Meghan Markle’s father is reportedly threatening to publish deeply personal extracts from an emotional letter that she sent him following her wedding to Prince Harry.
Thomas Markle says his daughter, now the Duchess of Sussex, accused him of breaking her heart “into a million pieces”. He told The Mail on Sunday that the five-page handwritten note was a “dagger” to his own heart that had left him “devastated”.
“This is not the girl I know. It’s not the way she talks. This letter is cold. When she signs off it’s ‘Meg’. You read the way it ends and it felt like a final farewell to me,” said the retired television lighting director, who did not attend the wedding in May.
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His other daughter, Samantha, who is half-sister to the Duchess, told The Sun: “It was nasty. Dad is prepared to release more of it.”
The letter, sent in August last year, “lays bare the true depths of the Duchess’s estrangement from her father”, says the Mail.
She wrote: “Your actions have broken my heart into a million pieces. You have manufactured such unnecessary and unwarranted pain, but by making the choice not to tell the truth as you are puppeteered in this. Something I will never understand.
“If you love me… allow us to live our lives in peace. Please stop lying, please stop creating so much pain, please stop exploiting my relationship with my husband.”
The letter also reveals her anger after CCTV footage proved her father had staged pre-wedding photos.
“We all rallied around to support and protect you from day 1, and this you know. So to hear about the attacks you’ve made at Harry in the press, who was nothing but patient, kind, and understanding with you, is perhaps the most painful of all,” she wrote.
“For some reason you choose to continue fabricating these stories, manufacturing this fictitious narrative, and entrenching yourself deeper into this web you’ve spun. I believed you, trusted you and told you I loved you. The next morning the CCTV footage came out.”
In another blow, the Royal wife, who is expecting her first child this spring, reputes claims that her father had never asked her for money.
She wrote: “You’ve said I never helped you financially and you’ve never asked me for help which is also untrue; you sent me an email last October that said: ‘If I’ve depended too much on you for financial help then I’m sorry but please could you help me more not as a bargaining chip for my loyalty.’”
Her father, who now lives in Mexico, told The Mail on Sunday that he never intended to make the letter public “out of respect for Meghan” - but says he has been forced to do so now because its contents have been falsely portrayed.
“There was no loving message in there, nothing asking about my health, nothing from her saying, “Let’s get together and heal our differences,” he added.
The existence of the letter was revealed by US magazine People last week. The publication claims unnamed friends of the Duchess were concerned about the potential effects of the “emotional trauma” on her unborn baby.
