Another stressor has been added to the life of The Duchess of Sussex, thanks to her father, Thomas Markle. Over the weekend, Thomas released a private letter, written by his daughter, to the Daily Mail. From its excerpts, the letter was an olive branch from Meghan to her estranged father just days after he admitted to staging paparazzi photos and missing the Royal Wedding due to a heart attack. The article features screenshots of the letter and photos of Thomas and Meghan together.
The letter was first mentioned in last week's People cover story that featured quotes from Meghan's inner circle. Those nearest and dearest to the new royal offered their support, frustration, and concern over the "global bullying" the mother-to-be has experienced from tabloids, Internet trolls, and — most heartbreakingly — her own immediate family.
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A friend told the publication, “After the wedding she wrote him a letter. She’s like, ‘Dad, I’m so heartbroken. I love you. I have one father. Please stop victimizing me through the media so we can repair our relationship.'" The unnamed friend also claims that her father wrote a long letter in return, sealed not with a kiss but with a request for a photo op. Beyond his behavior being tacky and unseemly, it also seems to reveal that he is not interested in repairing their relationship.
According to Thomas, that is exactly why he leaked the letter. "The letter was presented in a way that vilified me and wasn’t true," he told the Daily Mail. The father and daughter have a notoriously tense relationship, but this letter and "inner circle" drama is, in the words of an expert quoted on Mail, akin to opening Pandora's box.
In the letter (the legitimacy of which Kensington Palace has denied commenting on, Vanity Fair reports), Meghan begs her dad to stop communicating with her through tabloids and to stop leeching off of her relationship with Prince Harry. "Please stop exploiting my relationship with my husband…I realize you are so far down this rabbit hole that you feel (or may feel) there’s no way out, but if you take a moment to pause I think you’ll see that being able to live with a clear conscience is more valuable than any payment in the world," she reportedly writes.
The five-page document was reportedly written in August 2018, and Markle says he thought it would be an "olive branch" between them. ‘When I opened the letter I was hoping it was the olive branch I’d longed for,’ he told Mail on Sunday. "I was expecting something that would be a pathway to reconciliation. Instead, it was deeply hurtful. I was so devastated I couldn’t show it to anyone and never would have had it not been for the events of last week."