Meghan told father he would never meet her children, BBC reports

The Metropolitan Police is making internal inquiries into reports that its royal protection officers passed Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, a letter containing allegations about her father in 2018. The force has not confirmed that the letter was passed on, and it is not conducting a UK criminal investigation into Thomas Markle.

“We are aware of media reports that officers from the Met’s Royalty and Specialist Protection Command were involved in the passing on of a letter in 2018,” a police spokesperson said. “We are undertaking inquiries internally in an effort to confirm this.”

Meghan said on Friday that the letter had been sent to the Met and later shared with her. “It made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father, and I was given assurances that these were being investigated,” she said. She said her decision to keep her father from having contact with her children was to protect them.

ITV News says it has seen the letter and that it contains no allegations of crimes committed in the UK. The Sun says it has seen a copy addressed to the Met’s Fixated Threat Assessment Centre. According to the newspaper, the letter alleges that Markle sexually abused a child abroad. The Met’s inquiries have yet to establish what officers did with the letter in 2018; the allegation in it is not a finding of abuse.

The account of the letter emerged alongside a separate allegation by Meghan’s half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr, that he found child sexual abuse images among their father’s belongings at his former home in the Philippines. Philippine justice undersecretary Nicholas Ty told ITV News that a specialist taskforce in Cebu is investigating that matter. Markle denied his son’s accusations in an interview with the Daily Mail, calling them “just a bunch of lies”. Whether the Philippine inquiry has any connection to the allegations in the 2018 letter remains unclear.

Update

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote to her estranged father in 2025 to say she would never contact him again and that he would never meet her children, the BBC reports, citing sources close to her. The account has emerged as authorities in the Philippines investigate allegations against Thomas Markle, which he denies. [6]

The BBC says Meghan also told her father that authorities were aware of claims against him. It has not published the letter. Philippine officials told the BBC that a task force dealing with trafficking and child sexual exploitation was investigating the allegations. Interior minister Jonvic Remulla said police had secured Markle’s computer for a digital forensic examination. Markle denies possessing child sexual abuse images or having sex with underage girls. [6]

The reported 2025 letter to her father is separate from a warning sent to the Metropolitan Police years earlier. The Met says it received a letter in January 2019 containing claims about alleged offending outside the UK and passed it to the office of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. It says it did not share the allegations with other law enforcement agencies. ITV News says it has seen the handwritten letter, which it says made no allegations of illegal activity in the UK. [7] [8]

Meghan said she had been assured at the time that the older allegations were being investigated. She initially recalled the letter reaching police in 2018, but her spokesperson subsequently accepted the Met’s 2019 record as the reference point for when it was received and shared. The Met is now reviewing its handling of that letter and considering whether to refer itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. That review concerns the force’s actions in 2019, not a finding that the allegations against Markle are true. [8]