Meghan Markle’s estranged father swears his son invented the worst accusation a man can face.
His side of the family insists nobody can lay a finger on him.
And Kash Patel’s FBI just got a second tip about a room he kept to himself for seven years.
A Newspaper Beat Every Badge in Two Countries to the Door
Thomas Markle Sr already has police in the Philippines digging through his life. His son, Thomas Markle Jr, told investigators in Cebu he found child sex abuse images in boxes his father left behind there, and the old man calls the whole thing “sick lies.”
Then two Daily Mail reporters drove to Rosarito, Mexico, the beach town ten miles from the US border where Markle hid from the world for more than a decade.
They found a storage unit.
According to the paper, Markle rented the five-by-ten locker in 2017, three miles from his old house, and kept it going until a final three-month renewal in March 2024. Then he stopped paying. The paper says it got inside after two years of missed payments, and a source told reporters that nobody else, not even Thomas Jr, ever visited the place.
What the reporters say they found turns the stomach. Family snapshots and old letters sat in roughly 20 boxes alongside books about pedophilia, magazines printed in Asia that the Daily Mail says show children being sexually abused, and black-and-white prints of nude young women, some of whom looked “conspicuously young” to the reporters.
The paper also admits it has no evidence Markle had sex with any of the women in those photos. That detail matters, and it belongs in any honest telling of this story.
But the pile in the corner matters more to the FBI.
Seven Hard Drives and a Note Nobody Can Wave Away
Markle’s locker held seven hard drives pulled out of computers, four pen drives, two digital cameras, two cameras made for kids, an old Apple computer, and more than 50 VHS tapes with unknown contents.
And then there’s the computer tower.
Somebody taped a handwritten note to it reading “Overheated . . . Virus!” Somebody also taped up instructions for WinCleaner, a program that scrubs a hard drive of everything on it, right down to the activation code.
Nearby sat a paper plate with “DARK WEB” scrawled across it in red ink next to a list of web addresses.
Nobody outside a forensic lab knows what those drives hold. Maybe nothing. Maybe a wiped slate. And the Daily Mail says plainly it doesn’t know, though it reported Markle to the FBI anyway.
Markle didn’t answer the paper’s requests for comment on the locker. He has denied every accusation from his son, though he did admit to paying for sex in the Philippines while he was single. “I never had sex with anyone under the age of 18,” he told the paper, and he insists the computers in question left his hands when he moved out of Mexico in January 2025.
Thomas Jr Already Called the FBI Back in July
Here’s the part that ought to bother folks.
Thomas Jr says he first contacted the FBI tip line on July 10, along with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Pennsylvania State Police, since his father lived in Pennsylvania at the time. He told reporters he heard nothing back. The Sun later reported the Bureau acknowledged his sworn affidavit and that an agent asked for contact details for the Cebu investigators.
The FBI’s public line since then promises to “provide support, as appropriate, to the Philippine authorities.”
Support. As appropriate. For somebody else’s case.
But Thomas Markle Sr doesn’t live in the Philippines anymore. Doctors there amputated his left leg in December 2025, and he flew back to the United States in May 2026. He now sits in a rehab center in central Florida, learning to walk again, about as far inside the FBI’s reach as a man can get.
Philippine authorities aren’t sitting on their hands. Police in Cebu secured a court warrant to search the computers, phones, hard drives, and tapes Thomas Jr turned over. Filipino official Jonvic Remulla said Markle could be a “sex offender of the grossest kind,” and Melvin Matibag, director of the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation, confirmed his agency has talked with the FBI.
Samantha’s Camp Has an Answer for Everything, and One of Them Is Wrong
When reporters knocked on Samantha Markle’s door in Florida, her boyfriend, Mark Phillips, did the talking. He claimed “The FBI has no jurisdiction in Mexico,” and he argued any statute of limitations ran out years ago.
The first point carries some weight. American agents can’t stroll into a Mexican storage locker waving a federal warrant.
But the second point doesn’t hold up. In 2006, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Act and wiped out the statute of limitations for most federal crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children. If prosecutors ever found a crime here that falls under American law, a calendar wouldn’t stand in their way.
Commenters under the Daily Mail story raised a sharper objection. Reporters, not police, opened that locker first, and any defense lawyer worth his retainer will ask who touched what before an agent ever showed up.
But that problem cuts both ways. It may weaken any case built on the Mexico locker. It also shows how long the material sat there while no agency in any country came looking, right up until the rent stopped and a newspaper got curious.
Kash Patel Promised an FBI That Lets Good Cops Be Cops
When the Senate confirmed Kash Patel in February 2025, he vowed to “let good cops be cops.” Donald Trump, announcing the pick, promised an FBI that would stop “the evil scourge of human and drug trafficking.”
This case hands the Bureau about as clean a test as it gets. The man lives on American soil. Two separate tips have landed. A foreign partner is already asking questions, and a newspaper just mapped out seven hard drives the public didn’t know existed.
And none of that proves a crime. Markle is 82 years old, missing a leg, and denying everything. He deserves the same presumption of innocence any other American gets, and a real investigation is the only thing that can give it to him. A trial in the British tabloids sure won’t.
But Americans have watched plenty of powerful institutions sit on ugly allegations for years. Meghan says British police told her about troubling allegations against her father long ago and advised her that speaking out could hurt any legal case. Years passed. The Philippines, not London, finally opened a file.
The old man spent his career on the lighting crews of General Hospital and Married . . . with Children, deciding what the audience saw and what stayed in the shadows. Now strangers with flashlights are going through his boxes in two countries.
And Meghan, for her part, kept Archie and Lilibet away from him. The Sussexes let the public blame the press for that rift for years, and that story looks a lot different now.
If the drives come back clean, Thomas Jr will face hard questions about the accusation he aimed at his own father. If they don’t, the FBI will have some explaining to do about a tip that has sat since July.
Markle himself has already said where he stands. From his rehab center in Florida, he told the Daily Mail, “I welcome an investigation because I didn’t do this.”
Sources:
Daily Mail, “Daily Mail finds child pornography in Thomas Markle’s Mexico storage unit”
BBC, “Philippine police obtain warrant to search Thomas Markle’s devices”
Newser, “Philippine Cops Get Warrant to Search Devices of Thomas Markle”
IBTimes UK, “Meghan Markle’s Dad Reportedly Investigated Over Thousands of Suspected Child Sex Abuse Images in Philippines Home”
Ynetnews, “Meghan Markle’s father investigated over alleged possession of child pornography”
HollywoodLife, “Did Police Investigate Meghan Markle’s Dad?”
Australian Associated Press via Canberra Times, “Meghan Markle’s father’s belongings scrutinised”
PA Media via Qatar Tribune, “Philippines investigating allegations against Meghan’s father”
The Irish News, “Philippines authorities investigating allegations against Thomas Markle Sr”
EURweb, “Thomas Markle Sr denies son’s allegations”
South Asian Herald, “Kash Patel Confirmed as FBI Director in Narrow Senate Vote”
The National News Desk, “Kash Patel says ‘hello’: Meet President-elect Trump’s pick for FBI director”