Meghan Markle authorized “a source close to her” to let a British paper know she wants to help the FBI and other international authorities investigate her father, Thomas Markle, who was arrested in Florida ON Friday and charged with possession of child sexual abuse images he kept in two Los Angeles-area storage lockers.

This source confirmed to the Sunday Times that the Duchess of Sussex will fully co-operate. “Absolutely she will. She would very much like to,” the source said.

But this claim of cooperation adds to growing questions about what’s taken the wife of Prince Harry so long to say anything or appear to act on “the troubling and disturbing” allegations she says she has known about her father for seven years — at least since January 2019.

During those years, Meghan has tried to brand herself as an advocate for women and children’s online safety, including at a European Parliament event she and Harry will appear at on Tuesday.

“One has to question what did she know and why didn’t she say anything?” said royal biographer Andrew Lownie in an interview with Times Radio. “She’s campaigning on so many issues but this is not one that she seems to have taken any interest in up till now.”

In a similar vein, Meghan and Harry have been called out by online critics and other royal journalists for statements they’ve made in interviews, court documents, books and their Netflix TV series, claiming that the anguish she experienced during her time in the British royal family, especially in early 2019, was caused by something other than learning her father could be a pedophile. Instead, she and Harry attributed her anguish to the unrelentingly critical coverage by the British media and on what the couple characterized as the cruel indifference and racism of Harry’s royal relatives.

On Oct. 23, Meghan finally revealed that she had long been harboring a dark secret about her 82-year-old father. In one of several statements issued by her or by her team, she said she learned certain “sickening” things about the retired Hollywood lighting designer after her 2018 marriage to Harry. She said she was advised to not say anything publicly and was assured that authorities were investigating.

In her initial statements, Meghan also condemned media outlets for blaming her for her estrangement from her elderly father and for chastising her for not letting him meet her children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5. “My choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them,” she said.

But Meghan’s critics and royal journalists also have asked why she apparently never tried to follow up on the investigation herself, either to ask privately about its status or to offer to help to make sure, as she said, that justice is “fully served” and that innocent children are protected. None of her statements mention that she ever reached out to police or the FBI on her own to find out what was going on with her father. Instead, it appears she went on her her life and, as she said, assumed police somewhere were investigating. It turns out they were not.

Daily Beast editor Tom Sykes has been more blunt in theorizing why Meghan did not say anything about her father until now. On his The Royalist YouTube channel, Sykes said she and her husband “built a profitable narrative” by publicly cataloging offenses committed against them by royal family members. But Meghan left out “the fact that (her) father had been disclosed to (her) to be a pedophile,” Sykes said.

“You know, it is frankly outrageous that Harry’s family were used by Meghan and Harry, dragged through the mud, accused of damaging their mental health through believably trivial domestic matters, when in fact one imagines that coming to the realization that your father was or indeed is a pedophile would be quite upsetting,” said Sykes.

“I understand they couldn’t go public with the unproven information about Thomas,” Sykes continued, “but let’s face it, it is incredibly convenient for them that they couldn’t breathe a word about the horrific alleged behavior of her father, because any such disclosure would have completely destroyed the very, very profitable narrative that their mental anguish in 2019 was exclusively the result of a rapacious British tabloid media … and the heartless and cruel royal family.”

Another royal author, Robert Jobson, likewise questioned why Meghan kept quiet all these years or apparently didn’t follow up on the case. In an interview on Sykes’ YouTube channel, he accused her of using the newly disclosed allegations against her father to win public sympathy at a time when she has become unpopular in the U.K. Meghan and Harry recently moved back to the U.K. after living in California for six years.

“There’s been so many opportunities for the Markle camp to have actually put this back into the public domain,” Jobson told Sykes. “I just don’t buy this, this ‘Poor me’ thing from Meghan Markle. I think that she is utilizing this horrible story to try to make her in some way look like the victim of a media campaign against her. Now I think that’s a rather shoddy—slightly contrived, to say the very least—way of doing this.”

Others have said that Meghan could easily have used her position, as the wife of the fifth in line to the British throne, to get answers about her father’s case from law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic. It also sounds like the FBI would have been open to hearing about Markle years earlier.

When announcing Markle’s arrest, Patrick Grandy, the Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, said, “This case highlights the importance of the involvement of the public, even if it’s a family member or close friend, to be vigilant and speak up if they have information on individuals they suspect may be preying on and exploiting our children.”

In the light of Markle’s arrest, Harry and Meghan have said that they will still attend the child safety event in Brussels on Tuesday, the Sunday Times reported. The event honors honors children who lost their lives to online abuse and social media harm. But people close to them said Meghan won’t speak — just Harry will. The duchess is said to be “very emotional about last week’s dramatic events, while Harry hopes that his words “will be understood in the context of his father-in-law’s arrest,” the Times said.

The revelations about Harry’s father-in-law first became public on Oct. 22 in The Sun. Meghan’s older half brother, Thomas Markle Jr., from whom she is also estranged, contacted the tabloid after he said he found disturbing materials in four boxes his father had shipped to the Philippines when he and his father moved there in early 2025. Markle Jr. said his father left the boxes behind when he moved back to the United States in May 2026, after suffering a stroke and having his leg amputated.

Since The Sun’s story was published and the FBI joined the investigation, it has become known that Markle kept at least three more troves of alleged child sex abuse images in storage lockers near where he once lived in Los Angeles and in Mexico. Before Markle’s arrest Friday, FBI agents searched lockers in the Los Angeles area; among the 78 items seized were photos of Markle with pre-pubescent girls in stages of undress, the FBI said. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, who is Markle’s second ex-wife, helped FBI identify her ex-husband as the man in those photos, the Sunday Times reported.

The FBI believes that Markle was in his thirties or forties when the photos were taken and suggests that his alleged offending could stretch back more than 50 years and cover a period when Meghan was a young child. She was co-parented by Markle and Ragland when she was young, then primarily lived with her father as a teenager, and he paid for her private schooling and education at Northwestern University.

Over the years, Markle reportedly told his first ex-wife, Roslyn Loveless, and his son that he liked to travel to the Philippines and Thailand to engage in sex. Markle recently admitted to the Mail on Sunday that he had paid for sex with adult women in Southeast Asia but denied ever abusing children or possessing child porn.

But Loveless told a different story about her husband’s sexual proclivities before she died in 2024. She wrote a letter, which was received by the U.K.’s Metropolitan Police in January 2019. The letter alleged that Markle, whom she divorced in 1975, liked to travel to the Philippines “because 12-year-olds are legal there,” as People and other outlets reported. Loveless contacted the British police, saying she believed Markle could be a threat to Meghan and Harry. The Metropolitan Police confirmed that they subsequently shared the letter with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

When asked why Meghan never said anything before about what she learned from the letter, a source close to her and Harry told NBC News that the claims made by Loveless were unsubstantiated. Meghan also was advised by royal bodyguard that speaking publicly could jeopardize the investigation and that the case was being investigated, The Telegraph also reported. But the Metropolitan Police said they didn’t forward the allegations to other international authorities, including the FBI.

Whether or not Meghan and Harry followed up on the letter, they spent the next several years blaming her estrangement from her father on the media. She said their fall-out began in the leadup to her May 2018 wedding to Harry. Markle was supposed to walk her down the aisle but he backed out amid his reported health problems and controversy over his cooperation in staging paparazzi photos.

The couple also spoke sympathetically about Meghan’s father being a victim of media intrusion, even after she said she read Loveless’ letter. In a privacy lawsuit she filed against the Daily Mail in September 2019, over a letter she wrote to her father in 2018, she described him as a “vulnerable and fragile individual” who had been “exploited … and harassed and manipulated” by the media.

The 2020 book, “Finding Freedom,” also reported that Harry was angry for how the media treated his father-in-law. “What they’ve done to her father, drawn him out from his private life and forced him out into the open, and then waving checks at him, it’s just absolutely terrible,” a senior courtier told the authors. “He wanted to live privately. He would have been at the wedding if the media had left him alone as they were asked to.”

In Harry and Meghan’s 2022 Netflix series, Harry also blamed himself for Meghan not having a relationship with her father, while she affectionately described the close bond she once shared with the man who raised her. She described herself as a “Daddy’s Girl my whole life.”

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