlfriend called Gail. She was Asian and gorgeous but looked very young.'
And what of Thomas Sr? He is purportedly in severe ill health, but has declared himself prepared to do 'whatever it takes' to clear his name, saying that the computers and phones at the centre of this week's events haven't been in his possession for more than two years so: 'If there is anything bad on there it was put there by someone else.'
As we have seen in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, he admitted that when he was single he travelled to the Philippines at least twice and 'slept with prostitutes', adding, perhaps ill-advisedly, that: 'I like Asian women but that is not a crime.'
And so, the case continues.
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