Meghan knew suspicions - broke with her father to protect the children

Two days before the wedding at St. George's Chapel in Windsor in 2018, Buckingham Palace announced that Meghan Markle's father, Thomas Markle, had withdrawn for health reasons.

Instead, the bride was escorted down the aisle by her father-in-law, future King Charles III.

In the same year, Meghan Markle broke off contact with her father. Her and Prince Harry's two children, Lilibet and Archie, are said to have never met their grandfather.

Her half-sibling blamed her for the decision and called her emotional. The British tabloids portrayed her as demanding and difficult. From the Daily Express, she was early nicknamed Duchess Difficult - the Duchess of Tril.

It was not a fair characterization, it turns out.

Last week the news broke that Thomas Markle is being investigated by the police in the Philippines. It was his eldest son, Meghan Markle's half-brother, who reported him this summer after finding hundreds of images and videos of child sexual abuse in his apartment in the Philippine city of Cebu City.

The brother, who goes by the name Thomas Markle Junior, has now publicly apologized to Meghan Markle.

- I know that I have protected the wrong person for the past nine years. After seeing what I have seen, I consider the man I have defended and taken care of to be a monster, he says in an interview with The Sun newspaper.

The Duchess of Sussex and her husband Prince Harry recently moved back to the UK from the US and wish to reunite with the British royal family. She must have known about the suspicions against her father for several years. The British police authorities are said to have done so too, but Meghan Markle was advised not to speak about them publicly.

On Friday, however, she made her first public statement. She is "deeply saddened" by the allegations against her father and that her thoughts go out to "all the children who may have been harmed".

In the statement, which has been shared with several British news media, she further writes:

"I hope that you can now - despite the fact that certain media have distorted the image over the years - understand that I kept my distance from my father, and that my decision not to let him have contact with our children was about one thing only: to protect them."

During his working life, Thomas Markle was a lighting technician and cinematographer in Hollywood. Last year he moved to the Philippines, but after he suffered a stroke last spring and had to have a leg amputated, he is back in the US at a rehabilitation clinic. He denies all the charges.

- I have paid for sex in the Far East. But I have never had sex with anyone under the age of 18, he says in an interview with the Daily Mail on Saturday.