Thomas Markle Was Reported as a Potential Threat to Harry and Meghan, Then the Met Police Lost the Warning Letter

The story surrounding the 2019 warning letter about Thomas Markle has taken another significant turn. The Telegraph now reports that Roslyn Loveless, Thomas’s first wife, did not simply send Scotland Yard allegations concerning alleged child sexual offences. She also warned British police that she considered her former husband a potential security risk to Prince Harry, Meghan Sussex and Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland.

According to the newspaper, Loveless told the Metropolitan Police that she believed it would be useful for British security and threat-assessment officials to know about what she described as Thomas’s “true and unsavoury background.” She reportedly characterised him as a “high risk” to Harry, Meghan and Doria.

Thomas Markle strongly denies the allegations against him.

The Met Received a Child Sex Abuse Warning About Thomas Markle, Then Lost the Letter

The letter was addressed to the Metropolitan Police’s Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, a specialist unit concerned with threats to members of the Royal Family, politicians and other public figures.

She said she felt it was “useful for security and threat assessment units in the UK” to be aware of the “true and unsavoury background” her former husband was accused of. She said she felt he was “a high risk to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and to Doria Ragland [the Duchess’s mother]”.

The Telegraph

That detail is incredibly important becuase this was not simply somebody writing to a newspaper with family gossip. A woman who had been married to Thomas Markle for more than a decade contacted a specialist police unit because she believed authorities responsible for protecting Meghan should know what she was alleging.

The Met has now confirmed that it received the letter in January 2019 and sent it to its Protection Command because of concerns relating to Meghan’s security. Police reviewed the letter and passed it to Harry and Meghan’s private office, which operated under Kensington Palace at the time. However, the Met has still not disclosed which royal staff members received the information.

But the force has also admitted that it did not share the allegations with other law-enforcement agencies. And the handling appears to have been even more troubling than first reported.

According to The Times, the Met later could not locate its original copy of the letter and had to ask Meghan to provide the copy she had kept. The Independent reports that police had received the warning in 2019, failed to pass the allegations to other authorities and then were unable to find the original correspondence when the issue resurfaced.

The Met says it is now reviewing how the matter was handled in 2019 and considering whether it should refer itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct.

The Met Couldn’t Even Get Meghan’s Name Right

This is not the first time the Metropolitan Police’s handling of a royal matter has raised questions about Meghan. Remember the controversy surrounding the March 2021 vigil for Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped, raped and murdered by serving Met officer Wayne Couzens?

Kate Middleton, then Duchess of Cambridge, visited the memorial at Clapham Common during COVID-19 restrictions. Later that evening, police arrested women attending the gathering. Yet Kate faced no enforcement action. When questioned, then-Met Commissioner Cressida Dick defended Kate’s attendance, suggesting she had been carrying out royal duties. The visit had initially been described as private.

But another detail subsequently emerged. A Met public-order debrief reportedly identified the Duchess of Sussex as having attended the memorial instead of the Duchess of Cambridge.

Meghan was living in California at the time. She wasn’t even in the country. How does a police force responsible for protecting members of the Royal Family confuse two of its most recognisable figures in an official record?

Now, five years later, we discover that the same institution received serious allegations involving Meghan’s father, failed to alert other law-enforcement agencies and reportedly misplaced the warning letter.

The Met has serious questions to answer about its record-keeping, accountability and treatment of Meghan. The Metropolitan Police’s handling of this case is a scandalous failure of duty. Serious allegations of child sexual abuse went nowhere. Crucial correspondence disappeared. And the woman they spent years vilifying was left to safeguard the very evidence the authorities should have protected. This is not incompetence. This is negligence of the highest order.

Meghan Trusted the Authorities. Why Was She Expected to Do Their Job?

The Met’s repeated failures make the years of criticism directed at Meghan even more outrageous. Meghan has said she was shown the allegations and assured they were being investigated. She believed the authorities were handling the matter, and her decision to keep her distance from her father and prevent him from having contact with Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet was about protecting her children.

So I keep coming back to the same question: what exactly was Meghan supposed to do? Investigate her own father? Contact foreign police herself? Ignore what British authorities had told her and allow Thomas access to her children anyway?

Meghan trusted the people responsible for investigating serious allegations and assessing threats. That is what most of us would have done.

The Media Had Questions for Meghan, But Very Few for Thomas

There is another institution that deserves scrutiny here: the media. Thomas Markle spent years appearing in interviews discussing his daughter, complaining about their estrangement and repeatedly saying he wanted to meet his grandchildren.

British television gave him an enormous platform. Piers Morgan interviewed him. Good Morning Britain interviewed him. Newspapers repeatedly carried his grievances. The estranged father who simply wanted his daughter back became an almost permanent feature of royal coverage. And yet there was one painfully obvious line of questioning that received remarkably little attention:

What relationship did Thomas Markle have with his other grandchildren?

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If Meghan was supposedly cruel because Thomas Markle had never met Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, why did interviewers rarely question his relationships with his other grandchildren? His former wife, Roslyn Loveless, revealed in 2019 that he had five other grandchildren, two of whom he had never met.

And what about Samantha Markle? Her daughter, Ashleigh Hale, revealed in the Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan that her paternal grandparents obtained custody of her and her brother and eventually adopted them. Ashleigh also said she had little contact with Samantha growing up.

Yet British television repeatedly gave Samantha a platform to attack Meghan’s family relationships and criticise her decisions concerning her children. The cheek of it. A woman whose own children were raised by their grandparents was invited to pass judgment on Meghan’s family choices, while her own history received comparatively little scrutiny.

The media did not need Roslyn Loveless’s warning letter to ask better questions. They simply needed to scrutinise Thomas and Samantha with the same determination they reserved for Meghan.

For years, the British press treated Meghan’s decision to distance herself from her father as a character flaw, while giving Thomas and Samantha Markle repeated opportunities to attack her. Now we know that Roslyn Loveless had warned police that Thomas could pose a risk to Meghan and her family. The Met failed to share the allegations with other authorities and reportedly lost the letter. Perhaps it is time the journalists who spent years questioning Meghan’s judgment started examining their own.