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Last week, news broke that Meghan Markle’s father Thomas Markle is being investigated for possession of child abuse images. His son, Thomas Markle Jr., reported the images to the police in the Philippines; Markle Sr. has continued to deny wrongdoing.
His granddaughter, Noelle Rasmussen, broke her silence on the matter this week in an interview with the Telegraph. “Maybe it was a vibe that I subconsciously got… something’s not right about a person, and you don’t actively register it. But your body tells you when something’s off,” she said. “It’s a disturbing allegation for everybody involved and everybody reading it. Nobody likes to hear things like that.”
She added she was glad her uncle is “whistleblowing,” and criticized the Metropolitan Police for failing to act when they received a letter from her grandmother, Markle Sr.’s first wife, the late Roslyn Loveless. “If she put something in a letter, it’s more than likely what she had seen to be the truth or what she had experienced,” Rasmussen says of Loveless’s accusations. “It was something that she either saw or heard or believed to be 100 per cent true.”
Rasmussen, the daughter of Samantha Markle (from whom she is estranged), rarely saw her grandfather growing up. When Rasmussen was 16, her grandmother Loveless wrote to police and Child Protective Services to remove her from her mother’s custody. “The police got involved, my dad came and picked me up, and I went for the weekend. I didn’t go back,” she says.
She hasn’t spoken to her aunt, Meghan, in years, she added. “I support her decision to prevent her kids from seeing him. I wouldn’t want my kids around somebody who was being accused of child molestation.”
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Meghan pictured earlier this year.
Her comments follow Meghan’s own statement on the allegations, released last week. “I am deeply distressed at the news that has come to light in the last 24 hours, and my thoughts are with any children who may have been harmed,” the Duchess of Sussex said. “In 2018, a letter was sent to the Metropolitan Police and Royalty and Specialist Protection. That letter was subsequently shared with me. It made troubling and disturbing allegations against my father and I was given assurances that these were being investigated.”
She added, “I hope it can now be understood that, despite certain media publications’ distortion over the years, any distance from my father and my choice to not allow him to have contact with our children, was for one reason: to protect them. I trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. Although the breadth of what has now been uncovered is more sickening than one could ever imagine, my sincerest hope is that justice will be fully served and that the priority remains the safety and protection of innocent children.”
Emily Burack (she/her) is the Deputy Digital Editor for Town & Country, where she covers entertainment, celebrities, the royals, and a wide range of other topics. Before joining T&C, she was the deputy managing editor at Hey Alma, a Jewish culture site. Follow her @emburack on Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms.