An 82-year-old man who once lit Hollywood sets now sits in a Florida nursing home while police in two countries look into claims his son found boxes of child sex abuse images among family keepsakes. The story comes from one British paper. The family is already split over whether any of it is true.
Thomas Markle Senior, father of the Duchess of Sussex, is under investigation in the Philippines after his own son, Thomas Markle Junior, filed a sworn statement saying he discovered hundreds, if not thousands, of illegal images and videos in four large cardboard boxes left behind in Cebu. No arrest has been made. No charges have been filed. The boxes have not yet been fully examined by forensic experts. What readers see is one son’s account, one daughter’s flat denial, and a source close to Meghan suggesting the long silence between father and daughter may now make more sense to the public.
What the Son Says He Found
Thomas Junior, 60, told police and later The Sun that he was looking through his father’s stored belongings for a spare phone to give his girlfriend’s father when an old LG mobile lit up with a 15-minute video. He said the girls in the video looked no older than ten or eleven and were shown in sex acts. Three still pictures of girls around the same age sat on the same phone. One of those pictures, he claimed, was a photo of a laptop screen taken in a room he recognised from his father’s earlier home in Rosarito, Mexico.
He said he reported the phone to the FBI tip line, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and Pennsylvania state police on 10 July. Weeks passed with no follow-up call. He then opened the remaining boxes. With help from a local computer technician he switched on three hard drives. He described rows of thumbnail images of preschool children and toddlers, some nude, some engaged in sex acts. He said one antique photography book titled “Lewis Carroll Photographs of Children: Four Nude Studies” held additional images of a man with a very young Asian girl. A film negative showed two naked schoolgirls. Other books had ordinary covers of adult nudes but inside pages of young girls in sexual poses.
“When I found this material I was horrified and I had no option but to report my dad. 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.”
He told friends the material mixed with old family VHS tapes, books, nine phones, and the three Emmy Awards his father won for lighting work. On one hard drive the child images sat next to his father’s professional CV and a download of Meghan speaking at a United Nations women’s event. Thomas Junior said the discovery left him a “shaking wreck.” He has agreed to hand the four boxes to a Philippine task force from the Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking and the Women and Children’s Protection Centre for forensic review. An FBI agent has already asked for the contact details of the Philippine investigators, according to a source quoted by The Sun.
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| Markle Snr with his daughter, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex |
What the Daughter Says
Samantha Markle, 60 or 61, who has been supporting her father in Florida, called the claims lies made for money and revenge. She told the Daily Mail there is “no merit in these disgusting allegations whatsoever” and that her brother wants to destroy their dad. She said the computers had been out of her father’s possession for about two years after he returned to the United States for medical care. Anyone could have had access. She described her brother as a man who treated their father as a “cash cow” and turned on him once the money stopped.
The family history is already public and messy. Thomas Senior’s first marriage produced Samantha and Thomas Junior. His second marriage to Doria Ragland produced Meghan in 1981 and ended in 1987. The father and Meghan have been estranged since around the 2018 wedding. He did not attend. A source close to Meghan told The Sun that the new claims may finally help people understand why she has had nothing to do with him since then. No public statement from Meghan or Prince Harry has appeared in the early reports. Related royal family legal and press battles continue to draw attention; see Planet Today’s earlier report on Prince Harry’s costs order and the ongoing court fight over search warrants involving Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Health, Moves, and Timing
Thomas Senior suffered a serious stroke in 2022. Later a blood clot led to the amputation of his left leg. He left the Cebu flat in May and returned to the United States. He now lives in a nursing and rehabilitation centre in Florida. His son had moved to a nearby place in Cebu in January 2025 and had acted as carer. The boxes of belongings stayed behind. Philippine investigators appointed a specialist task force after court papers were filed in Cebu City. Officers declined comment when asked by The Sun. No public forensic result has been released.
US law treats possession of child sexual abuse material as a federal crime. Philippine law also carries heavy sentences in similar cases. The fact that the man is an American citizen living on US soil gives the FBI a clear reason to look. At the same time, the material has not been independently verified in open court. The son’s account is detailed and sworn. The daughter’s account raises questions of access, motive, and possible tampering. Both cannot be fully true at once.
What Remains Unclear
Readers are left with the same gaps the early reports leave. Were the images actually on devices that belonged to Thomas Senior at the time they were created? Did anyone else have unsupervised access for the years the boxes sat in storage? Why did the July report to American agencies produce no visible follow-up until the Philippine statement? Why does one child of the same father treat the material as reason to cut all contact while the other treats the entire story as a cash grab? A source near Meghan has already offered one reading of the long estrangement. That reading is not evidence. It is an interpretation offered after the fact.
The investigation is only days old in public view. Forensic examination of the boxes has not been completed. No official Philippine or FBI statement has confirmed the contents. Until those steps happen, the public record is one man’s sworn description of what he says he found, one woman’s public rejection of that description, and the ordinary machinery of two police systems beginning to look. The rest is still between the lines.
Original source: The Sun, published 22 October 2026 (updated 23 October 2026).
Disclaimer for fact-checkers: This article reports allegations published by The Sun and responses published by other outlets. The claims have not been proven in court. No arrest or charges have been reported. Both the son’s account and the daughter’s denial are included so readers can weigh the public record themselves. The Sun is a commercial tabloid; its reporting should be checked against later forensic results and official statements when they appear.